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1817.

The love of woman cannot die out;

and it has a [ ] and uncontrollable fate,

increased by the refinements of civilization.

1818.

Woman is the veritable syren or goddess of the young.

1819.

Yet society can be improved;

and free government is possible for States;

and freedom of thought and conscience is no longer wholly utopian.

1820.

Already we see that Emperors prefer to be elected by universal suffrage;

that States are conveyed to Empires by vote;

1821.

and that Empires are administered with something of the spirit of a Republic,

being little else than democracies with a single head,

ruling through one man, one representative,

instead of an assembly of representatives.

1822.

And if Priesthoods still govern, they now come before the laity to prove,

by stress of argument, that they ougllt to govern.

1823.

They are obliged to evoke the very reason which they are bent on supplanting.

1824.

Accordingly, men become daily more free,

because the freedom of the man lies in his reason.

1825.

He can reflect upon his own future conduct, and summon up its consequences;

he can take wide views of human life,

and lay down rules for constant guidance.

1826.

Thus he is relieved of the tyranny of sense and passion,

and enabled at any time to live according to the whole light of the knowledge that is within him,

instead of being driven, like a dry leaf on the wings of the wind, by every present impulse.

1827.

Herein lies the freedom of the man

as regarded in connection with the necessity imposed by

the omnipotence and foreknowledge of God.

1828.

So much light,

so much liberty.

1829.

When emperor and church appeal to reason

there is naturally universal suffrage.

1830.

Therefore no one need lose courage,

nor believe that labor in the cause of Progress will be labor wasted.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE

Divisions 1831-1860

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1831.

There is no waste in nature,

either of Matter, Force, Act, or Thought.

1832.

A Thought is as much the end of life as an Action;

and a single Thought sometimes works greater results than a Revolution,

even Revolutions themselves.

1833.

Still there should not be divorce between Thought and Action.

1834.

The true Thought is that in which life culminates.

1835.

Yet all wise and true Thought produces Action.

1836.

It is generative, like the light;

and light and the deep shadow of the passing cloud are the gifts of the prophets of the race.

1837.

Knowledge, laboriously acquired,

and inducing habits of sound Thought, --the reflective character, --must necessarily be rare.

1838.

The multitude of laborers cannot acquire it.

1839.

Most men attain to a very low standard of it.

1840.

It is incompatible with the ordinary and indispensable avocations of life.

1841.

A whole world of [error] [knowlegde], as well as of labor,

go together to make one reflective man.

1842.

In the most advanced nation of Europe there are more ignorant than wise,

more poor than rich, more autornatic laborers,

the mere creatures of habit, than reasoning and reflective men.

1843.

The proportion is at least a thousand to one.

1844.

Unanimity of opinion is so obtained.

1845.

It only exists among the multitude who do not think,

and the political or spiritual priesthood who think for that multitude,

who think how to guide and govern them.

1846.

When men begin to reflect, they begin to differ.

1847.

The great problem is to find guides who will not seek to be tyrants.

1848.

This is needed even more in respect to the heart than the head.

1849.

Now, every man earns his special share of the produce of human labor,

by an incessant scramble, by trickery and deceit.

1850.

Useful knowledge, honorably acquired,

is too often used after a fashion not honest or reasonable,

so that the studies of youth are far more noble than the practices of manhood.

1851.

The labor of the farmer in his fields,

the generous returns of the earth, the benignant and favoring skies,

tend to make him earnest, provident, and grateful;

1852.

the education of the market-place makes him querulous, crafty, envious,

and an intolerable niggard.

1853.

Masonry seeks to be

the beneficent, unambitious, disinterested altruistic guide;

1854.

and it is the condition of all great structures

that the sound of the hammer and the clink of the trowel

should be always heard in some part of the building.

1855.

With faith in man,

hope for the future of humanity,

loving-kindness for our fellows,

Masonry and the Mason must always work and teach.

1856.

Let each do that for which he is best fitted.

1857.

The teacher also is a workman.

1858.

Praiseworthy as the active navigator is,

who comes and goes and makes one clime partake of the treasures of the other,

and one to share the treasures of all,

he who keeps the beacon-light upon the hill is also at his post.

1859.

Masonry has already helped cast down some idols from their pedestals,

and grind to impalpable dust some of the links of the chains that held men's souls in bondage.

1860.

