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the ancients struggled in vain to express the nature of the soul,

by comparing it to FIRE and LIGHT,

1282.

it will be well for us to consider whether, with all our boasted knowledge,

we have any better or clearer idea of its nature,

and whether we have not despairingly taken refuge in having none at all.

1283.

And if they erred as to its original place of abode,

and understood literally the mode and path of its descent,

these were merely the accessories of the great Truth,

and probably, to the Initiates, mere allegories,

designed to make the idea more palpable and impressive to the mind.

1283.

They are at least no more fit to be smiled at by the self-conceit of a vain ignorance,

the wealth of whose knowledge consists solely in words,

than the bosom of Abraham, as a home for the spirits of the just dead;

the gulf of actual fire, for the eternal torture of spirits;

1284.

and the City of the New Jerusalem,

with its walls of jasper and its edifices of pure gold like clear glass,

its foundations of precious stones, and its gates each of a single pearl.

1285.

" I knew a man, " says PAUL, " caught up to the third Heaven;

.... that he was caught up into Paradise,

and heard ineffable words, which it is not possible for a man to utter. "

1286.

And nowhere is the antagonism and conflict between the spirit and body

more frequently and forcibly insisted on than in the writings of this apostle,

nowhere the Divine nature of the soul more strongly asserted.

1287.

" With the mind, " he says, " I serve the law of God;

yet with the flesh the law of sin....

1288.

As many as are led by the Spirit of God, are the sons of GOD....

1289.

The earnest expectation of the created waits for the manifestation of the sons of God....

1290.

The created shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption,

of the flesh liable to decay, into the glorious liberty of the children of God. "

* * * * * *

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FORTY ONE

Divisions 1291-1325

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1291.

Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and deceit.

1292.

Under a Despotism,

men are false, treacherous, and deceitful through fear,

like slaves dreading the lash.

1293.

Under a Democracy

they are so as a means of attaining popularity and office,

and because of the greed for wealth.

1294.

Experience will probably prove that these odious and detestable vices

will grow most rankly and spread most rapidly within a Republic.

1295.

When office and wealth become the gods of a people,

and the most unworthy and unfit most aspire to the former,

and fraud becomes the highway to the latter,

the land will reek with falsehood and sweat lies and chicane.

1296.

When the offices are open to all,

merit and stern integrity and the dignity of unsullied honor

will attain them only rarely and by accident.

1297.

To be able to serve the country well,

will cease to be a reason why the great and wise and learned

should be selected to render service.

1298.

Other qualifications, less honorable, will be more available.

1299.

To adapt one's opinions to the popular humor;

1300.

to defend, apologize for, and justify

the popular follies;

1301.

to advocate the expedient and the plausible;

1302.

to caress, cajole, and flatter the elector;

1303.

to beg like a spaniel for his vote,

even if he be a negro three removes from barbarism;

1304.

to profess friendship for a competitor

and stab him by innuendo;

1305.

to set on foot that which at third hand shall become a lie,

being cousin-german to it when uttered,

and yet capable of being explained away,

1306.

--who is there that has not seen these low arts and base appliances put into practice,

and becoming general, until success cannot be surely had by any more honorable means? --

1307.

the result being a State ruled and ruined by ignorant and shallow mediocrity,

pert self-conceit, the greenness of unripe intellect,

vain of a school-boy's smattering of knowledge.

1308.

The faithless and the false in public and in political life,

will be faithless and false in private.

1309.

The jockey in politics, like the jockey on the race-course, is morally rotten from skin to core.

[Concerned only with winning the race]

1310.

Everywhere he will see first to his own interests,

and whoso leans on him will be pierced with a broken reed.

1311.

His ambition is ignoble, like himself;

and therefore he will seek to attain once by ignoble means,

as he will seek to attain any other coveted object,

--land, money, or reputation.

1312.

At length, office and honor are divorced.

1313.

The place that the small and shallow, the knave or the trickster,

is deemed competent and fit to fill,

and ceases to be worthy the ambition of the great and capable;

1314.

or if not, these shrink from a contest,

for the weapons to be used therein are unfit for a gentleman to handle.

1315.

