A MIRACULOUS tradition, something like that connected with the labarum of Constantine, hallows the Ancient Cross of St. Andrew. Hungus, who in the ninth century reigned over the Picts in Scotland, is said to have seen in a vision, on the night before a battle, the Apostle Saint Andrew, who promised him the victory; and for an assured token thereof, he told him that there should appear over the Pictish host, in the air, such a fashioned cross as he had suffered upon. Hungus, awakened, looking up at the sky, saw the promised cross, as did all of both armies; and Hungus and the Picts, after rendering thanks to the Apostle for their victory, and making their offerings with humble devotion, vowed that from thenceforth, as well they as their posterity, in time of war, would wear a cross of St. Andrew for their badge and cognizance.

John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, says that this cross appeared to Achaius, King of the Scots, and Hungus, King of the Picts, the night before the battle was fought betwixt them and Athelstane, King of England, as they were on their knees at prayer.

Every cross of Knighthood is a symbol of the nine qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew of Scotland; for every order of chivalry required of its votaries the same virtues and the same excellencies.

Humility, Patience, and Self-denial are the three essential qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew of Scotland. The Cross, sancti fied by the blood of the holy ones who have died upon it; the Cross, which Jesus of Nazareth bore, fainting, along the streets of Jerusalem and up to Calvary, upon which He cried, "Not My will, O Father! but Thine be done," is an unmistakable and eloquent symbol of these three virtues. He suffered upon it, because He consorted with and taught the poor and lowly, and found His disciples among the fishermen of Galilee and the despised publicans. His life was one of Humility, Patience, and Self-denial.

The Hospitallers and Templars took upon themselves vows oi obedience, poverty, and chastity. The Lamb, which became the device of the Seal of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiery oi the Temple of Solomon, conveyed the same lessons of humility and self-denial as the original device of two Knights riding a single horse. The Grand Commander warned every candidate not to be induced to enter the Order by a vain hope of enjoying earthly pomp and splendor. He told him that he would have to endure many things, sorely against his inclinations; and that he would be compelled to give up his own will, and submit entirely to that of his superiors.

The religious Houses of the Hospitallers, despoiled by Henry the Eighth's worthy daughter, Elizabeth, because they would not take the oath to maintain her supremacy, had been Alms-houses, and Dispensaries, and Foundling-asyla, relieving the State of many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to their necessities, God's ravens in the wilderness, bread and flesh in the morning, bread and flesh in the evening. They had been Inns to the wayfaring man, who heard from afar the sound of the Vesperbell, inviting him to repose and devotion at once, and who might sing his matins with the Morning Star, and go on his way rejoicing. And the Knights were no less distinguished by bravery in battle, than by tenderness and zeal in their ministrations to the sick and dying.

The Knights of St. Andrew vowed to defend all orphans, maidens, and widows of good family, and wherever they heard of murderers, robbers, or masterful thieves who oppressed the people, to bring them to the laws, to the best of their power.

"If fortune fail you," so ran the vows of Rouge-Croix, "in divers lands or countries wherever you go or ride that you find any gentleman of name and arms, which hath lost goods, in worship and Knighthood, in the King's service, or in any other place of worship, and is fallen into poverty, you shall aid, and support, and succor him, in that you may; and he ask of you your goods to his sustenance, you shall give him part of such goods as God hath sent you to your power, and as you may bear."

Thus CHARITY and GENEROSITY are even more essential qualities of a true and gentle Knight, and have been so in all ages; and so also hath CLEMENCY. It is a mark of a noble nature to spare the conquered. Valor is then best tempered, when it can turn out a stern fortitude into the mild strains of pity, which never shines more brightly than when she is clad in steel. A martial man, compassionate, shall conquer both in peace and war; and by a twofold way, get victory with honor. The most famed men in the world have had in them both courage and compassion. An enemy reconciled hath a greater value than the long train of captives of a Roman triumph.

VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR are the three MOST essential qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew. "Ye shall love God above all things, and be steadfast in the Faith," it was said to the Knights, in their charge, "and ye shall be true unto your Sovereign Lord, and true to your word and promise. Also, ye shall sit in no place where that any judgment should be given wrongfully against any body, to your knowledge."

The law hath not power to strike the virtuous, nor can fortune subvert the wise. Virtue and Wisdom, only, perfect and defend man. Virtue's garment is a sanctuary so sacred, that even Princes dare not strike the man that is thus robed. It is the livery of the King of Heaven. It protects us when we are unarmed; and is an armor that we cannot lose, unless we be false to ourselves. It is the tenure by which we hold of Heaven, without which we are but outlaws, that cannot claim protection. Nor is there wisdom without virtue, but only a cunning way of procuring our own undoing.

Peace is nigh 
Where Wisdom's voice has found a listening heart. 
Amid the howl of more than winter storms, 
The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours, 
Already on the wing.

Sir Launcelot thought no chivalry equal to that of Virtue. This word means not continence only, but chiefly manliness, and so includes what in the old English was called souffrance, that patient endurance which is like the emerald, ever green and flow ering; and also that other virtue, droicture, uprightness, a virtueso strong and so puissant, that by means of it all earthly things almost attain to be unchangeable. Even our swords are formed to remind us of the Cross, and you and any other of us may live to show how much men bear and do not die; for this world is a place of sorrow and tears, of great evils and a constant calamity, and if we would win true honor in it, we must permit no virtue of a Knight to become unfamiliar to us, as men's friends, coldly entreated and not greatly valued, become mere ordinary acquaintances.

We must not view with impatience or anger those who injure us; for it is very inconsistent with philosophy, and particularly with the Divine Wisdom that should govern every Prince Adept, to betray any great concern about the evils which the world, which the vulgar, whether in robes or tatters, can inflict upon the brave. The favor of God and the love of our Brethren rest upon a basis which the strength of malice cannot overthrow; and with these and a generous temper and noble equanimity, we have everything. To be consistent with our professions as Masons, to retain the dignity of our nature, the consciousness of our own honor, the spirit of the high chivalry that is our boast, we must disdain the evils that are only material and bodily, and therefore can be no bigger than a blow or a cozenage, than a wound or a dream.

Look to the ancient days, Sir E.., for excellent examples of VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR, and imitate with a noble emulation the Ancient Knights, the first Hospitallers and Templars, and Bayard, and Sydney, and Saint Louis; in the words of Pliny to his friend Maximus, Revere the ancient glory, and that old age which in man is venerable, in cities sacred. Honor antiquity and great deeds, and detract nothing from the dignity and liberty of any one. If those who now pretend to be the great and mighty, the learned and wise of the world, shall agree in condemning the memory of the heroic Knights of former ages, and in charging with folly us who think that they should be held in eternal remembrance, and that we should defend them from an evil hearing, do you remember that if these who now claim to rule and teach the world should condemn or scorn your poor tribute of fidelity, still it is for you to bear therewith modestly, and yet not to be ashamed, since a day will come when these who now scorn those who were of infinitely higher and finer natures than they are, will be pronounced to have lived poor and pitiful lives, and the world will make haste to forget them.

But neither must you believe that, even in this very different age, of commerce and trade, of the vast riches of many, and the poverty of thousands, of thriving towns and tenement houses swarming with paupers, of churches with rented pews, and theatres, opera-houses, custom-houses, and banks, of steam and telegraph, of shops and commercial palaces, of manufactories and trades-unions, the Gold-room and the Stock Exchange, of newspapers, elections, Congresses, and Legislatures, of the frightful struggle for wealth and the constant wrangle for place and power, of the worship paid to the children of mammon, and covetousness of official station, there are no men of the antique stamp for you to revere, no heroic and knightly souls, that preserve their nobleness and equanimity in the chaos of conflicting passions, of ambition and baseness that welters around them.

It is quite true that Government tends always to become a conspiracy against liberty; or, where votes give place, to fall habitually into such hands that little which is noble or chivalric is found among those who rule and lead the people. It is true that men, in this present age, become distinguished for other things, and may have name and fame, and flatterers and lacqueys, and the oblation of flattery, who would, in a knightly age, have been despised for the want in them of all true gentility and courage; and that such men are as likely as any to be voted for by the multitude, who rarely love or discern or receive truth; who run after fortune, hating what is oppressed, and ready to worship the prosperous; who love accusation and hate apologies; and who are always glad to hear and ready to believe evil of those who care not for their favor and seek not their applause.

But no country can ever be wholly without men of the old heroic strain and stamp, whose word no man will dare to doubt, whose virtue shines resplendent in all calamities and reverses and amid all temptations, and whose honor scintillates and glitters as purely and perfectly as the diamond--men who are not wholly ,he slaves of the material occupations and pleasures of life, wholly engrossed in trade, in the breeding of cattle, in the framing and enforcing of revenue regulations, in the chicanery of the law, the objects of political envy, in the base trade of the lower literature, or in the heartless, hollow vanities of an eternal dissipation. Every generation, in every country, will bequeath to those who succeed it splendid examples and great images of the dead, to be admired and imitated; there were such among the Romans, under the basest Emperors; such in England when the Long Parliament ruled; such in France during its Saturnalia of irreligion and murder, and some such have made the annals of America illustrious.