That there has been progress needs no other demonstration

than that you may now reason with men,

and urge upon them, without danger of the rack or stake,

that no doctrines can be apprehended as truths if they contradict each other,

or contradict other truths given us by God.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FIFTY SIX

Divisions 1861-1890

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1861.

Long before the Reformation,

a monk, who had found his way to heresy without the help of Martin Luther,

not venturing to breathe aloud into any living ear his anti-papal and treasonable doctrines,

wrote them on parchment,

and sealing up the perilous record, hid it in the massive walls of his monastery.

1862.

There was no friend or brother to whom he could intrust his secret or pour forth his soul.

1863.

It was some consolation to imagine that in a future age some one might find the parchment,

and the seed be found not to have been sown in vain.

1864.

What if the truth should have to lie dormant almost as long

before germinating as the wheat in the Egyptian mummy?

1865.

Speak it, nevertheless, again and again,

and let it take its chance!

1866.

The rose of Jericho grows in the sandy deserts of Arabia

and on the Syrian housetops.

1867.

Scarcely six inches high,

it loses its leaves after the flowering season,

and dries up into the form of a ball.

1868.

Then it is uprooted by the winds,

and carried, blown, or tossed across the desert, into the sea.

1869.

There, feeling the contact of the water, it unfolds itself,

expands its branches, and expels its seeds from their seed-vessels.

1870.

These, when saturated with water,

are carried by the tide and laid on the sea-shore.

1871.

Many are lost, as many individual lives of men are useless.

1872.

Yet many are thrown back again from the sea-shore into the desert,

where, by the virtue of the sea-water that they have imbibed,

the roots and leaves sprout and they grow into fruitful plants,

which will, in their turns, like their ancestors, be whirled into the sea.

1873.

God will not be less careful to provide for

the germination of the truths you may boldly utter forth.

1874.

" Cast, " He has said, " thy bread upon the waters,

and after many days it shall return to thee again. "

1875.

Initiation does not change:

we find it again and again, and always the same, through all the ages.

1876.

The last disciples of Pascalis Martinez are still the children of Orpheus;

yet they adore the realizer of the antique philosophy,

the Incarnate Word of the Christians.

1877.

Pythagoras, the great divulger of the philosophy of numbers,

visited all the sanctuaries of the world.

1878.

He went into Judaea, where he procured himself to be circumcised,

that he might be admitted to the secrets of the Kabalah,

which the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, not without some reservations, communicated to him.

1879.

Then, not without some difficulty, he succeeded in being admitted to the Egyptian initiation,

upon the recommendation of King Amasis.

1880.

The power of his genius supplied the deficiencies

of the imperfect communications of the Hierophants,

and he himself became a Master and a Revealer.

1881.

Pythagoras defined God:

a Living and Absolute Verity clothed with Light.

1882.

He said that the Word was Number manifested by Form.

1883.

He made all descend from the Tetyactys,

that is to say, from the Quaternary.

1884.

God, he said again, is the Supreme Music,

the nature of which is Harmony.

1885.

Pythagoras gave the magistrates of Crotona this great religious, political, and social precept:

" There is no evil that is not preferable to Anarchy. "

1886.

Pythagoras said,

" Even as there are three divine notions and free intelligible regions,

so there is a triple word, for the Hierarchical Order always manifests itself by threes.

1887.

There are the word simple,

the word hieroglyphical,

and the word symbolic:

1888.

in other terms, there are the word that expresses,

the word that conceals,

and the word that signifies;

1889.

the whole hieratic intelligence is in

the perfect knowledge of these three degrees. "

1890.

Pythagoras enveloped doctrine with symbols,

yet carefully eschewed personifications and images,

which, he thought, sooner or later produced idolatry.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FIFTY SEVEN

Divisions 1891-1915

The philosophy of existence, being, and what it is to be.

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1891.

The Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth,

was carried from Chaldcea by Abraham,

taught to the Egyptian priesthood by Joseph,

recovered and purified by Moses,

1892.

concealed under symbols in the Bible,

revealed by the Saviour to Saint John,

1893.

and contained, entire, under hieratic figures analogous to those of all antiquity,

in the Apocalypse of that Apostle.

1894.

The Kabalists consider God as the Intelligent, Animated, Living Infinite.

1895.