Then the habits of unprincipled advocates in law courts are naturalized in Senates,

and pettifoggers wrangle there,

when the fate of the nation and the lives of millions are at stake.

1316.

States are even begotten by villainy and brought forth by fraud,

and rascalities are justified by legislators claiming to be honorable.

1317.

Then contested elections are decided by perjured votes or party considerations;

and all the practices of the worst times of corruption are revived and exaggerated in Republics.

1318.

It is strange that reverence for truth,

that manliness and genuine loyalty,

and scorn of littleness and unfair advantage,

and genuine faith and godliness and large-heartedness should diminish,

1319.

among statesmen and people, as civilization advances,

and freedom becomes more general,

and universal suffrage implies universal worth and fitness!

1320.

In the age of Elizabeth, without universal suffrage,

or Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,

or popular lecturers, or Lycaea (libraries),

the statesman, the merchant, the burgher, the sailor,

were all alike heroic, fearing God only, and man not at all.

1321.

Let merely a hundred or two years elapse,

and in a Monarchy or Republic of the same race,

nothing is less heroic than the merchant, the shrewd speculator, the office-seeker,

fearing man only, and God not at all.

1322.

Reverence for greatness dies out,

and is succeeded by base envy of greatness.

1323.

Every man is in the way of many,

either in the path to popularity or wealth.

1324.

There is a general feeling of satisfaction when a great statesman is displaced, or a general,

who has been for his brief hour the popular idol,

is unfortunate, and sinks from his high estate.

1325.

It becomes a misfortune, if not a crime, to be above the popular level.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FORTY TWO

Divisions 1326-13 50

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1326.

We should naturally suppose that a nation in distress

would take counsel with the wisest of its sons.

1327.

Yet, on the contrary, great men seem never so scarce as when they are most needed,

and small men never so bold to insist on infesting place,

as when mediocrity and incapable pretence and sophomoric greenness,

and showy and sprightly incompetency are most dangerous.

1328.

When France was in the extremity of revolutionary agony,

she was governed by an assembly of provincial pettifoggers,

and Robespierre, Marat, and Couthon ruled

in the place of Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and Carnot.

1329.

England was governed by the Rump Parliament,

after she had beheaded her king.

Cromwell extinguished one body, and Napoleon the other.

1330.

Fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deceit in national affairs

are the signs of decadence in States and precede convulsions or paralysis.

1331.

To bully the weak and crouch to the strong,

is the policy of nations governed by small mediocrity.

1332.

The tricks of the canvass (electioneering) for office are re-enacted in Senates.

1333.

The Executive becomes the dispenser of patronage,

chiefly to the most unworthy;

and men are bribed with offices instead of money,

to the greater ruin of the Commonwealth.

1334.

The Divine in human nature disappears,

and interest, greed, and selfishness takes it place.

1335.

That is a sad and true allegory which represents the companions of Ulysses

changed by the enchantments of Circe into swine.

* * * * *

1336.

" Ye cannot, " said the Great Teacher, " serve God and Mammon. "

1337.

When the thirst for wealth becomes general,

it will be sought for as well dishonestly as honestly;

1338.

by frauds and overreachings,

by the knaveries of trade,

the heartlessness of greedy speculation,

by gambling in stocks and commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community.

1339.

Men will speculate upon the needs of their neighbors

and the distresses of their country.

1340.

Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes,

will be blown up by cunning knavery,

with stupid credulity as its assistants and instrument.

1341.

Huge bankruptcies, that startle a country like the earthquakes, and are more fatal,

fraudulent assignments of loans and business investments,

engulfment of the savings of the poor,

1342.

expansions and collapses of the currency,

the crash of banks,

the depreciation of Government securities,

1343.

prey on the savings of self-denial,

and trouble with their depredations the first nourishment of infancy and the last sands of life,

and fill with inmates the churchyards and lunatic asylums.

1344.

Yet the sharper and speculator thrives and fattens.

1345.

If his country is fighting by a levy en masse for her very existence,

he aids her by depreciating her paper,

so that he may accumulate fabulous amounts with little outlay.

1346.

If his neighbor is distressed, he buys his property for a song.

1347.