When things tend to that state and condition in which, in any country under the sun, the management of its affairs and the customs of its people shall require men to entertain a disbelief in the virtue and honor of those who make and those who are charged to execute the laws; when there shall be everywhere a spirit of suspicion and scorn of all who hold or seek office, or have amassed wealth; when falsehood shall no longer dishonor a man, and oaths give no assurance of true testimony, and one man hardly expect another to keep faith with him, or to utter his real sentiments, or to be true to any party or to any cause when another approaches him with a bribe; when no one shall expect what he says to be printed without additions, perversions, and misrepresentations; when public misfortunes shall be turned to private profit, the press pander to licentiousness, the pulpit ring with political harangues, long prayers to God, eloquently delivered to admiring auditors, be written out for publication, like poems and political speeches; when the uprightness of judges shall be doubted, and the honesty of legislators be a standing jest; then men may come to doubt whether the old days were not better than the new, the Monastery than the Opera Bouffe, the little chapel than the drinking-saloon, the Convents than the buildings as large as they, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness, true Acherusian Temples, where the passer-by hears from within the never-ceasing din and clang and clashing of machinery, and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work and not to their prayers; where, says an animated writer, they keep up a perennial laudation of the Devil, before furnaces which are never suffered to cool.

It has been well said, that whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the Past, the Distant, or the Future, predominate over the Present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. The modern rivals of the German Spa, with their flaunting pretences and cheap finery, their follies and frivolities, their chronicles of dances and inelegant feasts, and their bulletins of women's names and dresses, are poor substitutes for the Monastery and Church which our ancestors would have built in the deep sequestered valleys, shut up between rugged mountains and forests of sombre pine; and a man of meditative temper, learned, and of poetic feeling, would be glad if he could exchange the showy hotel, amid the roar and tumult of the city, or the pretentious tavern of the country-town, for one old humble Monastery by the wayside, where he could refresh himself and his horse without having to fear either pride, impertinence, or knavery to pay for pomp, glitter, and gaudy ornamentation; then where he could make his orisons in a church which resounded with divine harmony, and there were no pews for wealth to isolate itself within; where he could behold the poor happy and edified and strengthened with the thoughts of Heaven; where he could then converse with learned and holy and gentle men, and before he took his departure could exalt and calm his spirits by hearing the evening song.

Even Free-Masonry has so multiplied its members that its obligations are less regarded than the simple promises which men make to one another upon the streets and in the markets. It clamors for public notice and courts notoriety by scores of injudicious journals; it wrangles in these, or, incorporated by law, carries its controversies into the Courts. Its elections are, in some Orients, conducted with all the heat and eagerness, the office-seeking and management of political struggles for place. And an empty pomp, with semi-military dress and drill, of peaceful citizens, glittering with painted banners, plumes, and jewels, gaudy and ostentatious, commends to the public favor and female admiration an Order that challenges comparison with the noble Knights, the heroic soldiery encased in steel and mail, stern despisers of danger and death, who made themselves immortal memories, and won Jerusalem from the infidels and fought at Acre and Ascalon, and were the bulwark of Christendom against the Saracenic legions that swarmed after the green banner of the Prophet Mohammed.

If you, Sir E......, would be respectable as a Knight, and not a mere tinselled pretender and Knight of straw, you must practise, and be diligent and ardent in the practice of, the virtues you have professed in this Degree. How can a Mason vow to be tolerant, and straightway denounce another for his political opinions? How vow to be zealous and constant in the service of the Order and be as useless to it as if he were dead and buried? What does the symbolism of the Compass and Square profit him, if his sensual appetites and baser passions are not governed by, but domineer over his moral sense and reason, the animal over the divine, the earthly over the spiritual, both points of the compass remaining below the Square ? What a hideous mockery to call one "Brother," whom he maligns to the Profane, lends money unto at usury, defrauds in trade, or plunders at law by chicanery?

VIRTUE, TRUTH, HONOR !--possessing these and never proving false to your vows, you will be worthy to call yourself a Knight, to whom Sir John Chandos might, if living, give his hand, and whom St. Louis and Falkland, Tancred and Baldassar Castiglione would recognize as worthy of their friendship.

Chivalry, a noble Spaniard said, is a religious Order, and there are Knights in the fraternity of Saints in Heaven. Therefore do you here, and for all time to come, lay aside all uncharitable and repining feeling; be proof henceforward against the suggestions of undisciplined passion and inhuman zeal; learn to hate the vices and not the vicious; be content with the discharge of the duties which your Masonic and Knightly professions require; be governed by the old principles of honor and chivalry, and reverence with constancy that Truth which is as sacred and immutable as God Himself. And above all, remember always, that jealousy is not our life, nor disputation our end, nor disunion our health, nor revenge our happiness; but loving-kindness is all these, greater than Hope, greater than Faith, which can remove mountains, properly the only thing which God requires of us, and in the possession of which lies the fulfillment of all our duties.
 

[By Ill .'. Bro .'. Rev .'. W.W. Lord, 32d.]

We are constrained to confess it to be true, that men, in this Age of Iron, worship gods of wood and iron and brass, the work of their own hands. The Steam-Engine is the pre-eminent god of the nineteenth century, whose idolaters are everywhere, and those, who wield its tremendous power securely account themselves gods, everywhere in the civilized world.

Others confess it everywhere, and we must confess here, how reluctantly soever, that the age which we represent is narrowed and not enlarged by its discoveries, and has lost a larger world than it has gained. If we cannot go as far as the satirist who says that our self-adored century

- its broad clown's back turns broadly on the glory of the stars,

we can go with him when he adds,

We are gods by our own reckoning, and may as well shut up our temples 
And wield on amidst the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars: 
For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring
With, at every step, "Run faster, O the wondrous, wondrous age!"
Little heeding if our souls are wrought as nobly as our iron,
Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.

Deceived by their increased but still very imperfect knowledge and limited mastery of the brute forces of nature, men imagine that they have discovered the secrets of Divine Wisdom, and do not hesitate, in their own thoughts, to put human prudence in the place of the Divine. Destruction was denounced by the Prophets against Tyre and Sidon, Babylon, and Damascus, and Jerusalem, as a consequence of the sins of their people; but if fire now consumes or earthquake shatters or the tornado crushes a great city, those are scoffed at as fanatics and sneered at for indulging in cant, or rebuked for Pharisaic uncharitableness, who venture to believe and say that there are divine retributions and God's judgment in the ruin wrought by His mighty agencies.

Science, wandering in error, struggles to remove God's Providence to a distance from us and the material Universe, and to substitute for its supervision and care and constant overseeing, what it calls Forces-- Forces of Nature--Forces of Matter. It will not see that the Forces of Nature are the varied actions of God. Hence it becomes antagonistic to all Religion, and to all the old Faith that has from the beginning illuminated human souls and constituted their consciousness of their own dignity, their divine origin, and their immortality; that Faith which is the Light by which the human soul is enabled, as it were, to see itself.

It is not one religion only, but the basis of all religions, the Truth that is in all religions, even the religious creed of Masonry, that is in danger. For all religions have owed all of life that they have had, and their very being, to the foundation on which they were reared; the proposition, deemed undeniable and an axiom, that the Providence of God rules directly in all the affairs and changes of material things. The Science of the age has its hands upon the pillars of the Temple, and rocks it to its foundation. As yet its destructive efforts have but torn from the ancient structure the worm-eaten fret-work of superstition, and shaken down some incoherent additions--owl-inhabited turrets of ignorance, and massive props that supported nothing. The structure itself will be overthrown, when, in the vivid language of a living writer, "Human reason leaps into the throne of God and waves her torch over the ruins of the Universe."

Science deals only with phenomena, and is but charlatanism when it babbles about the powers or causes that produce these, or what the things are, in essence, of which it gives us merely the names. It no more knows what Light or Sound or Perfume is, than the Aryan cattle-herders did, when they counted the Dawn and Fire, Flame and Light and Heat as gods. And that Atheistic Science is not even half-science, which ascribes the Universe and its powers and forces to a system of natural laws or to an inherent energy of Nature, or to causes unknown, existing and operating independently of a Divine and Supra-natural power.

That theory would be greatly fortified, if science were always capable of protecting life and property, and, with anything like the certainty of which it boasts, securing human interests even against the destructive agencies that man himself develops in his endeavors to subserve them. Fire, the fourth element, as the old philosophers deemed it, is his most useful and abject servant. Why cannot man prevent his ever breaking that ancient indenture, old as Prometheus, old as Adam? Why can he not be certain that at any moment his terrible subject may not break forth and tower up into his master, tyrant, destroyer? It is because it also is a power of nature; which, in ultimate trial of forces, is always superior to man. It is also because, in a different sense from that in which it is the servant of man, it is the servant of Him Who makes His ministers a flame of fire, and Who is over nature, as nature is over man.

