morals and dogmas

MORALS AND DOGMA

OF THE

ANCIENT AND ACCEPTED SCOTTISH RITE OF FREEMASONRY

PREPARED FOR THE SUPREME COUNCIL OF THE THIRTY-THIRD DEGREE

FOR THE SOUTHERN JURISDICTION OF THE UNITED STATES

AND PUBLISHED BY LI'S AUTHORITY.

CHARLESTON 
A.’. M.\ 5632 
r ati'«t Viu. 4

Filtered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 
ALBERT PIKE,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1906, by

THE SUPREME COUNCIL OF THE SOUTHERN 
JURISDICTION, A. A. S. R., U. S. A.,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Morals  and

Dogma  by

Albert

Pike

[ 1871 ]

This is Albert Pikes' 861 page volume of'lectures' on the esoteric  roots of Freemasonry, specifically the 32-degree Scottish Rite. 
Until 1964, this book was given to every Mason completing the 
14th degree in the Southern jurisdiction of the US Scottish Rite 
Freemasons. Masonic lectures are standard oral presentations  given during initiation to a new degree. Lectures provide  background material for initiates and the discuss duties of the  degree in general terms. They do not present details of the rituals,  gestures, regalia, etc., for which one must consult other books on 
Masonry .

Pike states right off that half of the text is copied from other  works. Unfortunately none of these quotes are properly cited, and  in most cases it is only a shift in style which allows us to identify a  quote. There are also lapses of fact and logic. So it would be a  mistake to use this work as an authoritative source without

additional research and critical thinking. That said, Morals and 
Dogma is a huge, rambling treasure-house of esoteric data,  particularly on the Kabalah and ancient Mystery religions. 
Whether you just browse these pages or study it from one end to  the other, this is a must-read book for anyone looking for long-lost  knowledge.

This etext uses Unicode extensively, particularly for Greek and 
Hebrew, and your browser needs to be Unicode compliant to view  it properly.  nM££ag|

Preface _

. Apprentice

III. The Master

V. Secret Master

V. Intimate Secretary

VII. Provost and Judge

VIII. Intendant of the Building

DCElecKif the Nine|

X. Illustrious Elect of the Fifteen

XI. Sublime Elect of the Twelve, or Prince Ameth

XII. Grand Master Architect

XIII. Roval Arch of Solomon

XIV. Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason

Chapter of Rose Croix

XV. Knight of the East or of the Sword

^

[VIII. Knight Rose Croix|

Council of Kadosh

XIX. Grand Pontiff

XX. Grand Master of All Symbolic Lodges

XXL^oachi^^orPrussmnKnmhj

XXII. Knight of the Roval Axe.  or Prince of Libanus|

XXIII. Chief of the Tabernacle

XXIV. Prince of the Tabernacle

XXV. Knieht of the Brazen Seroent

XXVII. Knight Commande^of the Temple|

XXVIII. Knight of the Sun, or Prince Adept

XXD£ : _Grand_Scottis hKnight of St. Andrew

XXX. Knight Kadosh

Consistory

XXXII. Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret

PREFACE.

THE following work has been prepared by authority of the 
Supreme Council of the Thirty-third Degree, for the Southern 
Jurisdiction of the United States, by the Grand Commander,  and is now published by its direction. It contains the Lectures  of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in that jurisdiction,  and is specially intended to be read and studied by the 
Brethren of that obedience, in connection with the Rituals of  the Degrees. It is hoped and expected that each will furnish  himself with a copy, and make himself familiar with it; for  which purpose, as the cost of the work consists entirely in the  printing and binding, it will be lurnished at a price as  moderate as possible. No individual will receive pecuniary  profit from it, except the agents for its sale.

It has been copyrighted, to prevent its republication  elsewhere, and the copyright, like those of all the other works  prepared for the Supreme Council, has been assigned to 
Trustees for that Body. Whatever profits may accrue from it  will be devoted to purposes of charity.

The Brethren of the Rite in the United States and Canada will  be afforded the opportunity to purchase it, nor is it forbidden  that other Masons shall; but they will not be solicited to do so.

In preparing this work, the Grand Commander has been about  equally Author and Compiler; since he has extracted quite  half its contents from the works of the best writers and most  philosophic or eloquent thinkers. Perhaps it would have been  better and more acceptable if he had extracted more and  written less.

Still, perhaps half of it is his own; and, in incorporating here  p. IV  the thoughts and words of others, he has continually changed  and added to the language, often intermingling, in the same  sentences, his own words with theirs. It not being intended for  the world at large, he has felt at liberty to make, from all  accessible sources, a Compendium of the Morals and Dogma  of the Rite, to re-mould sentences, change and add to words  and phrases, combine them with his own, and use them as if  they were his own, to be dealt with at his pleasure and so  availed of as to make the whole most valuable for the  purposes intended. He claims, therefore, little of the merit of  authorship, and has not cared to distinguish his own from that  which he has taken from other sources, being quite willing  that every portion of the book, in turn, may be regarded as  borrowed from some old and better writer.

The teachings of these Readings are not sacramental, so far as  they go beyond the realm of Morality into those of other  domains of Thought and Truth. The Ancient and Accepted 
Scottish Rite uses the word "Dogma" in its true sense, of  doctrine, or teaching ; and is not dogmatic in the odious sense  of that term. Every one is entirely free to reject and dissent  from whatsoever herein may seem to him to be untrue or  unsound. It is only required of him that he shall weigh what is  taught, and give it fair hearing and unprejudiced judgment. Of  course, the ancient theosophic and philosophic speculations  are not embodied as part of the doctrines of the Rite; but  because it is of interest and profit to know what the Ancient 
Intellect thought upon these subjects, and because nothing so  conclusively proves the radical difference between our human  and the animal nature, as the capacity of the human mind to  entertain such speculations in regard to itself and the Deity. 
But as to these opinions themselves, we may say, in the words  of the learned Canonist, Ludovicus Gomez: " Opiniones  secundum varietatem temporum senescent et intermoriantur,  alieeque diversce vel prioribus contrarice renascantur et  deinde pubescent."  p. V

Titles of Degrees as herein given have in some instances been  changed. Correct titles are as follows:

1 “-Apprentice.

2°—Fellow-craft.

3 “—Master.

4°—Secret Master.

5°—Perfect Master.

6°—Intimate Secretary.

7°-Provost and Judge.

8°—Intendant of the Building.

9°—Elu of the Nine.

10°—Elu of the Fifteen.

11 °—Elu of the Twelve.