If he administers upon an estate, it turns out insolvent,

and the orphans are paupers.

1348.

If his bank explodes, he is found to have taken care of himself in time.

1349.

Society worships its paper-and-credit kings,

as the old Hindus and Egyptians worshipped their worthless idols,

and often the most obsequiously when in actual solid wealth they are the veriest paupers.

1350.

No wonder men think there ought to be another world,

in which the injustices of this may be atoned for,

when they see the friends of ruined families begging the wealthy sharpers to give alms

to prevent the orphaned victims from starving,

until they may find ways of supporting themselves.

* * * * * *

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FORTY THREE

Divisions 1351-1390

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1351.

States are chiefly avaricious of commerce and of territory.

1352.

The latter leads to the violation of treaties,

encroachments upon feeble neighbors,

and rapacity toward their wards whose lands are coveted.

1353.

Republics are, in this, as rapacious and unprincipled as Despots,

never learning from history that inordinate expansion by rapine and fraud

has its inevitable consequences in dismemberment or subjugation.

1354.

When a Republic begins to plunder its neighbors,

the words of doom are already written on its walls.

1355.

There is a judgment already pronounced of God upon whatever is unrighteous in the conduct of national affairs.

1356.

When civil war tears the vitals of a Republic,

let it look back and see if it has not been guilty of injustices;

and if it has, let it humble itself in the dust!

1357.

When a nation becomes possessed with a spirit of commercial greed,

beyond those just and fair limits set by a due regard

to a moderate and reasonable degree of general and individual prosperity,

1358.

it is a nation possessed by the devil of commercial avarice,

a passion as ignoble and demoralizing as avarice in the individual;

1359.

and as this sordid passion is baser and more unscrupulous than ambition, so it is more hateful,

and at last makes the infected nation to be regarded as the enemy of the human race.

1360.

To grasp at the lion's share of commerce,

has always at last proven the ruin of States,

because it invariably leads to injustices that make a State detestable;

1361.

to a selfishness and crooked policy

that forbid other nations to be the friends of a State that cares only for itself.

1362.

Commercial avarice in India was the parent of more atrocities and greater rapacity,

and cost more human lives,

than the nobler ambition for extended empire of Consular Rome.

1363.

The nation that grasps at the commerce of the world cannot not become egocentric, calculating,

dead to the noblest impulses and sympathies which ought to actuate States.

1364.

It will submit to insults that wound its honor,

rather than endanger its commercial interests by war;

1365.

while, to subserve those interests,

it will wage unjust war, on false or frivolous pretexts,

its free people cheerfully allying themselves with despots

to crush a commercial rival that has dared to exile its kings and elect its own ruler.

1366.

Thus the cold calculations of a sordid self-interest, in nations commercially avaricious,

always at last displace the sentiments and lofty impulses of Honor and Generosity

through which they rose to greatness;

1367.

that made Elizabeth and Cromwell alike

the protectors of Protestants beyond the four seas of England,

against crowned Tyranny and mitred Persecution;

1368.

and, if they had lasted, would have forbidden alliances with Czars and Autocrats and Bourbons

to re-enthrone the Tyrannies of Incapacity,

and arm the Inquisition anew with its instruments of torture.

1369.

The soul of the avaricious nation petrifies,

like the soul of the individual who makes gold his god.

1370.

The Despot will occasionally act upon noble and generous impulses,

and help the weak against the strong, the right against the wrong.

1371.

Yet commercial avarice is essentially egotistic,

grasping, faithless, overreaching, crafty, cold, ungenerous, and calculating,

controlled by considerations of self-interest alone.

1372.

Heartless and merciless, it has no sentiments of pity, sympathy, or honor,

to make it pause in its remorseless career;

and it crushes down all that is of impediment in its way,

as its keels of commerce crush under them the murmuring and unheeded waves.

1373.

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.

1374.

A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable,

and more than anything else it demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness

men and nations can descend.

1375.

Commercial greed values the lives of men no more than it values the lives of ants.

1376.

The slave-trade is as acceptable to a people enthralled by that greed,

as the trade in ivory or spices, if the profits are as large.

1377.