There are powers of nature which man does not even attempt to check or control. Naples does nothing against Vesuvius. Valparaiso only trembles with the trembling earth before the coming earthquake. The sixty thousand people who went down alive into the grave when Lisbon buried her population under both earth and sea had no knowledge of the causes, and no possible contro1 over the power, that effected their destruction.

But here the servant, and, in a sense, the creature of man, the drudge of kitchen and factory, the humble slave of the lamp, engaged in his most servile employment, appearing as a little point of flame, or perhaps a feeble spark, suddenly snaps his brittle chain, breaks from his prison, and leaps with destructive fury, as if from the very bosom of Hell, upon the doomed dwellings of fifty thousand human beings, each of whom, but a moment before, conceived himself his master. And those daring fire-brigades, with their water-artillery, his conquerors, it seemed, upon so many midnight fields, stand paralyzed in the presence of their conqueror.

In other matters relative to human safety and interests we have observed how confident science becomes upon the strength of some slight success in the war of man with nature, and how much inclined to put itself in the place of Providence, which, by the very force of the ter;n, is the only absolute science. Near the beginning of this century, for instance, medical and sanitary science had made, in the course of a few years, great and wonderful progress. The great plague which wasted Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and reappeared in the seventeenth, had been identified with a disease which yields to enlightened treatment, and its ancient virulence was attributed to ignorance of hygiene, and the filthy habits of a former age. Another fatal and disfiguring scourge had to a great extent been checked by the discovery of vaccination. From Sangrado to Sydenham, from Paracelsus to Jenner, the healing art had indeed taken a long stride. The Faculty might be excused had it then said, "Man is mortal, disease will be often fatal; but there shall be no more unresisted and unnecessary slaughter by infectious disease, no more general carnage, no more carnivals of terror and high festivals of death."

The conceited boast would hardly have died upon the lip, when, from the mysterious depths of remotest India a spectre stalked forth, or rather a monster crept, more fearful than human eye had ever yet beheld. And not with surer instinct does the tiger of the jungles, where this terrible pestilence was born, catch the scent of blood upon the air, than did this invisible Destroyer, this fearful agent of Almighty Power, this tremendous Consequence of some Sufficient Cause, scent the tainted atmosphere of Europe and turn Westward his devastating march. The millions of dead left in his path through Asia proved nothing. They were unarmed, ignorant, defenceless, unaided by science, undefended by art. The cholera was to them inscrutable and irresistible as Azrael, the Angel of Death.

But it came to Europe and swept the halls of science as it had swept the Indian village and the Persian khan. It leaped as noise lessly and descended as destructively upon the population of many a high-towered, wide-paved, purified, and disinfected city of the West as upon the Pariahs of Tanjore and the filthy streets of Stamboul. In Vienna, Paris, London, the scenes of the great plague were re-enacted.

The sick man started in his bed
The watcher leaped upon the floor
At the cry, Bring out your dead,
The cart is at the door!

Was this the judgment of Almighty God? He would be bold who should say that it was; he would be bolder who should say it was not. To Paris, at least, that European Babylon, how often have the further words of the prophet to the daughter of the Chaldaeans, the lady of kingdoms, been fulfilled? "Thy wisdom and thy knowledge have perverted thee, and thou hast said in thy heart I am and none else beside me. Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know whence it riseth; and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off; desolation shall come upon thee suddenly."

And as to London--it looked like judgment, if it be true that the Asiatic cholera had its origin in English avarice and cruelty, as they suppose who trace it to the tax which Warren Hastings, when Governor-General of India, imposed on salt, thus cutting off its use from millions of the vegetable-eating races of the East: just as that disease whose spectral shadow lies always upon America's threshold, originated in the avarice and cruelty of the slave-trade, translating the African coast fever to the congenial climate of the West Indies and Southern America--the yellow fever of the former, and the vomito negro of the latter.

But we should be slow to make inferences from our petty human logic to the ethics of the Almighty. Whatever the cruelty of the slave-trade, or the severity of slavery on the continents or islands of America, we should still, in regard to its supposed consequences, be wiser, perhaps, to say with that great and simple Casuist Who gave the world the Christian religion: "Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered such things ? or those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem?"

Retribution bars retaliation, even in words. A city shattered, burned, destroyed, desolate, a land wasted, humiliated, made a desert and a wilderness, or wearing the thorny crown of humiliation and subjugation, is invested with the sacred prerogatives and immunities of the dead. The base human revenge of exultation at its fall and ruin should shrink back abashed in the presence of the infinite Divine chastisement. "Forgiveness is wiser than revenge," our Freemasonry teaches us, "and it is better to love than to hate." Let him who sees in great calamities the hand of God, be silent, and fear His judgments.

Men are great or small in stature as it pleases God. But their nature is great or small as it pleases themselves. Men are not born, some with great souls and some with little souls. One by taking thought cannot add to his stature, but he can enlarge his soul. By an act of the will he can make himself a moral giant, or dwarf himself to a pigmy.

There are two natures in man, the higher and the lower, the great and the mean, the noble and the ignoble; and he can and must, by his own voluntary act, identify himself with the one or with the other. Freemasonry is continual effort to exalt the nobler nature over the ignoble, the spiritual over the material, the divine in man over the human. In this great effort and purpose the chivalric Degrees concur and co-operate with those that teach the magnificent lessons of morality and philosophy. Magnanimity, mercy, clemency, a forgiving temper, are virtues indispensable to the character of a perfect Knight. When the low and evil principle in our nature says, "Do not give; reserve your beneficence for impoverished friends, or at least unobjectionable strangers, Do not bestow it on successful enemies,-- friends only in virtue, of our misfortunes," the diviner principle whose voice spake by the despised Galilean says, "Do good to them that hate you, for if ye love them (only) who love you, what reward have you? Do not publicans and sinners the same"--that is, the tax-gathers and wicked oppressors, armed Romans and renegade Jews, whom ye count your enemies?,
 

XXX KNIGHT KADOSH.
 

We often profit more by our enemies than by our friends. " We support  ourselves only on that which resists," and owe our success to opposition.  The best friends of Masonry in America were the Anti-Masons of 1826,  and at the same time they were its worst enemies. Men are but the  automata of Providence, and it uses the demagogue, the fanatic, and the  knave, a common trinity in Republics, as its tools and instruments to effect  that of which they do not dream, and which they imagine themselves  commissioned to prevent. 
The Anti-Masons, traitors and perjurors some, and some mere political  knaves, purified Masonry by persecution, and so proved to be its  benefactors; for that which is persecuted, grows. To them its present  popularity is due, the cheapening of its Degrees, the invasion of its  Lodges, that are no longer Sanctuaries, by the multitude; its pomp and  pageantry and overdone display. 
An hundred years ago it had become known that the were the  Templars under a veil, and therefore the Degree was proscribed, and,  ceasing to be worked, became a mere brief and formal ceremony, under  another name. Now, from the tomb in which after his murders he rotted,  Clement the Fifth howls against the successors of his victims, in the 
Allocution of Pio Nono against the Free-Masons. The ghosts of the dead  Templars haunt the Vatican and disturb the slumbers of the paralyzed Papacy,  which, dreading the dead, shrieks out its excommunications and impotent  anathemas against the living. It is a declaration of war, and was needed to  arouse apathy and inertness to action. 
An enemy of the Templars shall tell us the secret of this Papal hostility  against an Order that has existed for centuries in despite of its anathemas,  and has its Sanctuaries and Asyla even in Rome. 
It will be easy, as we read, to separate the false from the true, the  audacious conjectures from the simple facts. 
"A power that ruled without antagonism and without concurrence, and  consequently without control, proved fatal to the Sacerdotal Royalties;  while the Republics, on the other hand, had perished by the conflict of  liberties and franchises, which, in the absence of all duty hierarchically  sanctioned and enforced, had soon become mere tyrannies, rivals one of  the other. To find a stable medium between these two abysses, the idea of  the Christian Hierophants was to create a society devoted to abnegation  by solemn vows, protected by severe regulations; which should be  recruited by initiation, and which, sole depositary of the great religious and  social secrets, should make Kings and Pontiffs, without exposing it to the  corruptions of Power. In that was the secret of that kingdom of Jesus 
Christ, which, without being of this world, would govern all its grandeurs.  "This idea presided at the foundation of the great religious orders, so often  at war with the secular authorities, ecclesiastical or civil. Its realization was  also the dream of the dissident sects of Gnostics or Illuminati who  pretended to connect their faith with the primitive tradition of the  Christianity of Saint John. It at length became a menace for the Church  and Society, when a rich and dissolute Order, initiated in the mysterious  doctrines of the Kabalah, seemed disposed to turn against legitimate  authority the conservative principle of Hierarchy, and threatened the entire  world with an immense revolution. 
The Templars, whose history is so imperfectly known, were those terrible  conspirators. In 1118, nine Knights Crusaders in the East, among whom  were Geoffroi de Saint-Omer and Hugues de Payens, consecrated  themselves to religion, and took an oath between the hands of the  Patriarch of Constantinople, a See always secretly or openly hostile to that  of Rome from the time of Photius. The avowed object of the Templars was  to protect the Christians who came to visit the Holy Places: their secret object was  the re-building of the Temple of Solomon on the model prophesied by  Ezekiel. 
"This re-building, formally predicted by the Judaizing Mystics of the earlier  ages, had become the secret dream of the Patriarchs of the Orient. The  Temple of Solomon, re-built and consecrated to the Catholic worship  would become, in effect, the Metropolis of the Universe; the East would  prevail over the West, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople would possess  themselves of the Papal power. 
"The Templars, or Poor Fellow-Soldiery of the Holy House of the Temple  intended to be re-built, took as their models, in the Bible, the Warrior-  Masons of Zorobabel, who worked, holding the sword in one hand and the  trowel in the other. Therefore it was that the Sword and the Trowel were  the insignia of the Templars, who subsequently, as will be seen,  concealed themselves under the name of Brethren Masons. [This name,  Frères Maçons in the French, adopted by way of secret reference to the  Builders of the Second Temple, was corrupted in English into Free- 
Masons, as Pythagore de Crotone was into Peter Gower of Groton in  England. Khairüm or Khür-üm, (a name mis-rendered into Hiram) from an  artificer in brass and other metals, became the Chief Builder of the Haikal  Kadosh, the Holy House, of the Temple, the ; and the words  Bonai and Banaim yet appear in the Masonic Degrees, meaning Builder  and Builders.] 
"The trowel of the Templars is quadruple, and the triangular plates of it are  arranged in the form of a cross, making the Kabalistic pantacle known by  the name of the Cross of the East. The Knight of the East, and the Knight  of the East and West, have in their titles secret allusions to the Templars  of whom they were at first the successors. 
"The secret thought of Hugues de Payens, in founding his Order, was not  exactly to serve the ambition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. There  existed at that period in the East a Sect of Johannite Christians, who  claimed to be the only true Initiates into the real mysteries of the religion of  the Saviour. They pretended to know the real history of Yesus the  ANOINTED, and, adopting in part the Jewish traditions and the tales of the  Talmud, they held that the facts recounted in the Evangels are but  allegories, the key of which Saint John gives, in saying that the world might be filled with the books that could be written upon the words  and deeds of Jesus Christ; words which, they thought, would be only a  ridiculous exaggeration, if he were not speaking of an allegory and a  legend, that might be varied and prolonged to infinity. 