12°—Master Architect.

13°—Royal Arch of Solomon.

14°—Perfect Elu.

15 “—Knight of the East.

16°—Prince of Jerusalem.

17°—Knight of the East and West.

18°—Knight Rose Croix.

19°—Pontiff.

20°—Master of the Symbolic Lodge.

21°—Noachite or Prussian Knight.

22°—Knight of the Royal Axe or Prince of Libanus. 
23 “—Chief of the Tabernacle.

24“—Prince of the Tabernacle.

25 “—Knight of the Brazen Serpent.

26°—Prince of Mercy.

27°—Knight Commander of the Temple.

28°—Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept.

29°—Scottish Knight of St. Andrew.

30°—Knight Kadosh.

31 “—Inspector Inquisitor.

32°—Master of the Royal Secret.

MORALS AND DOGMA  i.

APPRENTICE.

THE TWELVE-INCH RULE AND THE COMMON 
GAVEL.

FORCE, unregulated or ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the  void, like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam  unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows  meeting only the air, they recoil and bruise itself. It is  destruction and ruin. It is the volcano, the earthquake, the  cyclone;-not growth and progress. It is Polyphemus blinded,  striking at random, and falling headlong among the sharp  rocks by the impetus of his own blows.

The blind Force of the people is a Force that must be  economized, and also managed, as the blind Force of steam,  lifting the ponderous iron anns and turning the large wheels,  is made to bore and rifle the cannon and to weave the most  delicate lace. It must be regulated by Intellect. Intellect is to  the people and the people's Force, what the slender needle of  the compass is to the ship—its soul, always counselling the  huge mass of wood and iron, and always pointing to the north. 
To attack the citadels built up on all sides against the human  race by superstitions, despotisms, and prejudices,

P-2  the Force must have a brain and a law. Then its deeds of  daring produce permanent results, and there is real progress. 
Then there are sublime conquests. Thought is a force, and  philosophy should be an energy, finding its aim and its effects  in the amelioration of mankind. The two great motors are 
Truth and Love. When all these Forces are combined, and  guided by the Intellect, and regulated by the RULE of Right,  and Justice, and of combined and systematic movement and  effort, the great revolution prepared for by the ages will begin  to march. The POWER of the Deity Himself is in equilibrium  with His WISDOM. Hence the only results are HARMONY.

It is because Force is ill regulated, that revolutions prove fail-  tires. Therefore it is that so often insurrections, coming from  those high mountains that domineer over the moral horizon, 
Justice, Wisdom, Reason, Right, built of the purest snow of  the ideal after a long fall from rock to rock, after having  reflected the sky in their transparency, and been swollen by a  hundred affluents, in the majestic path of triumph, suddenly  lose themselves in quagmires, like a California river in the  sands.

The onward march of the human race requires that the heights  around it should blaze with noble and enduring lessons of  courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history, and form one class of  the guiding lights of man. They are the stars and coruscations  from that great sea of electricity, the Force inherent in the  people. To strive, to brave all risks, to perish, to persevere, to  be true to one's self, to grapple body to body with destiny, to  surprise defeat by the little terror it inspires, now to confront  unrighteous power, now to defy intoxicated triumph—these  are the examples that the nations need and the light that  electrifies them.

There are immense Forces in the great caverns of evil beneath  society; in the hideous degradation, squalor, wretchedness and  destitution, vices and crimes that reek and simmer in the  darkness in that populace below the people, of great cities. 
There disinterestedness vanishes, every one howls, searches,  gropes, and gnaws for himself. Ideas are ignored, and of  progress there is no thought. This populace has two mothers,  both of them stepmothers—Ignorance and Misery. Want is  their only guide—for the appetite alone they crave satisfaction. 
Yet even these may be employed. The lowly sand we trample  upon, cast into the furnace, melted, purified by fire, may  become resplendent crystal.

P-3

[paragraph continues] They have the brute force of the HAMMER,  but their blows help on the great cause, when struck within  the lines traced by the RULE held by wisdom and discretion.

Yet it is this very Force of the people, this Titanic power of  the giants, that builds the fortifications of tyrants, and is  embodied in their armies. Hence the possibility of such  tyrannies as those of which it has been said, that "Rome  smells worse under Vitellius than under Sulla. Under 
Claudius and under Domitian there is a deformity of baseness  corresponding to the ugliness of the tyranny. The foulness of  the slaves is a direct result of the atrocious baseness of the  despot. A miasma exhales from these crouching consciences  that reflect the master; the public authorities are unclean,  hearts are collapsed, consciences shrunken, souls puny. This  is so under Caracalla, it is so under Commodus, it is so under 
Heliogabalus, while from the Roman senate, under Caesar,  there comes only the rank odor peculiar to the eagle's eyrie."

It is the force of the people that sustains all these despotisms,  the basest as well as the best. That force acts through armies;  and these oftener enslave than liberate. Despotism there  applies the RULE. Force is the MACE of steel at the saddle-  bow of the knight or of the bishop in armor. Passive  obedience by force supports thrones and oligarchies, Spanish  kings, and Venetian senates. Might, in an army wielded by  tyranny, is the enormous sum total of utter weakness; and so 
Humanity wages war against Humanity, in despite of 
Humanity. So a people willingly submits to despot-ism, and  its workmen submit to be despised, and its soldiers to be  whipped; therefore it is that battles lost by a nation are often  progress attained. Less glory is more liberty. When the drum  is silent, reason sometimes speaks.

Tyrants use the force of the people to chain and subjugate—  that is, enyoke the people. Then they plough with them as men  do with oxen yoked. Thus the spirit of liberty and innovation  is reduced by bayonets, and principles are struck dumb by  cannon-shot; while the monks mingle with the troopers, and  the Church militant and jubilant, Catholic or Puritan, sings Te 
Deums for victories over rebellion.

The military power, not subordinate to the civil power, again  the HAMMER or MACE of FORCE, independent of the 
RULE, is an armed tyranny, bom full-grown, as Athene  sprang from the brain of Zeus. It spawns a dynasty, and  begins with Caesar to rot into

P-4

[paragraph continues] Vitellius and Commodus. At the present day it  inclines to begin where formerly dynasties ended.