It will by-and-by endeavor to compound with God and quiet its own conscience,

by compelling those to whom it sold the slaves it bought or stole, to set them free,

and slaughtering them by hecatombs if they refuse to obey the edicts of its philanthropy.

1378.

Justice in no wise consists in meting out to another

that exact measure of reward or punishment which we think and decree his merit,

or what we call his crime (which is more often merely his error) deserves.

1379.

The justice of the father is not incompatible

with forgiveness by him of the errors and offences of his child.

1380.

The Infinite Justice of God does not consist in meting out exact measures of punishment

for human frailties and sins.

1381.

We are too apt to erect our own little and narrow notions of what is right and just

into the law of justice, and to insist that God shall adopt that as His law;

to measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call it God's love of justice.

1382.

Continually we seek to ennoble our own ignoble love of revenge and retaliation

by misnaming it justice.

1383.

Nor does justice consist in strictly governing our conduct toward other men

by the rigid rules of legal right.

1384.

If there were a community anywhere, in which all stood upon the strictness of this rule,

there should be written over its gates, as a warning

to the unfortunates desiring admission to that inhospitable realm,

the words which DANTE says are written over the great gate of Hell:

1385.

LET THOSE WHO ENTER HERE LEAVE HOPE BEHIND!

1386.

It is not just to pay the laborer in field or factory or workshop his current wages and no more,

the lowest market-value of his labor,

for so long only as we need that labor and he is able to work;

1387.

for when sickness or old age overtakes him, that is to leave him and his family to starve;

1388.

and God will curse with calamity the people in which the children of the laborer out of work

has to eat the boiled grass of the field,

1389.

and mothers strangle their children,

that they may buy food for themselves with the charitable pittance given for burial expenses.

1390.

The rules of what is ordinarily termed " Justice, "

may be punctiliously observed among the fallen spirits that are the aristocracy of Hell.

* * * * * *

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

Divisions 1391-1425

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1391.

Justice, divorced from sympathy, is cold indifference,

not in the least more laudable than misanthropic isolation.

1392.

There is sympathy even among the hair-like oscillatorias, a tribe of simple plants, [ ]

armies of which may be discovered with the aid of the microscope,

in the tiniest bit of scum from a stagnant pool.

1393.

For these will place themselves, as if it were by agreement, in separate companies,

on the side of a vessel containing them,

and seem marching upward in rows;

1394.

and when a swarm grows weary of its situation, and has a mind to change its quarters,

each army holds on its way without confusion or intermixture,

proceeding with great regularity and order, as if under the directions of wise leaders.

1395.

The ants and bees give each other mutual assistance,

beyond what is required by that which human creatures are apt to regard

to be the strict law of justice.

1396.

Surely we need merely reflect a little,

to be convinced that the individual man is merely a fraction of the unit of society,

and that he is indissolubly connected with the rest of his race.

1397.

Not only the actions, yet the will and thoughts of other men make or mar his fortunes,

control his destinies,

are unto him life or death, and dishonor or honor.

1398.

The epidemics, physical and moral, contagious and infectious,

public opinion, popular delusions, enthusiasms,

and the other great electric phenomena and currents, moral and intellectual,

prove the universal sympathy.

1399.

The vote of a single and obscure p1an, the utterance of self-will,

ignorance, conceit, or spite,

deciding an election and placing Folly or Incapacity or Baseness in a Senate,

involves the country in war,

1400.

sweeps away our fortunes,

slaughters our sons,

renders the labors of a life unavailing,

and pushes on, helpless, with all our intellect to resist, into the grave.

1401.

These considerations ought to teach us that justice to others and to ourselves is the same;

that we cannot define our duties by mathematical lines ruled by the square,

yet must fill with them the great circle traced by the compasses;

1402.

that the circle of humanity is the limit, and we are merely the point in its centre,

the drops in the great Atlantic,

the atom or particle,

1403.

bound by a mysterious law of attraction which we term sympathy to every other atom in the mass;

that the physical and moral welfare of others cannot be indifferent to us;

1404.

that we have a direct and immediate interest in the public morality and popular intelligence,

in the well-being and physical comfort of the people at large.

1405.