"The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their Secret  Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of Christos,  Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one another  from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical powers. He who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the Temple, claimed  these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he knew HUGUES  DE PAYENS, he initiated him into the Mysteries and hopes of his  pretended church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign Priesthood  and Supreme royalty, and finally designated him as his successor  "Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin devoted to  the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings, and  the Apostolate of Kabalistic Gnosticism was vested in its chiefs. For Saint  John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the current translation of  his polemic against the heretical of his Sect and the pagans who denied  that Christ was the Word, is throughout a misrepresentation, or  misunderstanding at least, of the whole Spirit of that Evangel. 
"The tendencies and tenets of the Order were enveloped in profound  mystery, and it externally professed the most perfect orthodoxy. The  Chiefs alone knew the aim of the Order: the Subalterns followed them  without distrust. 
"To acquire influence and wealth, then to intrigue, and at need to fight, to  establish the Johannite or Gnostic and Kabalistic dogma, were the object  and means proposed to the initiated Brethren. The Papacy and the rival  monarchies, they said to them, are sold and bought in these days,  become corrupt, and to-morrow, perhaps, will destroy each other. All that  will become the heritage of the Temple: the World will soon come to us for  its Sovereigns and Pontiffs. We shall constitute the equilibrium of the  Universe, and be rulers over the Masters of the World. 
"The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations had two  doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was  Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic. Thus they  deceived the adversaries whom they sought to supplant. Hence Free-Masonry, vulgarly imagined to have begun with  the Dionysian Architects or the German Stone-workers, adopted Saint  John the Evangelist as one of its patrons, associating with him, in order  not to arouse the suspicions of Rome, Saint John the Baptist, and thus  covertly proclaiming itself the child of the Kabalah and Essenism  together." 
[For the Johannism of the Adepts was the Kabalah of the earlier Gnostics,  degenerating afterward into those heretical forms which Gnosticism  developed, so that even Manes had his followers among them. Many  adopted his doctrines of the two Principles, the recollection of which is  perpetuated by the handle of the dagger and the tesselated pavement or  floor of the Lodge, stupidly called " the Indented Tessel," and represented  by great hanging tassels, when it really means a tesserated floor (from the  Latin tessera) of white and black lozenges, with a necessarily denticulated  or indented border or edging. And wherever, in the higher Degrees, the  two colors white and black, are in juxtaposition, the two Principles of  Zoroaster and Manes are alluded to. With others the doctrine became a  mystic Pantheism, descended from that of the Brahmins, and even  pushed to an idolatry of Nature and hatred of every revealed dogma.  [To all this the absurd reading of the established Church, taking literally  the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a collection of Oriental  books of different ages, directly and inevitably led. The same result long  after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if they had been  written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the England of  James the First and the bigoted stolidity of Scottish Presbyterianism.]  "The better to succeed and win partisans, the Templars sympathized with  regrets for dethroned creeds and encouraged the hopes of new worships,  promising to all liberty of conscience and a new orthodoxy that should be  the synthesis of all the persecuted creeds." 
[It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol  called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet. Their  symbolism, invented ages before, to conceal what it was dangerous to  avow, was of course misunderstood by those who were not adepts, and to  their enemies seemed to be pantheistic. The calf of gold, made by Aaron  for the Israelites, was but one of the oxen under the layer of bronze, and  the Karobim on the Propitiatory, misunderstood. The symbols of the wise  always become the idols of the ignorant multitude. What the Chiefs of the Order really  believed and taught, is indicated to the Adepts by the hints contained in  the high Degrees of Free-Masonry, and by the symbols which only the  Adepts understand. 