He is not, for them, either the aggregate of existences,

or existence in the abstract,

or a being philosophically definable.

1896.

He is in all,

distinct from all,

and greater than all.

1897.

His name even is ineffable;

and yet this name only expresses the human ideal of His divinity.

1898.

What God is in Himself,

it is not given to man to comprehend.

1899.

God is the absolute of Faith;

yet the absolute of Reason is Being,

" I am that I am, " is a wretched translation.

1900.

Being is Existence, and because it is being, it is. (It is because it is. )

1901.

The reason of being, is Being, to be, is to exist at all.

1902.

We may inquire, " Why does something exist? "

that is, " Why does such or such a thing exist? "

1903.

Yet we cannot, without being absurd, ask, " Why Is Being? "

1905.

That would be to suppose Being before Being.

1906.

If Being had a cause, that cause would necessarily Be;

that is, the cause and effect would be identical.

1907.

Reason and science demonstrate to us that the modes of Existence and Being

balance each other in equilibrium according to harmonious and hierarchic laws.

1908.

Yet a hierarchy is synthetized, in ascending,

and becomes ever more and more monarchial.

1909.

Yet the reason cannot pause at a simle chief,

without being alarmed at the abysses which it seems to leave above this Supreme Monarch.

1910.

Therefore it is silent, and gives place to the Faith it adores.

1911.

What is certain, even for science and the reason, is, that the idea of God is the grandest,

the most holy, and the most useful of all the aspirations of man;

that upon this belief morality reposes, with its eternal sanction.

1912.

This belief, then, is in humanity, the most real of the phenomena of being;

and if it were false, nature would affirm the absurd;

nothingness would give form to life,

and God would at the same time be and not be.

1913.

It is to this philosophic and incontestable reality,

which is termed The Idea of God, that the Kabalists give a name.

1914.

In this name all others are contained.

1915.

Its cyphers contain all the numbers;

and the hieroglyphics of its letters express all the laws and all the things of nature.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FIFTY EIGHT

Divisions 1916-19 45

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1916.

BEING IS BEING:

the reason of Being is in Being:

in the Beginning is the Word, and the Word in logic formulated Speech, the spoken Reason;

the Word is in God, and is God, manifested to the Intelligence.

1917.

Here is what is above all the philosophies.

1918.

This we must believe, under the penalty of never truly knowing anything,

and relapsing into the absurd skepticism of Pyrrho.

1919.

The Priesthood, custodian of Faith, wholly rests upon this basis of knowledge,

and it is in its teachings we must recognize the Divine Principle of the Eternal Word.

1920.

Light is not Spirit, as the Indian Hierophants believed it to be;

yet only the instrument of the Spirit.

1921.

It is not the body of the Protoplastes,

like the Theurgists of the school of Alexandria taught,

yet the first physical manifestation of the Divine afflatus.

1922.

God eternally creates it, and man, in the image of God,

modifies and seems to multiply it.

1923.

The high magic is styled " The Sacerdotal Art, "

and " The Royal Art. "

1924.

In Egypt, Greece, and Rome,

it could not except share the greatnesses and decadences of the Priesthood and of Royalty.

1925.

Every philosophy hostile to the national worship and to its mysteries,

was of necessity hostile to the great political powers, which lose their grandeur,

if they cease, in the eyes of the multitudes, to be the images of the Divine Power.

1926.

Every Crown is shattered, when it clashes against the Tiara.

1927.

Plato, writing to Dionysius the Younger, in regard to the nature of the First Principle, says:

1928.

" I must write to you in enigmas, so that if my letter be intercepted by land or sea,

he who shall read it may in no degree comprehend it. "

1929.

And then he says,

" All things surround their King;

they are, on account of Him, and He alone is the cause of good things,

Second for the Seconds and Third for the Thirds. "

1930.

There is in these few words a complete summary of the Theology of the Sephiroth.

1931.

" The King" is AINSOPH, Being Supreme and Absolute.

1932.

From this centre, which is everywhere, all things ray forth;

yet we especially conceive of it in three manners and in three different spheres.

1933.

In the Divine world (AZILUTH), which is that of the First Cause,

and wherein the whole Eternity of Things in the beginning existed as Unity,

to be afterward, during Eternity uttered forth,

1934.

clothed with form, and the attributes that constitute them matter,

the First Principle is Single and First,

and yet not the very Illimitable Deity, incomprehensible, undefinable;

yet Him so far as manifested by the Creative Thought.