Constantly the people put forth immense strength, only to end  in immense weakness. The force of the people is exhausted in  indefinitely prolonging things long since dead; in governing  mankind by embalming old dead tyrannies of Faith; restoring  dilapidated dogmas; regilding faded, worm-eaten shrines;  whitening and rouging ancient and barren superstitions;  saving society by multiplying parasites; perpetuating  superannuated institutions; enforcing the worship of symbols  as the actual means of salvation; and tying the dead corpse of  the Past, mouth to mouth, with the living Present. Therefore it  is that it is one of the fatalities of Humanity to be condemned  to eternal struggles with phantoms, with superstitions,  bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, the formulas of error, and  the pleas of tyranny. Despotisms, seen in the past, become  respectable, as the mountain, bristling with volcanic rock,  rugged and horrid, seen through the haze of distance is blue  and smooth and beautiful. The sight of a single dungeon of  tyranny is worth more, to dispel illusions, and create a holy  hatred of despotism, and to direct FORCE aright, than the  most eloquent volumes. The French should have preserved  the Bastile as a perpetual lesson; Italy should not destroy the  dungeons of the Inquisition. The Force of the people  maintained the Power that built its gloomy cells, and placed  the living in their granite sepulchres.

The FORCE of the people cannot, by its unrestrained and  fitful action, maintain and continue in action and existence a  free Government once created. That Force must be limited,  restrained, conveyed by distribution into different channels,  and by roundabout courses, to outlets, whence it is to issue as  the law, action, and decision of the State; as the wise old 
Egyptian kings conveyed in different canals, by sub-division,  the swelling waters of the Nile, and compelled them to  fertilize and not devastate the land. There must be the jus et  norma, the law and Rule, or Gauge, of constitution and law,  within which the public force must act. Make a breach in  either, and the great steam-hammer, with its swift and  ponderous blows, crushes all the machinery to atoms, and, at  last, wrenching itself away, lies inert and dead amid the ruin it  has wrought.

The FORCE of the people, or the popular will, in action and  p.5  exerted, symbolized by the GAVEL, regulated and guided by  and acting within the limits of LAW and ORDER, symbolized  by the TWENTY-FOUR-INCH RULE, has for its fiuit 
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY,-liberty  regulated by law; equality of rights in the eye of the law;  brotherhood with its duties and obligations as well as its  benefits.

You will hear shortly of the Rough ASHLAR and the Perfect 
ASHLAR, as part of the jewels of the Lodge. The rough 
Ashlar is said to be "a stone, as taken from the quarry, in its  rude and natural state." The perfect Ashlar is said to be "a  stone made ready by the hands of the workmen, to be adjusted  by the working-tools of the Fellow-Craft." We shall not repeat  the explanations of these symbols given by the York Rite.

You may read them in its printed monitors. They are declared  to allude to the self-improvement of the individual craftsman,- 
-a continuation of the same superficial interpretation.

The rough Ashlar is the PEOPLE, as a mass, rude and  unorganized. The perfect Ashlar, or cubical stone, symbol of  perfection, is the STATE, the rulers deriving their powers  from the con-sent of the governed; the constitution and laws  speaking the will of the people; the government harmonious,  symmetrical, efficient,—its powers properly distributed and  duly adjusted in equilibrium.

If we delineate a cube on a plane surface thus:  we have visible three faces, and nine external lines, drawn  between seven points. The complete cube has three more  faces, making six; three more lines, making twelve; and one  more point, making eight. As the number 12 includes the  sacred numbers, 3, 5, 7, and 3 times 3, or 9, and is produced  by adding the sacred number 3 to 9; while its own two  figures, 1, 2, the unit or monad, and duad, added together,  make the same sacred number 3; it was called the perfect  number; and the cube became the symbol of perfection.

Produced by FORCE, acting by RULE; hammered in  accordance  p. 6  with lines measured by the Gauge, out of the rough Ashlar, it  is an appropriate symbol of the Force of the people, expressed  as the constitution and law of the State; and of the State itself  the three visible faces represent the three departments,—the 
Executive, which executes the laws; the Legislative, which  makes the laws; the Judiciary, which interprets the laws,  applies and enforces them, between man and man, between  the State and the citizens. The three invisible faces, are 
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,—the threefold soul of the 
State—its vitality, spirit, and intellect.

Though Masonry neither usurps the place of, nor apes  religion, prayer is an essential part of our ceremonies. It is the  aspiration of the soul toward the Absolute and Infinite 
Intelligence, which is the One Supreme Deity, most feebly  and misunderstandingly characterized as an "ARCHITECT." 
Certain faculties of man are directed toward the Unknown—  thought, meditation, prayer. The unknown is an ocean, of  which conscience is the compass. Thought, meditation,  prayer, are the great mysterious pointings of the needle. It is a  spiritual magnetism that thus connects the human soul with  the Deity. These majestic irradiations of the soul pierce  through the shadow toward the light.

It is but a shallow scoff to say that prayer is absurd, because it  is not possible for us, by means of it, to persuade God to  change His plans. He produces foreknown and foreintended  effects, by the instrumentality of the forces of nature, all of  which are His forces. Our own are part of these. Our free  agency and our will are forces. We do not absurdly cease to  make efforts to attain wealth or happiness, prolong life, and  continue health, because we cannot by any effort change what  is predestined. If the effort also is predestined, it is not the less  our effort, made of our free will. So, likewise, we pray. Will  is a force. Thought is a force. Prayer is a force. Why should it  not be of the law of God, that prayer, like Faith and Love,  should have its effects? Man is not to be comprehended as a  starting-point, or progress as a goal, without those two great  forces, Faith and Love. Prayer is sublime. Orisons that beg  and clamor are pitiful. To deny the efficacy of prayer, is to  deny that of Faith, Love, and Effort. Yet the effects produced,  when our hand, moved by our will, launches a pebble into the  ocean, never cease; and every uttered word is registered for  eternity upon the invisible air.

Every Lodge is a Temple, and as a whole, and in its details  symbolic. The Universe itself supplied man with the model  for the first temples reared to the Divinity. The arrangement  of the Temple of Solomon, the symbolic ornaments which  formed its chief decorations, and the dress of the High-Priest,  all had reference to the order of the Universe, as then  understood. The Temple contained many emblems of the  seasons—the sun, the moon, the planets, the constellations 
Ursa Major and Minor, the zodiac, the elements, and the other  parts of the world. It is the Master of this Lodge, of the 
Universe, Hermes, of whom Khurum is the representative,  that is one of the lights of the Lodge.

For further instruction as to the symbolism of the heavenly  bodies, and of the sacred numbers, and of the temple and its  details, you must wait patiently until you advance in Masonry,  in the mean time exercising your intellect in studying them for  yourself. To study and seek to interpret correctly the symbols  of the Universe, is the work of the sage and philosopher. It is  to de-cipher the writing of God, and penetrate into His  thoughts.