[The Blue Degrees are but the outer court or portico of the Temple. Part of  the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is intentionally  misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall understand  them; but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands them. Their  true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry. The  whole body of the Royal and Sacerdotal Art was hidden so carefully,  centuries since, in the High Degrees, as that it is even yet impossible to  solve many of the enigmas which they contain. It is well enough for the  mass of those called Masons, to imagine that all is contained in the Blue  Degrees; and whoso attempts to undeceive them will labor in vain, and  without any true reward violate his obligations as an Adept. Masonry is the  veritable Sphinx, buried to the head in the sands heaped round it by the  ages.] 
"The seeds of decay were sown in the Order of the Temple at its origin.  Hypocrisy is a mortal disease. It had conceived a great work which it was  incapable of executing, because it knew neither humility nor personal  abnegation, because Rome was then invincible, and because the later  Chiefs of the Order did not comprehend its mission. Moreover, the  Templars were in general uneducated, and capable only of wielding the  sword, with no qualifications for governing, and at need enchaining, that  queen of the world called Opinion." [The doctrines of the Chiefs would, if  expounded to the masses, have seemed to them the babblings of folly.  The symbols of the wise are the idols of the vulgar, or else as  meaningless as the hieroglyphics of Egypt to the nomadic Arabs. There  must always be a common-place interpretation for the mass of Initiates, of  the symbols that are eloquent to the Adepts.] 
"Hugues de Payens himself had not that keen and far-sighted intellect nor  that grandeur of purpose which afterward distinguished the military  founder of another soldiery that became formidable to kings. The  Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits.  "Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They  became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on  which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed  their contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to  overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them. Their projects were divined  and prevented. [Rome, more intolerant of heresy than of vice and crime,  came to fear the Order, and fear is always cruel. It has always deemed  philosophical truth the most dangerous of heresies, and has never been at  a loss for a false accusation, by means of which to crush free thought.]  Pope Clement V. and King Philip le Bel gave the signal to Europe, and the  Templars, taken as it were in an immense net, were arrested, disarmed,  and cast into prison. Never was a Coup d' Etat accomplished with a more  formidable concert of action. The whole world was struck with stupor, and  eagerly waited for the strange revelations of a process that was to echo  through so many ages. 
"It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the Templars  against the Thrones and the Tiara. It was impossible to expose to them  the doctrines of the Chiefs of the Order. [This would have been to initiate  the multitude into the secrets of the Masters, and to have uplifted the veil  of Isis. Recourse was therefore had to the charge of magic, and  denouncers and false witnesses were easily found. When the temporal  and spiritual tyrannies unite to crush a victim they never want for  serviceable instruments.] The Templars were gravely accused of spitting 
upon Christ and denying God at their receptions, of gross obscenities,  conversations with female devils, and the worship of a monstrous idol.  "The end of the drama is well known, and how Jacques de Molai and his  fellows perished in the flames. But before his execution, the Chief of the  doomed Order organized and instituted what afterward came to be called  the Occult, Hermetic, or Scottish Masonry. In the gloom of his prison, the  Grand Master created four Metropolitan Lodges, at Naples for the East, at  Edinburg for the West, at Stockholm for the North, and at Paris for the  South." [The initials of his name, J\ B\ M\ found in the same order in  the first three Degrees, are but one of the many internal and cogent proofs  that such was the origin of modern FreeMasonry. The legend of Osiris  was revived and adopted, to symbolize the destruction of the Order, and  the resurrection of
Khürüm, slain in the body of the Temple, of KHÜRÜM ABAI, the Master, as  the martyr of fidelity to obligation, of Truth and Conscience, prophesied the  restoration to life of the buried association.] 
"The Pope and the King soon after perished in a strange and sudden manner.  Squin de Florian, the chief denouncer of the Order, died assassinated. In  breaking the sword of the Templars, they made of it a poniard; and their  proscribed trowels thenceforward built only tombs." 
[The Order disappeared at once. Its estates and wealth were confiscated, and  it seemed to have ceased to exist. Nevertheless it lived, under other names  and governed by unknown Chiefs, revealing itself only to those who, in 
passing through a series of Degrees, had proven themselves worthy to be  entrusted with the dangerous Secret. The modern Orders that style  themselves Templars have assumed a name to which they have not the  shadow of a title.] 
"The Successors of the Ancient Adepts Rose-Croix, abandoning by degrees  the austere and hierarchial Science of their Ancestors in initiation, became a  Mystic Sect, united with many of the Templars, the dogmas of the two  intermingling, and believed themselves to be the sole depositaries of the  secrets of the Gospel of St. John, seeing in its recitals an allegorical series of  rites proper to complete the initiation. 
"The Initiates, in fact, thought in the eighteenth century that their time had  arrived, some to found a new Hierarchy, others to overturn all authority, and  to press down all the summits of the Social Order under the level of Equality." 
The mystical meanings of the Rose as a Symbol are to be looked for in the  Kabalistic Commentaries on the Canticles.  The Rose was for the Initiates the living and blooming symbol of the  revelation of the harmonies of being. It was the emblem of beauty, life, love,  and pleasure. Flamel, or the Book of the Jew Abraham, made it the  hieroglyphical sign of the accomplishment of the great Work. Such is the key  of the Roman de la Rose. The Conquest of the Rose was the problem  propounded to Science by Initiation, while Religion was laboring to prepare 
and establish the universal triumph, exclusive and definitive, of the Cross. 
To unite the Rose to the Cross, was the problem proposed by the High  Initiation and in fact the Occult philosophy being the
Universal Synthesis, ought to explain all the phenomena of Being. 
Religion, considered solely as a physiological fact, is the revelation and 
satisfaction of a necessity of souls. Its existence is a scientific fact; to deny 
it, would be to deny humanity itself. 
The Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and 
revealed religion. Consequently they could no more be the enemies of the 
Papacy than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against the 
Popes and Kings, it was because they considered them personally as 
apostates from duty and supreme favorers of anarchy. 
What, in fact, is a despot, spiritual or temporal, but a crowned anarchist ? 
One of the magnificent pantacles that express the esoteric and 
unutterable part of Science, is a Rose of Light, in the centre of which a 
human form extends its arms in the form of a cross. 
Commentaries and studies have been multiplied upon the Divine Comedy, 
the work of DANTE, and yet no one, so far as we know, has pointed out its 
especial character. The work of the great Ghihellin is a declaration of war 
against the Papacy, by bold revelations of the Mysteries. The Epic of 
Dante is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like that of the 
Apocalypse, of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the Christian 
dogmas, and a secret negation of every thing absolute in these dogmas. 
His journey through the supernatural worlds is accomplished like the 
initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. He escapes from that 
gulf of Hell over the gate of which the sentence of despair was written, by 
reversing the positions of his head and feet, that is to say, by accepting 
the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma and then he reascends to the 
light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous ladder. Faust ascends to 
Heaven, by stepping on the head of the vanquished Mephistopheles. Hell 
is impassable for those only who know not how to turn back from it. We 
free ourselves from its bondage by audacity. 
His Hell is but a negative Purgatory. His Heaven is composed of a series 
of Kabalistic circles, divided by a cross, like the Pantacle of Ezekiel. In the 
centre of this cross blooms a rose and we see the symbol of the Adepts of 
the Rose-Croix for the first time publicly expounded and almost 
categorically explained. 
For the first time, because Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, five 
years before the birth of Alighieri, had not completed
his Roman de la Rose, which was continued by Chopinel, a half century 
afterward. One is astonished to discover that the Roman de la Rose and 
the Divina Commedia are two opposite forms of one and the same work, 
initiation into independence of spirit, a satire on all contemporary 
institutions, and the allegorical formula of the great Secrets of the Society 
of the Roses-Croix. 
The important manifestations of Occultism coincide with the period of the 
fall of the Templars; since Jean de Meung or Chopinel, contemporary of 
the old age of Dante, flourished during the best years of his life at the 
Court of Philippe le Bel. The Roman de la Rose is the Epic of old France. 
It is a profound book, under the form of levity, a revelation as learned as 
that of Apuleius, of the Mysteries of Occultism. The Rose of Flamel, that of 
Jean de Meung, and that of Dante, grew on the same stem. 
Swedenborg's system was nothing else than the Kabalah, minus the 
principle of the Hierarchy. It is the Temple, without the keystone and the 
foundation. 
Cagliostro was the Agent of the Templars, and therefore wrote to the 
Free-Masons of London that the time had come to begin the work of rebuilding 
the Temple of the Eternal. He had introduced into Masonry a new 
Rite called the Egyptian, and endeavored to resuscitate the mysterious 
worship of Isis. The three letters L\ P\D\ on his seal, were the initials of 
the words "Lilia pedibus destrue;" tread under foot the Lilies [of France], 
and a Masonic medal of the sixteenth or seventeenth century has upon it 
a sword cutting off the stalk of a lily, and the words " talem dabit ultio 
messem," such harvest revenge will give. 
A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic of 
Geneva, became the centre of the revolutionary movement in France, and 
a Prince of the blood-royal went thither to swear the destruction of the 
successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai. The 
registers of the Order of Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d' 
Orleans, was Grand Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that his 
successors were the Duc de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Conde, and the 
Duc de Cosse-Brissac. 
The Templars compromitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the 
People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for 
centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars 
demanded. The secret movers of the
French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the Altar upon 
the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis XVI. was executed, half the 
work was done; and thenceforward the Army of the Temple was to direct 
all its efforts against the Pope. 
Jacques de Molai and his companions were perhaps martyrs, but their 
avengers dishonored their memory. Royalty was regenerated on the 
scaffold of Louis XVI., the Church triumphed in the captivity of Pius VI., 
carried a prisoner to Valence, and dying of fatigue and sorrow, but the 
successors of the Ancient Knights of the Temple perished, overwhelmed 
in their fatal victory.
 
 

XXXI GRAND INSPECTOR INQUISITOR COMMANDER.

[Inspector Inquisitor.]
 

To hear patiently, to weigh deliberately and dispassionately, and
to decide impartially;--these are the chief duties of a Judge.
After the lessons you have received, I need not further enlarge
upon them. You will be ever eloquently reminded of them by the
furniture upon our Altar, and the decorations of the Tribunal.

The Holy Bible will remind you of your obligation; and that as you
judge here below, so you will be yourself judged hereafter, by One
who has not to submit, like an earthly judge, to the sad necessity
of inferring the motives, intentions, and purposes of men [of which
all crime essentially consists] from the uncertain and often unsafe
testimony of their acts and words; as men in thick darkness grope
their way, with hands outstretched before them: but before Whom
every thought, feeling, impulse, and intention of every soul that
now is, or ever was, or ever will be on earth, is, and ever will be
through the whole infinite duration of eternity, present and
visible.

The Square and Compass, the Plumb and Level, are well known to you
as a Mason. Upon you as a Judge, they peculiarly inculcate
uprightness, impartiality, careful consideration of facts and
circumstances, accuracy in judgment, and uniformity in decision. As
a Judge, too, you are to bring up square work and square work only.
Like a temple erected by the plumb, you are to lean neither to one
side nor the other. Like a building well squared and levelled, you
are to be firm and steadfast in your convictions of right and
justice. Like the circle swept with the compasses, you are to be
true. In the scales of justice you are to weigh the facts and the
law alone, nor place in either scale personal friendship or
personal dislike, neither fear nor favour: and when reformation is
no longer to be hoped for, you are to smite relentlessly with the
sword of justice.

The peculiar and principal symbol of this Degree is the Tetractys
of Pythagoras, suspended in the East, where ordinarily the sacred
word or letter glitters, like it, representing the Deity. Its nine
external points form the triangle, the chief symbol in Masonry,
with many of the meanings of which you are familiar.