1935.

To compare littleness with infinity,

--Arkwright, as inventor of the cotton spinning-jenny,

and not the man Arkwright otherwise and beyond that.

1936.

All we can know of the Very God is, compared to His Wholeness,

only as an infinitesimal fraction of a unit, compared with an infinity of Units.

1937.

In the World of Creation, which is that of Second Causes [the Kabalistic World BRIAH],

the Autocracy of the First Principle is complete,

yet we conceive of it only as the Cause of the Second Causes.

1938.

Here it is manifested by the Binary, and is the Creative Principle passive.

1939.

Finally: in the third world, YEZIRAH, or of Formation,

it is revealed in the perfect Form, the Form of Forms, the World,

the Supreme Beauty and Excellence, the Created Perfection.

1940.

Thus the Principle is at once the First, the Second, and the Third,

since it is All in All, the Centre and Cause of all.

1941.

It is not the genius of Plato that we here admire.

1942.

We recognize only the exact knowledge of the Initiate.

1943.

The great Apostle Saint John did not borrow from the philosophy of Plato

the opening of his Gospel.

1944.

Plato, on the contrary, drank at the same springs with Saint John and Philo;

and John in the opening verses of his paraphrase,

states the first principles of a dogma common to many schools,

yet in language especially belonging to Philo, whom it is evident he had read.

1945.

The philosophy of Plato, the greatest of human Revealers,

could yearn toward the Word made man;

the Gospel alone could give him to the world.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

Divisions 1946-1975

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1946.

Doubt, in presence of Being and its harmonies;

skepticism, in the face of the eternal mathematics

and the immutable laws of Life which make the Divinity present and visible everywhere,

as the Human is known and visible by its utterances of word and act,

1947.

--Is this not the most foolish of superstitions,

and the most inexcusable as well as the most dangerous of all credulities?

1948.

Thought, we know, is not a result or consequence of the organization of matter,

of the chemical or other action or reaction of its particles,

like effervescence and gaseous explosions.

1949.

On the contrary, the fact that Thought is manifested and realized in act human or act divine,

proves the existence of an Entity, or Unity, that thinks.

1950.

And the Universe is the Infinite Utterance of one of an infinite number of Infinite Thoughts,

which cannot but emanate from an Infinite and Thinking Source.

1951.

The cause is always equal, at least, to the effect;

and matter cannot think, nor could it cause its creation, or exist without cause,

nor could nothing produce either forces or things;

for in void nothingness no Forces can inhere.

1952.

Admit a self-existent Force, and its Intelligence,

or an Intelligent cause of it is admitted, and at once GOD is.

1953.

The Hebrew allegory of the Fall of Man,

which is merely a special variation of a universal legend,

symbolizes one of the grandest and most universal allegories of science.

1954.

Moral Evil is Falsehood in actions,

as Falsehood is Crime in words.

1955.

Injustice is the essence of Falsehood;

and every false word is an injustice.

1956.

Injustice is the death of the Moral Being,

as Falsehood is the poison of the Intelligence.

1957.

The perception of the Light

is the dawn of the Eternal Life, in Being.

1958.

The Word of God, which creates the Light,

seems to be uttered by every Intelligence that can take cognizance of Forms and will look.

1959.

" Let the Light BE!

1960.

The Light, in fact, exists, in its condition of splendor, for those eyes alone that gaze at it;

and the Soul, amorous of the spectacle of the beauties of the Universe,

and applying its attention to that luminous writing of the Infinite Book that is called " The Visible, " seems to utter, as God did on the dawn of the first day,

that sublime and creative word, " BE! LIGHT! "

1961.

It is not beyond the tomb, but in life itself,

that we are to seek for the mysteries of death.

1962.

Salvation or reprobation begins here below,

and the terrestrial world too has its Heaven and its Hell.

1963.

Always, even here below, virtue is rewarded;

always, even here below, vice is punished;

1964.

and that which makes us sometimes believe in the impunity of evil-doers

is that riches, those instruments of good and of evil, seem sometimes to be given them at hazard.

1965.

Yet woe to unjust men, when they possess the key of gold!

1966.

It opens, for them, only the gate of the tomb and of Hell.

1967.

All the true Initiates have recognized the usefulness of toil and sorrow.