This is what is asked and answered in our catechism, in regard  to the Lodge.

A "Lodge" is defined to be "an assemblage of Freemasons,  duly congregated, having the sacred writings, square, and  compass, and a charter, or warrant of constitution, authorizing  them to work." The room or place in which they meet,  representing some part of King Solomon's Temple, is also  called the Lodge; and it is that we are now considering.

It is said to be supported by three great columns, WISDOM, 
FORCE or STRENGTH, and BEAUTY, represented by the 
Master, the Senior Warden, and the Junior Warden; and these  are said to be the columns that support the Lodge, "because 
Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty, are the perfections of  everything, and nothing can endure without them." "Because,"  the York Rite says, "it is necessary that there should be 
Wisdom to conceive, Strength to support, and Beauty to  adorn, all great and important undertakings." "Know ye not,"  says the Apostle Paul, "that ye are the temple of God, and that  the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man desecrate the  temple of God, him shall God destroy, for the temple of God  is holy, which temple ye are."

The Wisdom and Power of the Deity are in equilibrium. The  p. 8  laws of nature and the moral laws are not the mere despotic  man-dates of His Omnipotent will; for, then they might be  changed by Him, and order become disorder, and good and  right become evil and wrong; honesty and loyalty, vices; and  fraud, ingratitude, and vice, virtues. Omnipotent power,  infinite, and existing alone, would necessarily not be  constrained to consistency. Its decrees and laws could not be  immutable. The laws of God are not obligatory on us because  they are the enactments of His POWER, or the expression of 
His WILL; but because they express His infinite WISDOM. 
They are not right because they are His laws, but His laws  because they are right. From the equilibrium of infinite  wisdom and infinite force, results perfect harmony, in physics  and in the moral universe. Wisdom, Power, and Harmony  constitute one Masonic triad. They have other and profounder  meanings, that may at some time be unveiled to you.

As to the ordinary and commonplace explanation, it may be  added, that the wisdom of the Architect is displayed in  combining, as only a skillful Architect can do, and as God has  done everywhere,—for example, in the tree, the human frame,  the egg, the cells of the honeycomb-strength, with grace,  beauty, symmetry, proportion, lightness, ornamentation. That,  too, is the perfection of the orator and poet—to combine force,  strength, energy, with grace of style, musical cadences, the  beauty of figures, the play and irradiation of imagination and  fancy; and so, in a State, the warlike and industrial force of  the people, and their Titanic strength, must be combined with  the beauty of the arts, the sciences, and the intellect, if the 
State would scale the heights of excellence, and the people be  really free. Harmony in this, as in all the Divine, the material,  and the human, is the result of equilibrium, of the sympathy  and opposite action of contraries; a single Wisdom above  them holding the beam of the scales. To reconcile the moral  law, human responsibility, free-will, with the absolute power  of God; and the existence of evil with His absolute wisdom,  and goodness, and mercy,—these are the great enigmas of the 
Sphynx.

You entered the Lodge between two columns. They represent  the two which stood in the porch of the Temple, on each side  of the great eastern gateway. These pillars, of bronze, four  fingers breadth in thickness, were, according to the most  authentic

P-9  account—that in the First and that in the Second Book of 
Kings, confirmed in Jeremiah—eighteen cubits high, with a  capital five cubits high. The shaft of each was four cubits in  diameter. A cubit is one foot and 707/1000. That is, the shaft  of each was a little over thirty feet eight inches in height, the  capital of each a little over eight feet six inches in height, and  the diameter of the shaft six feet ten inches. The capitals were  enriched by pomegranates of bronze, covered by bronze net¬  work, and ornamented with wreaths of bronze; and appear to  have imitated the shape of the seed-vessel of the lotus or 
Egyptian lily, a sacred symbol to the Hindus and Egyptians. 
The pillar or column on the right, or in the south, was named,  as the Hebrew word is rendered in our translation of the Bible, 
JACHIN: and that on the left BOAZ. Our translators say that  the first word means, "He shall establish and the second, "in  it is strength."

These columns were imitations, by Khurum, the Tyrian artist,  of the great columns consecrated to the Winds and Fire, at the  entrance to the famous Temple of Malkarth, in the city of 
Tyre. It is customary, in Lodges of the York Rite, to see a  celestial globe on one, and a terrestrial globe on the other; but  these are not warranted, if the object be to imitate the original  two columns of the Temple. The symbolic meaning of these  columns we shall leave for the present unexplained, only  adding that Entered Apprentices keep their working-tools in  the column JACHIN; and giving you the etymology and  literal meaning of the two names.

The word Jachin, in Hebrew, is I’D 1 , It was probably  pronounced Ya-kciycin, and meant, as a verbal noun, He that  strengthens; and thence, firm, stable, upright.

The word Boaz is Tin, Baaz. TS? means Strong, Strength,

Power, Might, Refuge, Source of Strength, a Fort. The 3  prefixed means "with" or "in" and gives the word the force of  the Latin gerund, roborando—Strengthening.

The former word also means he will establish, or plant in an  erect position —from the verb pa, Kiln, he stood erect. It  probably meant Active and Vivifying Energy’ and Force ; and 
Boaz, Stability, Permanence, in the passive sense.

The Dimensions of the Lodge, our Brethren of the York Rite  say, "are unlimited, and its covering no less than the canopy  of Heaven." "To this object," they say, "the mason's mind is  continually  p. 10  directed, and thither he hopes at last to arrive by the aid of the  theological ladder which Jacob in his vision saw ascending  from earth to Heaven; the three principal rounds of which are  denominated Faith, Hope, and Charity; and which admonish  us to have Faith in God, Hope in Immortality, and Charity to  all mankind." Accordingly a ladder, sometimes with nine  rounds, is seen on the chart, resting at the bottom on the earth,  its top in the clouds, the stars shining above it; and this is  deemed to represent that mystic ladder, which Jacob saw in  his dream, set up on the earth, and the top of it reaching to 
Heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending on  it. The addition of the three principal rounds to the  symbolism, is wholly modem and incongmous.

The ancients counted seven planets, thus arranged: the Moon, 
Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There  were seven heavens and seven spheres of these planets; on all  the monuments of Mithras are seven altars or pyres,  consecrated to the seven planets, as were the seven lamps of  the golden candelabrum in the Temple. That these represented  the planets, we are assured by Clemens of Alexandria, in his 
Stromata, and by Philo Judaeus.