The ignorance of the people,

their pauperism and destitution, and consequent degradation,

their brutalization and demoralization, are all diseases;

1406.

and we cannot rise high enough above the people,

nor shut ourselves up from them enough,

to escape the miasmatic contagion and the great magnetic currents.

1407.

Justice is peculiarly indispensable to nations.

1408.

The unjust State is doomed of God to calamity and ruin.

1409.

This is the teaching of the Eternal Wisdom and of history.

1410.

" Righteousness exalteth a nation;

yet wrong is a reproach to nations. "

1411.

" The Throne is established by Righteousness.

1412.

Let the lips of the Ruler pronounce the sentence that is Divine;

and his mouth do no wrong in judgment! "

1413.

The nation that adds province to province by fraud and violence,

that encroaches on the weak and plunders its wards,

and violates its treaties and the obligation of its contracts,

1414.

and for the law of honor and fairdealing substitutes the exigencies (crisises) of greed

and the base precepts of policy and craft and the ignoble tenets of expediency,

is predestined to destruction;

1415.

for here, as with the individual, the consequences of wrong are inevitable and eternal.

1416.

A sentence is written against all that is unjust,

written by God in the nature of man and in the nature of the Universe,

because it is in the nature of the Infinite God.

1417.

No wrong is really successful.

1418.

The gain of injustice is a loss;

its pleasure, is in suffering.

1419.

Iniquity often seems to prosper, yet its success is its defeat and shame.

1420.

If its consequences pass by the doer, they fall upon and crush his children.

1421.

It is a philosophical, physical, and moral truth, in the form of a threat,

that God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children,

to the third and fourth generation of those who violate His laws of justice.

1422.

After a long while, the day of reckoning always comes, to nation as to individual;

and always the knave deceives himself, and proves a failure.

1423.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice and wrong pay to virtue and justice.

1424.

It is Satan attempting to clothe himself in the angelic vesture of light.

1425.

It is equally detestable in morals, politics, and religion;

in the man and in the nation.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

Divisions 1426-1450

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1426.

To do injustice under the pretence of equity and fairness;

1427.

to reprove vice in public and commit it in private;

1428.

to pretend to charitable opinion and censoriously condemn;

1429.

to profess the principles of Masonic beneficence,

and close the ear to the wail of distress and the cry of suffering;

1430.

to eulogize the intelligence of the people,

and plot to deceive and betray them by means of their ignorance and simplicity;

1431.

to prate of purity, and peculate (embezzle);

of honor, and basely abandon a sinking cause;

1432.

of disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for place and power,

are hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful.

1433.

To steal the livery of the Court of God to serve the Devil withal;

1434.

to pretend to believe in a God of mercy and a Redeemer of love,

and persecute those of a different faith;

1435.

to devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers;

1436.

to preach continence, and wallow in lust;

1437.

to inculcate humility, and in pride surpass Lucifer;

1438.

to pay tithe, and omit the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith;

1439.

to strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel;

1440.

to make clean the outside of the cup and platter, keeping them full within of extortion and excess;

1441.

to appear outwardly righteous unto men, yet within be full of hypocrisy and iniquity,

1442.

is indeed to be like unto whited sepulchres, which appear beautiful outward,

yet are within full of bones of the dead and of all uncleanness.

1443.

The Republic cloaks its ambition with the pretence of a desire and duty

to " extend the area of freedom, "

1444.

and claims it as its " manifest destiny"

to annex other Republics or the States or Provinces of others to it,

by open violence, or under obsolete, empty, and fraudulent titles.

1445.

The Empire founded by a successful soldier, claims its ancient or natural boundaries,

and makes necessity and its safety tlh plea for open robbery.

1446.

The great Merchant Nation, gaining foothold in the Orient,

finds a continual necessity for extending its dominion by arms, and subjugates India.

1447.

The great Royalties and Despotisms, without a plea,

partition among themselves a Kingdom, dismember Poland,

and prepare to wrangle over the dominions of the Crescent.

1448.

To maintain the balance of power is a plea for the obliteration of States.

1449.

Carthage, Genoa, and Venice, commercial Cities only,

must acquire territory by force or fraud, and become States.

1450.

Alexander marches to the Indus;

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