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would give the skinny hand of the past a scepter to rule the aspiring and prophetic
present, and seal the lips of living scholars with the dicta of dead scholastics, Masonry
will never ground arms! Her plea is for government without tyranny and religion
without superstition, and as surely as suns rise and set her fight will be crowned with
victory. Defeat is impossible, the more so because she fights not with force, still less
with intrigue, but with the power of truth, the persuasions of reason, and the might of
gentleness, seeking not to destroy her enemies, but to win them to the liberty of the
truth and the fellowship of love.
Not only does Masonry plead for that liberty of faith which permits a man to hold
what seems to him true, but also, and with equal emphasis, for the liberty which faith
gives to the soul, emancipating it from the despotism of doubt and the fetters of fear.
Therefore, by every art of spiritual culture, it seeks to keep alive in the hearts of men a
great and simple trust in the goodness of God, in the worth of life, and the divinity of
the soul a trust so apt to be crushed by the tramp of heavy years. Help a man to a
firm faith in an Infinite Pity at the heart of this dark world, and from how many fears
is he free! Once a temple of terror, haunted by shadows, his heart becomes "a
cathedral of serenity and gladness," and his life is enlarged and unfolded into richness
of character and service. Nor is there any tyranny like the tyranny of time. Give a man
a day to live, and he is like a bird in a cage beating against its bars. Give him a year in
which to move to and fro with his thoughts and plans, his purposes and hopes, and
you have liberated him from the despotism of a day. Enlarge the scope of his life to
fifty years, and he has a moral dignity of attitude and a sweep of power impossible
hitherto. But give him a sense of Eternity; let him know that he plans and works in an
ageless time; that above his blunders and sins there hovers and waits the infinite
then he is free!
Nevertheless, if life on earth be worthless, so is immortality. The real question, after
all, is not as to the quantity of life, but its quality its depth, its purity, its fortitude, its
fineness of spirit and gesture of soul. Hence the insistent emphasis of Masonry upon
the building of character and the practice of righteousness; upon that moral culture
without which man is rudimentary, and that spiritual vision without which intellect is
the slave of greed or passion. What makes a man great and freed of soul, here or
anywhither, is loyalty to the laws of right, of truth, of purity, of love, and the lofty will
of God. How to live is the one matter; and the oldest man in his ripe age has yet to
seek a wiser way than to build, year by year, upon a foundation of faith in God, using
the Square of justice, the Plumb-line of rectitude, the Compass to restrain the
passions, and the Rule by which to divide our time into labor, rest, and service to our
fellows. Let us begin now and seek wisdom in the beauty of virtue and live in the light
of it, rejoicing; so in this world shall we have a foregleam of the world to come
bringing down to the Gate in the Mist something that ought not to die, assured that,
though hearts are dust, as God lives what is excellent is enduring!
IV
Bede the Venerable, in giving an account of the deliberations of the King of
Northumberland and his counsellors, as to whether they should allow the Christian
missionaries to teach a new faith to the people, recites this incident. After much
debate, a gray-haired chief recalled the feeling which came over him on seeing a little
bird pass through, on fluttering wing, the warm bright hall of feasting, while winter
winds raged without. The moment of its flight was full of sweetness and light for the
bird, but it was brief. Out of the darkness it flew, looked upon the bright scene, and
vanished into the darkness again, none knowing whence it came nor whither it went.
"Like this," said the veteran chief, "is human life. We come, our wise men cannot tell
whence. We go, and they cannot tell whither. Our flight is brief. Therefore, if there be
anyone that can teach us more about it - -in God's name let us hear him!"
Even so, let us hear what Masonry has to say in the great argument for the
immortality of the soul. "But, instead of making an argument linked and strong, it
presents a picture the oldest, if not the greatest drama in the world the better to
make men feel those truths which no mortal words can utter. It shows us the black
tragedy of life in its darkest hour; the forces of evil, so cunning yet so stupid, which
come up against the soul, tempting it to treachery, and even to the degradation of
saving life by giving up all that makes life worth living; a tragedy which, in its
simplicity and power, makes the heart ache and stand still. Then, out of the thick
darkness there rises, like a beautiful white star, that in man which is most akin to God,
his love of truth, his loyalty to the highest, and his willingness to go down into the
night of death, if only virtue may live and shine like a pulse of fire in the evening sky.
Here is the ultimate and final witness of our divinity and immortality the sublime,
death-defying moral heroism of the human soul! Surely the eternal paradox holds true
at the gates of the grave: he who loses his life for the sake of truth, shall find it anew!
And here Masonry rests the matter, assured that since there is that in man which
makes him hold to the moral ideal, and the integrity of his own soul, against all the
brute forces of the world, the God who made man in His own image will not let him
die in the dust! Higher vision it is not given us to see in the dim country of this world;
deeper truth we do not need to know.
Working with hands soon to be folded, we build up the structure of our lives from
what our fingers can feel, our eyes can see, and our ears can hear. Till, in a moment
marvelous whether it come in storm and tears, or softly as twilight breath beneath
unshadowed skies we are called upon to yield our grasp of these solid things, and
trust ourselves to the invisible Soul within us, which betakes itself along an invisible
path into the Unknown. It is strange: a door opens into a new world; and man, child of
the dust that he is, follows his adventurous Soul, as the Soul follows an inscrutable
Power which is more elusive than the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Suddenly,
with fixed eyes and blanched lips, we lie down and wait; and life, well-fought or
wasted, bright or somber, lies behind us a dream that is dreamt, a thing that is no
more. O Death,
Thou hast destroyed it,
The beautiful world,
With powerful fist:
In ruin 'tis hurled,
By the blow of a demigod shattered!
The scattered p. 279
Fragments into the void we carry,
Deploring
The beauty perished beyond restoring.
Mightier
For the children of men,
Brightlier
Build it again,
In thine own bosom build it anew!
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