To return to its source in the Infinite, the human soul, the  ancients held, had to ascend, as it had descended, through the  seven spheres. The Ladder by which it reascends, has,  according to Marsilius Ficinus, in his Commentary on the 
Ennead of Plotinus, seven degrees or steps; and in the 
Mysteries of Mithras, carried to Rome under the Emperors,  the ladder, with its seven rounds, was a symbol referring to  this ascent through the spheres of the seven planets. Jacob  saw the Spirits of God ascending and descending on it; and  above it the Deity Himself. The Mithraic Mysteries were  celebrated in caves, where gates were marked at the four  equinoctial and solstitial points of the zodiac; and the seven  planetary spheres were represented, which souls needs must  traverse in descending from the heaven of the fixed stars to  the elements that envelop the earth; and seven gates were  marked, one for each planet, through which they pass, in  descending or returning.

We learn this from Celsus, in Origen, who says that the  symbolic image of this passage among the stars, used in the 
Mithraic Mysteries, was a ladder reaching from earth to 
Heaven, divided

P . 11  into seven steps or stages, to each of which was a gate, and at  the summit an eighth one, that of the fixed stars. The symbol  was the same as that of the seven stages of Borsippa, the 
Pyramid of vitrified brick, near Babylon, built of seven stages,  and each of a different color. In the Mithraic ceremonies, the  candidate went through seven stages of initiation, passing  through many fearful trials—and of these the high ladder with  seven rounds or steps was the symbol.

You see the Lodge, its details and ornaments, by its Lights. 
You have already heard what these Lights, the greater and  lesser, are said to be, and how they are spoken of by our 
Brethren of the York Rite.

The Holy Bible, Square, and Compasses, are not only styled  the Great Lights in Masonry, but they are also technically  called the Furniture of the Lodge; and, as you have seen, it is  held that there is no Lodge without them. This has sometimes  been made a pretext for excluding Jews from our Lodges,  because they cannot regard the New Testament as a holy  book. The Bible is an indispensable part of the furniture of a 
Christian Lodge, only because it is the sacred book of the 
Christian religion. The Hebrew Pentateuch in a Hebrew 
Lodge, and the Koran in a Mohammedan one, belong on the 
Altar; and one of these, and the Square and Compass,  properly understood, are the Great Lights by which a Mason  must walk and work.

The obligation of the candidate is always to be taken on the  sacred book or books of his religion, that he may deem it  more solemn and binding; and therefore it was that you were  asked of what religion you were. We have no other concern  with your religious creed.

The Square is a right angle, formed by two right lines. It is  adapted only to a plane surface, and belongs only to  geometry, earth-measurement, that trigonometry which deals  only with planes, and with the earth, which the ancients  supposed to be a plane. The Compass describes circles, and  deals with spherical trigonometry, the science of the spheres  and heavens. The fonner, therefore, is an emblem of what  concerns the earth and the body; the latter of what concerns  the heavens and the soul. Yet the Compass is also used in  plane trigonometry, as in erecting perpendiculars; and,  therefore, you are reminded that, although in this Degree both  points of the Compass are under the Square, and  p. 12  you are now dealing only with the moral and political  meaning of the symbols, and not with their philosophical and  spiritual meanings, still the divine ever mingles with the  human; with the earthly the spiritual intermixes; and there is  something spiritual in the commonest duties of life. The  nations are not bodies-politic alone, but also souls-politic; and  woe to that people which, seeking the material only, forgets  that it has a soul. Then we have a race, petrified in dogma,  which presupposes the absence of a soul and the presence  only of memory and instinct, or demoralized by lucre. Such a  nature can never lead civilization. Genuflexion before the idol  or the dollar atrophies the muscle which walks and the will  which moves. Hieratic or mercantile absorption diminishes  the radiance of a people, lowers its horizon by lowering its  level, and deprives it of that understanding of the universal  aim, at the same time human and divine, which makes the  missionary nations. A free people, forgetting that it has a soul  to be cared for, devotes all its energies to its material  advancement. If it makes war, it is to subserve its commercial  interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth,  pomp, and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation  creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly. Thence the  two extremes, of monstrous opulence and monstrous misery;  all the enjoyment to a few, all the privations to the rest, that is  to say, to the people; Privilege, Exception, Monopoly, 
Feudality, springing up from Labor itself: a false and  dangerous situation, which, making Labor a blinded and  chained Cyclops, in the mine, at the forge, in the workshop, at  the loom, in the field, over poisonous fumes, in miasmatic  cells, in unventilated factories, founds public power upon  private misery, and plants the greatness of the State in the  suffering of the individual. It is a greatness ill constituted, in  which all the material elements are combined, and into which  no moral element enters. If a people, like a star, has the right  of eclipse, the light ought to return. The eclipse should not  degenerate into night.

The three lesser, or the Sublime Lights, you have heard, are  the Sun, the Moon, and the Master of the Lodge; and you  have heard what our Brethren of the York Rite say in regard  to them, and why they hold them to be Lights of the Lodge. 
But the Sun and Moon do in no sense light the Lodge, unless  it be symbolically, and then the lights are not they, but those  things of which they are the symbols. Of what they are the  symbols the Mason in that  p. 13

[paragraph continues] Rite is not told. Nor does the Moon in any  sense rale the night with regularity.

The Sun is the ancient symbol of the life-giving and  generative power of the Deity. To the ancients, light was the  cause of life; and God was the source from which all light  flowed; the essence of Light, the Invisible Fire, developed as  flame manifested as light and splendor. The Sun was His  manifestation and visible image; and the Sabasans  worshipping the Light-God, seemed to worship the Sun, in  whom they saw the manifestation of the Deity.

The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to  produce, the female, of which the life-giving power and  energy was the male. It was the symbol of Isis, Astarte, and 
Artemis, or Diana. The "Master of Life" was the Supreme 
Deity, above both, and manifested through both; Zeus, the 
Son of Saturn, become King of the Gods; Homs, son of Osiris  and Isis, become the Master of Life; Dionusos or Bacchus,  like Mithras, become the author of Light and Life and Truth.

The Master of Light and Life, the Sun and the Moon, are  symbolized in every Lodge by the Master and Wardens: and  this makes it the duty of the Master to dispense light to the 
Brethren, by himself, and through the Wardens, who are his  ministers.

"Thy sun," says ISAIAH to Jerusalem, "shall no more go  down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself; for the LORD  shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning  shall be ended. Thy people also shall be all righteous; they  shall inherit the land forever." Such is the type of a free  people.