1968.

" Sorrow, " says a German poet,

" is the dog of that unknown shepherd who guides the flock of men. "

1969.

To learn to suffer, to learn to die,

is the discipline of Eternity, the immortal Novitiate.

1970.

The allegorical picture of Cebes,

wherein the Divine Comedy of Dante was sketched in Plato's time,

the description whereof has been preserved for us,

and which many painters of the middle age have reproduced by this description,

is a monument at once philosophical and magical.

1971.

It is a most complete moral synthesis,

and at the same time the most audacious demonstration ever given of the Grand Arcanum,

of that secret whose revelation would overturn Earth and Heaven.

1972.

Let no one expect us to give them its explanation!

1973.

He who passes behind the veil that hides this mystery,

understands that it is in its very nature inexplicable,

and that it is death to those who win it by surprise, as well as to him who reveals it.

1974.

This secret is the Royalty of the Sages,

the Crown of the Initiate whom we see redescend victorious from the summit of Trials,

in the fine allegory of Cebes.

1975.

The Grand Arcanum makes him master of gold and the light,

which are at bottom the same thing,

he has solved the problem of the quadrature of the circle,

he directs the perpetual movement,

and he possesses the philosophical stone.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER SIXTY

Divisions 1976-2005

MORALS & DOGMA 3

1976.

Here the Adepts will understand us.

1977.

There is neither interruption in the toil of nature,

nor gap in her work.

1978.

The Harmonies of Heaven correspond to those of Earth,

and the Eternal Life accomplishes its evolutions

in accordance with the same laws as the life of a dog.

1979.

" God has arranged all things by weight, number, and measure, " says the Bible;

and this luminous doctrine was also that of Plato.

1980.

Humanity has never really had but one religion and one worship.

1981.

This universal light has had its uncertain mirages, its deceitful reflections, and its shadows;

yet always, after the nights of Error, we see it reappear, one and pure like the Sun.

1982.

The magnificences of worship are the life of religion,

and if Christ wishes poor ministers, His Sovereign Divinity does not wish paltry altars.

1983.

Some Protestants have not comprehended that worship is a teaching,

and that we must not create in the imagination of the multitude a mean or miserable God.

1984.

Those oratories that resemble poorlyfurnished offices or inns,

and those worthy ministers clad like notaries or lawyer's clerks,

do they not necessarily cause religion to be regarded as a mere puritanic formality,

and God as a Justice of the Peace?

1985.

We scoff at the Augurs.

1986.

It is so easy to scoff, and so difficult well to comprehend.

1987.

Did the Deity leave the whole world without Light for two score centuries,

to illuminate only a little corner of Palestine and a brutal, ignorant, and ungrateful people?

1988.

Why always calumniate God and the Sanctuary?

1989.

Were there never any others than rogues among the priests?

1990.

Could no honest and sincere men be found among the Hierophants of Ceres or Diana,

of Dionusos or Apollo, of Hermes or Mithras?

1991.

Were these, then, all deceived, like the rest?

1992.

Who, then, constantly deceived them, without betraying themselves, during a series of centuries?

--for the cheats are not immortal!

1993.

Arago said, that outside of the pure mathematics,

he who utters the word " impossible, " is wanting in prudence and good sense.

1994.

The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed;

for Satan is not a black god, yet the negation of God.

1995.

The Devil is the personification of Atheism or Idolatry.

1996.

For the Initiates, this is not a Person, yet a Force,

created for good, yet which may serve for evil.

1997.

It is the instrument of Liberty or Free Will.

1998.

They represent this Force, which presides over the physical generation,

under the mythologic and horned form of the God PAN;

1999.

thence came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent,

and the Light-bearer or Phosphor, of which the poets have made the false Lucifer of the legend.

2000.

Gold, to the eyes of the Initiates, is Light condensed.

2001.

They style the sacred numbers of the Kabalah " golden numbers, "

and the moral teachings of Pythagoras his " golden verses. "

2002.

For the same reason, a mysterious book of Apuleius, in which an ass figures largely,

was called " The Golden Ass. "

2003.

The Pagans accused the Christians of worshipping an ass,

and they did not invent this reproach, yet it came from the Samaritan Jews,

2004.

who, figuring the data of the Kabalah in regard to the Divinity by Egyptian symbols,

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