To us, its three sides represent the three principal attributes of
the Deity, which created, and now, as ever, support, uphold, and
guide the Universe in its eternal movement; the three supports of
the Masonic Temple, itself an emblem of the Universe:--Wisdom, or
the Infinite Divine Intelligence; Strength, or Power, the Infinite
Divine Will; and Beauty, or the Infinite Divine Harmony, the
Eternal Law, by virtue of which the infinite myriads of suns and
worlds flash ever onward in their ceaseless revolutions, without
clash or conflict, in the Infinite of space, and change and
movement are the law of all created existences.

To us, as Masonic Judges, the triangle figures forth the Pyramids,
which, planted firmly as the everlasting hills, and accurately
adjusted to the four cardinal points, defiant of all assaults of
men and time, teach us to stand firm and unshaken as they, when our
feet are planted upon the solid truth.

It includes a multitude of geometrical figures, all having a deep
significance to Masons. The triple triangle is peculiarly sacred,
having ever been among all nations a symbol of the Deity.
Prolonging all the external lines of the Hexagon, which also it
includes, we have six smaller triangles, whose bases cut each other
in the central point of the Tetractys, itself always the symbol of
the generative power of the Universe, the Sun, Brahma, Osiris,
Apollo, Bel, and the Deity Himself. Thus, too, we form twelve still
smaller triangles, three times three of which compose the Tetractys
itself.

I refrain from enumerating all the figures that you may trace
within it: but one may not be passed unnoticed. The Hexagon itself
faintly images to us a cube, not visible at the first glance, and
therefore the fit emblem of that faith in things invisible, most
essential to salvation. The first perfect solid, and reminding you
of the cubical stone that sweated blood, and of that deposited by
Enoch, it teaches justice, accuracy, and consistency.

The infinite divisibility of the triangle teaches the infinity of
the Universe, of time, of space, and of the Deity, as do the lines
that, diverging from the common centre, ever increase their
distance from each other as they are infinitely prolonged. As they
may be infinite in number, so are the attributes of Deity infinite;
and as they emanate from one-centre and are projected into space,
so the whole Universe has emanated from God.

Remember also, my Brother, that you have other duties to perform
than those of a judge. You are to inquire into and scrutinize
carefully the work of the subordinate Bodies in Masonry You are to
see that recipients of the higher Degrees are not un necessarily
multiplied; that improper persons are carefully excluded from
membership, and that in their life and conversation Masons bear
testimony to the excellence of our doctrines and the incalculable
value of the institution itself. You are to inquire also into your
own heart and conduct, and keep careful watch over yourself, that
you go not astray. If you harbour ill-will and jealousy, if you are
hospitable to intolerance and bigotry, and churlish to gentleness
and kind affections, opening wide your heart to one and closing its
portals to the other, it is time for you to set in order your own
temple, or else you wear in vain the name and insignia of a Mason,
while yet uninvested with the Masonic nature.

Everywhere in the world there is a natural law, that is, a constant
mode of action, which seems to belong to the nature of things, to
the constitution of the Universe. This fact is universal. In
different departments we call this mode of action by different
names, as the law of Matter, the law of Mind, the law of Morals,
and the like. We mean by this, a certain mode of action which
belongs to the material, mental, or moral forces, the mode in which
commonly they are found to act, and in which it is their ideal to
act always. The ideal laws of matter we know only from the fact
that they are always obeyed. To us the actual obedience is the only
evidence of the ideal rule; for in respect to the conduct of the
material world, the ideal and the actual are the same.

The laws of matter we learn only by observation and experience.
Before experience of the fact, no man could foretell that a body,
falling toward the earth, would descend sixteen feet the first
second, twice that the next, four times the third, and sixteen
times the fourth. No mode of action in our consciousness
anticipates this rule of action in the outer world. The same is
true of all the laws of matter. The ideal law is known because it
is a fact. The law is imperative. It must be obeyed without
hesitation. Laws of crystallization, laws of proportion in chemical
combination,-- neither in these nor in any other law of Nature is
there any margin left for oscillation of disobedience. Only the
primal will of God works in the material world, and no secondary
finite will.

There are no exceptions to the great general law of Attraction,
which binds atom to atom in the body of a rotifier visible only by
aid of a microscope, orb to orb, system to system; gives unity to
the world of things, and rounds these worlds of systems to a
Universe. At first there seem to be exceptions to this law, as in
growth and decomposition, in the repulsions of electricity; but at
length all these are found to be special cases of the one great law
of attraction acting in various modes.

The variety of effect of this law at first surprises the senses;
but in the end the unity of cause astonishes the cultivated mind.
Looked at in reference to this globe, an earthquake is no more than
a chink that opens in a garden-walk of a dry day in Summer. A
sponge is porous, having small spaces between the solid parts: the
solar system is only more porous, having larger room between the
several orbs: the Universe yet more so, with spaces between the
systems, as small, compared with infinite space, as those between
the atoms that compose the bulk of the smallest invisible
animalcule, of which millions swim in a drop of salt-water. The
same attraction holds together the animalcule, the sponge, the
system, and the Universe. Every particle of matter in that Universe
is related to each and all the other particles; and attraction is
their common bond.

In the spiritual world, the world of human consciousness, there is
also a law, an ideal mode of action for the spiritual forces of
man. The law of Justice is as universal an one as the law of
Attraction; though we are very far from being able to reconcile all
the phenomena of Nature with it. The lark has the same right in our
view, to live, to sing, to dart at pleasure through the ambient
atmosphere, as the hawk has to ply his strong wings in the Summer
sunshine: and yet the hawk pounces on and devours the harmless
lark, as it devours the worm, and as the worm devours the
animalcule; and, so far as we know, there is nowhere, in any future
state of animal existence, any compensation for this apparent
injustice. Among the bees, one rules, while the others obey --some
work, while others are idle. With the small ants, the soldiers feed
on the proceeds of the workmen's labour. The lion lies in wait for
and devours the antelope that has apparently as good a right to
life as he. Among men, some govern and others serve, capital
commands and labour obeys, and one race, superior in intellect,
avails itself of the strong muscles of another that is inferior;
and yet, for all this, no one impeaches the justice of God.

No doubt all these varied phenomena are consistent with one great
law of justice; and the only difficulty is that we do not, and no
doubt we cannot, understand that law. It is very easy for some
dreaming and visionary theorist to say that it is most evidently
unjust for the lion to devour the deer, and for the eagle to tear
and eat the wren; but the trouble is, that we know of no other way,
according to the frame, the constitution, and the organs which God
has given them, in which the lion and the eagle could manage to
live at all. Our little measure of justice is not God's measure.
His justice does not require us to relieve the hard working
millions of all labour, to emancipate the serf or slave, unfitted
to be free, from all control.

No doubt, underneath all the little bubbles, which are the lives,
the wishes, the wills, and the plans of the two thousand millions
or more of human beings on this earth (for bubbles they are,
judging by the space and time they occupy in this great and
age-outlasting sea of human-kind),--no doubt, underneath them all
resides one and the same eternal force, which they shape into this
or the other special form; and over all the same paternal
Providence presides, keeping eternal watch over the little and the
great, and producing variety of effect from Unity of Force.

It is entirely true to say that justice is the constitution or
fundamental law of the moral Universe, the law of right, a rule of
conduct for man (as it is for every other living creature), in all
his moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like all other
affairs), must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is
right agrees therewith and stands, while what is wrong conflicts
with it and falls. The difficulty is that we ever erect our notions
of what is right and just into the law of justice, and insist that
God shall adopt that as His law; instead of striving to learn by
observation and reflection what His law is, and then believing that
law to be consistent with His infinite justice, whether it
corresponds with our limited notion of justice, or does not so
correspond. We are too wise in our own conceit, and ever strive to
enact our own little notions into the Universal Laws of God.

It might be difficult for man to prove, even to his own
satisfaction, how it is right or just for him to subjugate the
horse and ox to his service, giving them in return only their daily
food, which God has spread out for them on all the green meadows
and savannas of the world: or how it is just that we should slay
and eat the harmless deer that only crops the green herbage, the
buds, and the young leaves, and drinks the free-running water that
God made common to all; or the gentle dove, the innocent kid, the
many other living things that so confidently trust to our
protection;--quite as difficult, perhaps, as to prove it just for
one man's intellect or even his wealth to make another's strong
arms his servants, for daily wages or for a bare subsistence.

To find out this universal law of justice is one thing--to
undertake to measure off something with our own little tape-line,
and call that God's law of justice, is another. The great general
plan and system, and the great general laws enacted by God,
continually produce what to our limited notions is wrong and
injustice, which hitherto men have been able to explain to their
own satisfaction only by the hypothesis of another existence in
which all inequalities and injustices in this life will be remedied
and compensated for. To our ideas of justice, it is very unjust
that the child is made miserable for life by deformity or organic
disease, in consequence of the vices of its father; and yet that is
part of the universal law. The ancients said that the child was
punished for the sins of its father. We say that this its deformity
or disease is the consequence of its father's vices; but so far as
concerns the question of justice or injustice, that is merely the
change of a word.