Our northern ancestors worshipped this tri-une Deity; ODIN,  the Almighty FATHER; FREA, his wife, emblem of universal  matter; and THOR, his son, the mediator. But above all these  was the Supreme God, "the author of everything that existeth,  the Eternal, the Ancient, the Living and Awful Being, the 
Searcher into concealed things, the Being that never  changeth." In the Temple of Eleusis (a sanctuary lighted only  by a window in the roof, and representing the Universe), the  images of the Sun, Moon, and Mercury, were represented.

"The Sun and Moon," says the learned Bro DELAUNAY, 
"represent the two grand principles of all generations, the  active and passive, the male and the female. The Sun  represents the  p. 14  actual light. He pours upon the Moon his fecundating rays;  both shed their light upon their offspring, the Blazing Star, or 
HORUS, and the three form the great Equilateral Triangle, in  the centre of which is the omnific letter of the Kabalah, by  which creation is said to have been effected."

The ORNAMENTS of a Lodge are said to be "the Mosaic

Pavement, the Indented Tessel, and the Blazing Star." The 
Mosaic Pavement, chequered in squares or lozenges, is said to  represent the ground-floor of King Solomon's Temple; and  the Indented Tessel "that beautiful tesselated border which  surrounded it." The Blazing Star in the centre is said to be "an  emblem of Divine Providence, and commemorative of the star  which appeared to guide the wise men of the East to the place  of our Saviour's nativity." But "there was no stone seen"  within the Temple. The walls were covered with planks of  cedar, and the floor was covered with planks of fir. There is  no evidence that there was such a pavement or floor in the 
Temple, or such a bordering. In England, anciently, the 
Tracing-Board was surrounded with an indented border; and it  is only in America that such a border is put around the Mosaic  pavement. The tesserae, indeed, are the squares or lozenges of  the pavement. In England, also, "the indented or denticulated  border" is called "tesselated," because it has four "tassels,"  said to represent Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, and 
Justice. It was termed the Indented Trassel; but this is a  misuse of words. It is a tesserated pavement, with an indented  border round it.

The pavement, alternately black and white, symbolizes,  whether so intended or not, the Good and Evil Principles of  the Egyptian and Persian creed. It is the warfare of Michael  and Satan, of the Gods and Titans, of Balder and Lok;  between light and shadow, which is darkness; Day and Night; 
Freedom and Despotism; Religious Liberty and the Arbitrary 
Dogmas of a Church that thinks for its votaries, and whose

Pontiff claims to be infallible, and the decretals of its 
Councils to constitute a gospel.

The edges of this pavement, if in lozenges, will necessarily be  indented or denticulated, toothed like a saw; and to complete  and finish it a bordering is necessary. It is completed by  tassels as ornaments at the comers. If these and the bordering  have any symbolic meaning, it is fanciftil and arbitrary.

To find in the BLAZING STAR of five points an allusion to  the  p. 15

[paragraph continues] Divine Providence, is also fanciful; and to  make it commemorative of the Star that is said to have guided  the Magi, is to give it a meaning comparatively modem. 
Originally it represented SIRIUS, or the Dog-star, the  forerunner of the inundation of the Nile; the God ANUBIS,  companion of Isis in her search for the body of OSIRIS, her  brother and husband. Then it became the image of HORUS,  the son of OSIRIS, himself symbolized also by the Sun, the  author of the Seasons, and the God of Time; Son of Isis, who  was the universal nature, himself the primitive matter,  inexhaustible source of Life, spark of uncreated fire, universal  seed of all beings. It was HERMES, also, the Master of 
Learning, whose name in Greek is that of the God Mercury. It  became the sacred and potent sign or character of the Magi,  the PENTALPHA, and is the significant emblem of Liberty  and Freedom, blazing with a steady radiance amid the  weltering elements of good and evil of Revolutions, and  promising serene skies and fertile seasons to the nations, after  the storms of change and tumult.

In the East of the Lodge, over the Master, inclosed in a  triangle, is the Hebrew letter YOD [’ or ]. In the English  and American Lodges the Letter G is substituted for this, as  the initial of the word GOD, with as little reason as if the  letter D., initial of DIEU, were used in Erench Lodges instead  of the proper letter. YOD is, in the Kabalah, the symbol of 
Unity, of the Supreme Deity, the first letter of the Holy Name;  and also a symbol of the Great Kabalistic Triads. To  understand its mystic meanings, you must open the pages of  the Sohar and Siphra de Zeniutha, and other kabalistic books,  and ponder deeply on their meaning. It must suffice to say,  that it is the Creative Energy of the Deity, is represented as a  point, and that point in the centre of the Circle of immensity.

It is to us in this Degree, the symbol of that unmanifested 
Deity, the Absolute, who has no name.

Our French Brethren place this letter YOD in the centre of the 
Blazing Star. And in the old Lectures, our ancient English 
Brethren said, "The Blazing Star or Glory in the centre refers  us to that grand luminary, the Sun, which enlightens the earth,  and by its genial influence dispenses blessings to mankind." 
They called it also in the same lectures, an emblem of 
PRUDENCE. The word Prudentia means, in its original and  fullest signification, Foresight ; and, accordingly, the Blazing 
Star has been regarded as an emblem of Omniscience, or the

All-seeing Eye, which to the  p. 16

Egyptian Initiates was the emblem of Osiris, the Creator. 
With the YOD in the centre, it has the kabalistic meaning of  the Divine Energy, manifested as Light, creating the 
Universe.

The Jewels of the Lodge are said to be six in number. Three  are called "Movable," and three " Immovable ." The SQUARE,  the LEVEL, and the PLUMB were anciently and properly  called the Movable Jewels, because they pass from one 
Brother to another. It is a modem innovation to call them  immovable, because they must always be present in the 
Lodge. The immovable jewels are the ROUGH ASHLAR, the 
PERFECT ASHLAR or CUBICAL STONE, or, in some 
Rituals, the DOUBLE CUBE, and the TRACING-BOARD,  or TRESTLE-BOARD.

Of these jewels our Brethren of the York Rite say: "The 
Square inculcates Morality; the Level, Equality; and the 
Plumb, Rectitude of Conduct." Their explanation of the  immovable Jewels may be read in their monitors.

Our Brethren of the York Rite say that "there is represented in  every well-governed Lodge, a certain point, within a circle;  the point representing an individual Brother; the Circle, the  boundary line of his conduct, beyond which he is never to  suffer his prejudices or passions to betray him."