It is very easy to lay down a broad, general principle, embodying
our own idea of what is absolute justice, and to insist that
everything shall conform to that: to say, "all human affairs must
be subject to that as the law paramount; what is right agrees
therewith and stands, what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private
cohesions of self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, must all
be subordinate to this universal gravitation toward the eternal
right." The difficulty is that this Universe of necessities
God-created, of sequences of cause and effect, and of life evolved
from death, this interminable succession and aggregate of
cruelties, will not conform to any such absolute principle or
arbitrary theory, no matter in what sounding words and glittering
phrases it may be embodied.

Impracticable rules in morals are always injurious; for as all men
fall short of compliance with them, they turn real virtues into
imaginary offenses against a forged law. Justice as between man and
man and as between man and the animals below him, is that which,
under and according to the God-created relations existing between
them, and the whole aggregate of circumstances surrounding them, is
fit and right and proper to be done, with a view to the general as
well as to the individual interest. It is not a theoretical
principle by which the very relations that God has created and
imposed on us are to be tried, and approved or condemned.

God has made this great system of the Universe, and enacted general
laws for its government. Those laws environ everything that lives
with a mighty network of necessity. He chose to create the tiger
with such organs that he cannot crop the grass, but must eat other
flesh or starve. He has made man carnivorous also; and some of the
smallest birds are as much so as the tiger. In every step we take,
in every breath we draw, is involved the destruction of a multitude
of animate existences, each, no matter how minute, as much a living
creature as ourself. He has made necessary among mankind a division
of labour, intellectual and moral. He has made necessary the varied
relations of society and dependence, of obedience and control.

What is thus made necessary cannot be unjust; for if it be, then
God the great Lawgiver is Himself unjust. The evil to be avoided
is, the legalization of injustice and wrong under the false plea of
necessity. Out of all the relations of life grow duties,--as
naturally grow and as undeniably, as the leaves grow upon the
trees. If we have the right, created by God's law of necessity, to
slay the lamb that we may eat and live, we have no right to torture
it in doing so, because that is in no wise necessary. We have the
right to live, if we fairly can, by the legitimate exercise of our
intellect, and hire or buy the labour of the strong arms of others,
to till our grounds, to dig in our mines, to toil in our
manufactories; but we have no right to overwork or underpay them.

It is not only true that we may learn the moral law of justice, the
law of right, by experience and observation; but that God has given
us a moral faculty, our conscience, which is able to perceive this
law directly and immediately, by intuitive perception of it; and it
is true that man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than
what he has ever yet come up to,--an ideal of nature that shames
his actual of history: because man has ever been prone to make
necessity, his own necessity, the necessities of society, a plea
for injustice. But this notion must not be pushed too far--for if
we substitute this ideality for actuality, then it is equally true
that we have within us an ideal rule of right and wrong, to which
God Himself in His government of the world has never come, and
against which He (we say it reverentially) every day offends. We
detest the tiger and the wolf for the rapacity and love of blood
which are their nature; we revolt against the law by which the
crooked limbs and diseased organism of the child are the fruits of
the father's vices; we even think that a God Omnipotent and
Omniscient ought to have permitted no pain, no poverty, no
servitude; our ideal of justice is more lofty than the actualities
of God. It is well, as all else is well. He has given us that moral
sense for wise and beneficent purposes. We accept it as a
significant proof of the inherent loftiness of human nature, that
it can entertain an ideal so exalted; and should strive to attain
it, as far as we can do so consistently with the relations which He
has created, and the circum.stances which surround us and hold us
captive.

If we faithfully use this faculty of conscience; if, applying it to
the existing relations and circumstances, we develop it and all its
kindred powers, and so deduce the duties that out of these
relation.s and those circumstances, and limited and qualified by
them, arise and become obligatory upon us, then we learn justice,
the law of right, the divine rule of conduct for human life. But if
we undertake to define and settle "the mode of action that belongs
to the infinitely perfect nature of God," and so set up any ideal
rule, beyond all human reach, we soon come to judge and condemn His
work and the relations which it has pleased Him in His infinite
wisdom to create.

A sense of justice belongs to human nature, and is a part of it.
Men find a deep, permanent, and instinctive delight in justice, not
only in the outward effects, but in the inward cause, and by their
nature love this law of right, this reasonable rule of conduct,
this justice, with a deep and abiding love. Justice is the object
of the conscience, and fits it as light fits the eye and truth the
mind.

Justice keeps just relations between men. It holds the balance
between nation and nation, between a man and his family, tribe,
nation, and race, so that his absolute rights and theirs do not
interfere, nor their ultimate interests ever clash, nor the eternal
interests of the one prove antagonistic to those of all or of any
other one. This we must believe, if we believe that God is just. We
must do justice to all, and demand it of all; it is a universal
human debt, a universal human claim. But we may err greatly in
defining what that justice is. The temporary interests, and what to
human view are the rights, of men, do often interfere and clash.
The life-interests of the individual often conflict with the
permanent interests and welfare of society; and what may seem to be
the natural rights of one class or race, with those of another.

It is not true to say that "one man, however little, must not be
sacrificed to another, however great, to a majority, or to all
men." That is not only a fallacy, but a most dangerous one. Often
one man and many men must be sacrificed, in the ordinary sense of
the term, to the interest of the many. It is a comfortable fallacy
to the selfish; for if they cannot, by the law of justice, be
sacrificed for the common good, then their country has no right to
demand of them self-sacrifice; and he is a fool who lays down his
life, or sacrifices his estate, or even his luxuries, to insure the
safety or prosperity of his country. According to that doctrine,
Curtius was a fool, and Leonidas an idiot; and to die for one's
country is no longer beautiful and glorious, but a mere absurdity.
Then it is no longer to be asked that the common soldier shall
receive in his bosom the sword or bayonet-thrust which otherwise
would let out the life of the great commander on whose fate hang
the liberties of his country, and the welfare of millions yet
unborn.

On the contrary, it is certain that necessity rules in all the
affairs of men, and that the interest and even the life of one man
must often be sacrificed to the interest and welfare of his
country. Some must ever lead the forlorn hope: the missionary must
go among savages, bearing his life in his hand; the physician must
expose himself to pestilence for the sake of others; the sailor, in
the frail boat upon the wide ocean, escaped from the foundering or
burning ship, must step calmly into the hungry waters, if the lives
of the passengers can be saved only by the sacrifice of his own;
the pilot must stand firm at the wheel, and let the flames scorch
away his own life to insure the common safety of those whom the
doomed vessel bears.

The mass of men are always looking for what is just. All the vast
machinery which makes up a State, a world of States, is, on the
part of the people, an attempt to organize, not that ideal justice
which finds fault with God's ordinances, but that practical justice
which may be attained in the actual organization of the world. The
minute and wide-extending civil machinery which makes up the law
and the courts, with all their officers and implements, on the part
of mankind, is chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory
of right. Constitutions are made to establish justice; the
decisions of courts are reported to help us judge more wisely in
time to come. The nation aims to get together the most nearly just
men in the State, that they may incorporate into statutes their
aggregate sense of what is right. The people wish law to be
embodied justice, administered without passion. Even in the wildest
ages there has been a wild popular justice, but always mixed with
passion and administered in hate; for justice takes a rude form
with rude men, and becomes less mixed with hate and passion in more
civilized communities. Every progressive State revises its statutes
and revolutionizes its constitution from time to time, seeking to
come closer to the utmost possible practical justice and right; and
sometimes, following theorists and dreamers in their adoration for
the ideal, by erecting into law positive principle of theoretical
right, works practical injustice, and then has to retrace its
steps.

In literature men always look for practical justice, and desire
that virtue should have its own reward, and vice its appropriate
punishment. They are ever on the side of justice and humanity; and
the majority of them have an ideal justice, better than the things
about them, juster than the law: for the law is ever imperfect, not
attaining even to the utmost practicable degree of perfection; and
no man is as just as his own idea of possible and practicable
justice. His passions and his necessities ever cause him to sink
below his own ideal. The ideal justice which men ever look up to
and strive to rise toward, is true; but it will not be realized in
this world. Yet we must approach as near to it as practicable, as
we should do toward that ideal democracy that "now floats before
the eyes of earnest and religious men,--fairer than the Republic of
Plato, or More's Utopia, or the Golden Age of fabled memory," only
taking care that we do not, in striving to reach and ascend to the
impossible ideal, neglect to seize upon and hold fast to the
possible actual. To aim at the best, but be content with the best
possible, is the only true wisdom. To insist on the absolute right,
and throw out of the calculation the important and all controlling
element of necessity, is the folly of a mere dreamer.

In a world inhabited by men with bodies, and necessarily with
bodily wants and animal passions, the time will never come when
there will be no want, no oppression, nor servitude, no fear of man
no fear of God, but only Love. That can never be while there are
inferior intellect, indulgence in low vice, improvidence,
indolence, awful visitations of pestilence and war and famine,
earthquake and volcano, that must of necessity cause men to want,
and serve, and suffer, and fear.

But still the ploughshare of justice is ever drawn through and
through the field of the world, uprooting the savage plants. Ever
we see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. The
injustice of England lost her America, the fairest jewel of her
crown. The injustice of Napoleon bore him to the ground more than
the snows of Russia did, and exiled him to a barren rock there to
pine away and die, his life a warning to bid mankind be just.
 

We intuitively understand what justice is, better than we can
depict it. What it is in a given case depends so much on
circumstances, that definitions of it are wholly deceitful. Often
it would be unjust to society to do what would, in the absence of
that consideration, be pronounced just to the individual. General
propositions of man's right to this or that are ever fallacious:
and not infrequently it would be most unjust to the individual
himself to do for him what the theorist, as a general proposition,
would say was right and his due.

We should ever do unto others what, under the same circumstances,
we ought to wish, and should have the right to wish they should do
unto us. There are many cases, cases constantly occurring, where
one man must take care of himself, in preference to another, as
where two struggle for the possession of a plank that will save
one, but cannot uphold both; or where, assailed, he can save his
own life only by slaying his adversary. So one must prefer the
safety of his country to the lives of her enemies; and sometimes,
to insure it, to those of her own innocent citizens. . The
retreating general may cut away a bridge behind him, to delay
pursuit and save the main body of his army, though he thereby
surrenders a detachment, a battalion, or even a corps of his own
force to certain destruction.

These are not departures from justice; though, like other instances
where the injury or death of the individual is the safety of the
many, where the interest of one individual, class, or race is
postponed to that of the public, or of the superior race, they may
infringe some dreamer's ideal rule of justice. But every departure
from real, practical justice is no doubt attended with loss to the
unjust man, though the loss is not reported to the public.
Injustice, public or private, like every other sin and wrong, is
inevitably followed by its consequences. The selfish, the grasping,
the inhuman, the fraudulently unjust, the ungenerous employer, and
the cruel master, are detested by the great popular heart; while
the kind master, the liberal employer, the generous, the humane,
and the just have the good opinion of all men, and even envy is a
tribute to their virtues. Men honour all who stand up for truth and
right, and never shrink. The world builds monuments to its
patriots. Four great statesmen, organizers of the right, embalmed
in stone, look down upon the lawgivers of France as they pass to
their hall of legislation, silent orators to tell how nations love
the just. How we revere the marble lineaments of those just judges,
Jay and Marshall, that look so calmly toward the living Bench of
the Supreme Court of the United States! What a monument Washington
has built in the heart of America and all the world, not because he
dreamed of an impracticable ideal justice, but by his constant
effort to be practically just !

But necessity alone, and the greatest good of the greatest number,
can legitimately interfere with the dominion of absolute and ideal
justice. Government should not foster the strong at the expense of
the weak, nor protect the capitalist and tax the labourer. The
powerful should not seek a monopoly of development and enjoyment;
not prudence only and the expedient for to-day should be appealed
to by statesmen, but conscience and the right: justice should not
be forgotten in looking at interest, nor political morality
neglected for political economy: we should not have national
housekeeping instead of national organization on the basis of
right.

We may well differ as to the abstract right of many things; for
every such question has many sides, and few men look at all of
them, many only at one. But we all readily recognize cruelty,
unfairness, inhumanity, partiality, over-reaching, hard-dealing, by
their ugly and familiar lineaments, and in order to know and to
hate and despise them, we do not need to sit as a Court of Errors
and Appeals to revise and reverse God's Providences.

There are certainly great evils of civilization at this day, and
many questions of humanity long adjourned and put off. The hideous
aspect of pauperism, the debasement and vice in our cities, tell us
by their eloquent silence or in inarticulate mutterings, that the
rich and the powerful and the intellectual do not do their duty by
the poor, the feeble, and the ignorant; and every wretched woman
who lives, Heaven scarce knows how, by making shirts at sixpence
each, attests the injustice and inhumanity of man. There are
cruelties to slaves, and worse cruelties to animals, each
disgraceful to their perpetrators, and equally unwarranted by the
lawful relation of control and dependence which it has pleased God
to create.

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. Fidelity to your faculties,
trust in their convictions, that is justice to yourself; a life in
obedience thereto, that is justice toward men. No wrong is really
successful. The gain of injustice is a loss, its pleasure
suffering. Iniquity often seems to prosper, but its success is its
defeat and shame. After a long while, the day of reckoning ever
comes, to nation as to individual. The knave deceives himself. The
miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and
at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and
naked and miserable. Whoso escapes a duty avoids a gain. Outward
judgment often fails, inward justice never. Let a man try to love
the wrong and to do the wrong, it is eating stones and not bread,
the swift feet of justice are upon him, following with woolen
tread, and her iron hands are round his neck. No man can escape
from this, any more than from himself. Justice is the angel of God
that flies from East to West; and where she stoops her broad wings,
it is to bring the counsel of God, and feed mankind with angel's
bread.

We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and
our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and
complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine
it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice.
Justice will not fail, though wickedness appears strong, and has on
its side the armies and thrones of power, the riches and the glory
of the world, and though poor men crouch down in despair. Justice
will not fail and perish out from the world of men! nor will what
is really wrong and contrary to God's real law of justice
continually endure. The Power, the Wisdom, and the Justice of God
are on the side of every just thought, and it cannot fail, any more
than God Himself can perish.

In human affairs, the justice of God must work by human means. Men
are the instruments of God's principles; our morality is the
instrument of His justice, which, incomprehensible to us, seems to
our short vision often to work injustice. but will at some time
still the oppressor's brutal laugh. Justice is the rule of conduct
written in the nature of mankind. We may, in our daily life, in
house or field or shop, in the office or in the court, help to
prepare the way for the commonwealth of justice which is slowly,
but, we would fain hope, surely approaching. All the justice we
mature will bless us here and hereafter, and at our death we shall
leave it added to the common store of human-kind. And every Mason
who, content to do that which is possible and practicable, does and
enforces justice, may help deepen the channel of human morality in
which God's justice runs; and so the wrecks of evil that now check
and obstruct the stream may the sooner be swept out and borne away
by the resistless tide of Omnipotent Right. Let us, my Brother, in
this as in all else, endeavour always to perform the duties of a
good Mason and a good man.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

XXXII SUBLIME PRINCE OF THE ROYAL SECRET.

[Master of Royal Secret.]
 
 

The Occult Science of the Ancient Magi was concealed
under the shadows of the Ancient Mysteries: it was
imperfectly revealed or rather disfigured by the
Gnostics: it is guessed at under the obscurities that
cover the pretended crimes of the Templars; and it is
found enveloped in enigmas that seem impenetrable, in
the Rites of the Highest Masonry.

Magism was the Science of Abraham and Orpheus, of
Confucius and Zoroaster. It was the dogmas of this
Science that were engraven on the tables of stone by
Hanoch and Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled
them, for that is the meaning of the word reveal. He
covered them with a new veil, when he made of the Holy
Kabalah the exclusive heritage of the people of Israel,
and the inviolable Secret of its priests. The Mysteries
of Thebes and Eleusis preserved among the nations some
symbols of it, already altered, and the mysterious key
whereof was lost among the instruments of an
ever-growing superstition. Jerusalem, the murderess of
her prophets, and so often prostituted to the false
gods of the Syrians and Babylonians, had at length in
its turn lost the Holy Word, when a Prophet announced
to the Magi by the consecrated Star of Initiation, came
to rend asunder the worn veil of the old Temple, in
order to give the Church a new tissue of legends and
symbols, that still and ever conceals from the Profane,
and ever preserves to the Elect the same truths.

It was the remembrance of this scientific and religious
Absolute, of this doctrine that is summed up in a word,
of this Word, in fine, alternately lost and found
again, that was transmitted to the Elect of all the
Ancient Initiations: it was this same remembrance,
preserved, or perhaps profaned in the celebrated Order
of the Templars, that became for all the secret
associations, of the Rose-Croix, of the Illuminati, and
of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their strange
rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and,
above all, of their mutual devotedness and of their
power.

The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be proscribed by the
Christians, and the official Sanctuary was closed
against the high initiation. Thus the Hierarchy of
Knowledge was compromitted by the violences of usurping
ignorance, and the disorders of the Sanctuary are
reproduced in the State; for always, willingly or
unwillingly, the King is sustained by the Priest, and
it is from the eternal Sanctuary of the Divine
instruction that the Powers of the Earth, to insure
themselves durability, must receive their consecration
and their force.

The Hermetic Science of the early Christian ages,
cultivated also by Geber, Alfarabius, and others of the
Arabs, studied by the Chiefs of the Templars, and
embodied in certain symbols of the higher Degrees of
Freemasonry, may be accurately defined as the Kabalah
in active realization,or the Magic of Works. It has
three analogous Degrees, religious, philosophical, and
physical realization.

Its religious realization is the durable foundation of
the true Empire and the true Priesthood that rule in
the realm of human intellect: its philosophical
realization is the establishment of absolute Doctrine,
known in all times as the "Holy Doctrine," and of which
PLUTARCH, in the Treatise "de Iside et Osiride," speaks
at large but mysteriously; and of a Hierarchical
instruction to secure the uninterrupted succession of