This is not to interpret the symbols of Masonry. It is said by  some, with a nearer approach to interpretation, that the point  within the circle represents God in the centre of the Universe. 
It is a common Egyptian sign for the Sun and Osiris, and is  still used as the astronomical sign of the great luminary. In the 
Kabalah the point is YOD, the Creative Energy of God,  irradiating with light the circular space which God, the  universal Light, left vacant, wherein to create the worlds, by  withdrawing His substance of Light back on all sides from  one point.

Our Brethren add that, "this circle is embordered by two  perpendicular parallel lines, representing Saint John the 
Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, and upon the top rest  the Holy Scriptures" (an open book). "In going round this  circle," they say, "we necessarily touch upon these two lines  as well as upon the Holy Scriptures; and while a Mason keeps  himself circumscribed within their precepts, it is impossible  that he should materially err."  p. 17

It would be a waste of time to comment upon this. Some  writers have imagined that the parallel lines represent the

Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, which the Sun alternately  touches upon at the Summer and Winter solstices. But the  tropics are not perpendicular lines, and the idea is merely  fanciful. If the parallel lines ever belonged to the ancient  symbol, they had some more recondite and more fruitful  meaning. They probably had the same meaning as the twin  columns Jachin and Boaz. That meaning is not for the 
Apprentice. The adept may find it in the Kabalah. The 
JUSTICE and MERCY of God are in equilibrium, and the  result is HARMONY, because a Single and Perfect Wisdom  presides over both.

The Holy Scriptures are an entirely modem addition to the  symbol, like the terrestrial and celestial globes on the columns  of the portico. Thus the ancient symbol has been  denaturalized by incongruous additions, like that of Isis  weeping over the broken column containing the remains of 
Osiris at Byblos.

Masonry has its decalogue, which is a law to its Initiates. 
These are its Ten Commandments:

I. ®.'. God is the Eternal, Omnipotent, Immutable 
WISDOM and Supreme INTELLIGENCE and 
Exhaustless LOVE.

Thou shalt adore, revere, and love Him!

Thou shalt honor Him by practising the virtues!

II. o Thy religion shall be, to do good because it is a  pleasure to thee, and not merely because it is a duty. 
That thou mayest become the friend of the wise man,  thou shalt obey his precepts!

Thy soul is immortal! Thou shalt do nothing to  degrade it!

III. Thou shalt unceasingly war against vice!

Thou shalt not do unto others that which thou wouldst  not wish them to do unto thee!

Thou shalt be submissive to thy fortunes, and keep  burning the light of wisdom!

IV. o .'. Thou shalt honor thy parents!

Thou shalt pay respect and homage to the aged!

Thou shalt instruct the young!

Thou shalt protect and defend infancy and innocence!

V. ®-'- Thou shalt cherish thy wife and thy children! 
Thou shalt love thy country, and obey its laws! P . is

VI. o.'. Thy friend shall be to thee a second self! 
Misfortune shall not estrange thee from him!

Thou shalt do for his memory whatever thou wouldst  do for him, if he were living!

VII. Thou shalt avoid and flee from insincere  friendships!

Thou shalt in everything refrain from excess.

Thou shalt fear to be the cause of a stain on thy  memory!

VIII. oThou shalt allow no passions to become thy  master!

Thou shalt make the passions of others profitable  lessons to thyself!

Thou shalt be indulgent to error!

IX. ® Thou shalt hear much: Thou shalt speak little: 
Thou shalt act well!

Thou shalt forget injuries!

Thou shalt render good for evil!

Thou shalt not misuse either thy strength or thy  superiority!

X. oThou shalt study to know men; that thereby thou  mayest learn to know thyself!

Thou shalt ever seek after virtue!

Thou shalt be just!

Thou shalt avoid idleness!

But the great commandment of Masonry is this: "A new  commandment give I unto you: that ye love one another! He  that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, remaineth  still in the darkness."

Such are the moral duties of a Mason. But it is also the duty  of Masonry to assist in elevating the moral and intellectual  level of society; in coining knowledge, bringing ideas into  circulation, and causing the mind of youth to grow; and in  putting, gradually, by the teachings of axioms and the  promulgation of positive laws, the human race in harmony  with its destinies.

To this duty and work the Initiate is apprenticed. He must not  imagine that he can effect nothing, and, therefore, despairing,  become inert. It is in this, as in a man's daily life. Many great  deeds are done in the small struggles of life. There is, we are  told, a determined though unseen bravery, which defends  itself, foot to foot, in the darkness, against the fatal invasion  of necessity and of baseness. There are noble and mysterious  triumphs, which no eye sees, which no renown rewards,  which no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune,  isolation, abandonment, poverty, are  p. 19  battle-fields, which have their heroes,-heroes obscure, but  sometimes greater than those who become illustrious. The 
Mason should struggle in the same manner, and with the same  bravery, against those invasions of necessity and baseness,  which come to nations as well as to men. He should meet  them, too, foot to foot, even in the darkness, and protest  against the national wrongs and follies; against usurpation and  the first inroads of that hydra, Tyranny. There is no more  sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation. It is more  difficult for a people to keep than to gain their freedom. The 
Protests of Truth are always needed. Continually, the right  must protest against the fact. There is, in fact, Eternity in the 
Right. The Mason should be the Priest and Soldier of that 
Right. If his country should be robbed of her liberties, he  should still not despair. The protest of the Right against the 
Fact persists forever. The robbery of a people never becomes  prescriptive. Reclamation of its rights is barred by no length  of time. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be

Teutonic. A people may endure military usurpation, and  subjugated States kneel to States and wear the yoke, while  under the stress of necessity; but when the necessity  disappears, if the people is fit to be free, the submerged  country will float to the surface and reappear, and Tyranny be  adjudged by History to have murdered its victims.

Whatever occurs, we should have Faith in the Justice and  over-ruling Wisdom of God, and Hope for the Future, and 
Loving-kindness for those who are in error. God makes  visible to men His will in events; an obscure text, written in a  mysterious language. Men make their translations of it  forthwith, hasty, incorrect, full of faults, omissions, and  misreadings. We see so short a way along the arc of the great  circle! Few minds comprehend the Divine tongue. The most  sagacious, the most calm, the most profound, decipher the  hieroglyphs slowly; and when they arrive with their text,  perhaps the need has long gone by; there are already twenty  translations in the public square—the most incorrect being, as  of course, the most accepted and popular. From each  translation, a party is bom; and from each misreading, a  faction. Each party believes or pretends that it has the only  true text, and each faction believes or pretends that it alone  possesses the light. Moreover, factions are blind men, who  aim straight, errors are excellent projectiles, striking skillfully,  and with all the violence that springs from false reasoning,  wherever a want of  logic in those who defend the right, like a defect in a cuirass,  makes them vulnerable.

Therefore it is that we shall often be discomfited in combating  error before the people. Antaeus long resisted Hercules; and  the heads of the Hydra grew as fast as they were cut off. It is  absurd to say that Error, wounded, writhes in pain, and dies  amid her worshippers. Truth conquers slowly. There is a  wondrous vitality in Error. Truth, indeed, for the most part,  shoots over the heads of the masses; or if an error is prostrated  for a moment, it is up again in a moment, and as vigorous as  ever. It will not die when the brains are out, and the most  stupid and irrational errors are the longest-lived.

Nevertheless, Masonry, which is Morality and Philosophy,  must not cease to do its duty. We never know at what moment  success awaits our efforts—generally when most unexpected—  nor with what effect our efforts are or are not to be attended. 
Succeed or fail, Masonry must not bow to error, or succumb  under discouragement. There were at Rome a few 
Carthaginian soldiers, taken prisoners, who refused to bow to 
Flaminius, and had a little of Hannibal's magnanimity.

Masons should possess an equal greatness of soul. Masonry  should be an energy; finding its aim and effect in the  amelioration of mankind. Socrates should enter into Adam,  and produce Marcus Aurelius, in other words, bring forth  from the man of enjoyments, the man of wisdom. Masonry  should not be a mere watch-tower, built upon mystery, from  which to gaze at ease upon the world, with no other result  than to be a convenience for the curious. To hold the full cup  of thought to the thirsty lips of men; to give to all the true  ideas of Deity; to harmonize conscience and science, are the  province of Philosophy. Morality is Faith in full bloom. 
Contemplation should lead to action, and the absolute be  practical; the ideal be made air and food and drink to the  human mind. Wisdom is a sacred communion. It is only on  that condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of Science, and  becomes the one and supreme method by which to unite 
Humanity and arouse it to concerted action. Then Philosophy  becomes Religion.

And Masonry, like History and Philosophy, has eternal duties- 
-etemal, and, at the same time, simple—to oppose Caiaphas as 
Bishop, Draco or Jefferies as Judge, Trimalcion as Legislator,  and Tiberius as Emperor. These are the symbols of the  tyranny that

P- 21  degrades and crushes, and the corruption that defiles and  infests, in the works published for the use of the Craft we are  told that the three great tenets of a Mason's profession, are 
Brotherly Love, Relief, and Tiuth. And it is true that a 
Brotherly affection and kindness should govern us in all our  intercourse and relations with our brethren; and a generous  and liberal philanthropy actuate us in regard to all men. To  relieve the distressed is peculiarly the duty of Masons—a  sacred duty, not to be omitted, neglected, or coldly or  inefficiently complied with. It is also most true, that Truth is a

Divine attribute and the foundation of every virtue. To be  true, and to seek to find and learn the Truth, are the great  objects of every good Mason.

As the Ancients did, Masonry styles Temperance, Fortitude, 
Prudence, and Justice, the four cardinal virtues. They are as  necessary to nations as to individuals. The people that would  be Free and Independent, must possess Sagacity, Forethought, 
Fore-sight, and careful Circumspection, all which are  included in the meaning of the word Prudence. It must be  temperate in asserting its rights, temperate in its councils,  economical in its expenses; it must be bold, brave,  courageous, patient under reverses, undismayed by disasters,  hopelul amid calamities, like Rome when she sold the field at  which Hannibal had his camp. No Can me or Pharsalia or 
Pavia or Agincourt or Waterloo must discourage her. Let her 
Senate sit in their seats until the Gauls pluck them by the  beard. She must, above all things, be just, not truckling to the  strong and warring on or plundering the weak; she must act  on the square with all nations, and the feeblest tribes; always  keeping her faith, honest in her legislation, upright in all her  dealings. Whenever such a Republic exists, it will be  immortal: for rashness, injustice, intemperance and luxury in  prosperity, and despair and disorder in adversity, are the  causes of the decay and dilapidation of nations.

II.

THE FELLOW-CRAFT.

IN the Ancient Orient, all religion was more or less a mystery  and there was no divorce from it of philosophy. The popular  theology, taking the multitude of allegories and symbols for  realities, degenerated into a worship of the celestial  luminaries, of imaginary Deities with human feelings,  passions, appetites, and lusts, of idols, stones, animals,  reptiles. The Onion was sacred to the Egyptians, because its  different layers were a symbol of the concentric heavenly  spheres. Of course the popular religion could not satisfy the  deeper longings and thoughts, the loftier aspirations of the 
Spirit, or the logic of reason. The first, therefore, was taught  to the initiated in the Mysteries. There, also, it was taught by  symbols. The vagueness of symbolism, capable of many  interpretations, reached what the palpable and conventional  creed could not. Its indefiniteness acknowledged the  abstruseness of the subject: it treated that mysterious subject  mystically: it endeavored to illustrate what it could not  explain; to excite an appropriate feeling, if it could not  develop an adequate idea', and to make the image a mere  subordinate conveyance for the conception, which itself never  became obvious or familiar.

Thus the knowledge now imparted by books and letters, was  of old conveyed by symbols; and the priests invented or  perpetuated a display of rites and exhibitions, which were not  only more attractive to the eye than words, but often more  suggestive and more pregnant with meaning to the mind.

Masonry, successor of the Mysteries, still follows the ancient  manner of teaching. Her ceremonies are like the ancient  mystic shows,-not the reading of an essay, but the opening of  a problem, requiring research, and constituting philosophy the  arch-expounder. Her symbols are the instruction she gives. 
The lectures are endeavors, often partial and one-sided, to  interpret these symbols. He who would become an  accomplished Mason must not be content merely to hear, or  even to understand, the lectures; he  p. 23  must, aided by them, and they having, as it were, marked out  the way for him, study, interpret, and develop these symbols  for himself.

Though Masonry is identical with the ancient Mysteries, it is  so only in this qualified sense: that it presents but an  imperfect image of their brilliancy, the mins only of their  grandeur, and a system that has experienced progressive  alterations, the fruits of social events, political circumstances,  and the ambitious imbecility of its improvers. After leaving 
Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by the habits of the  different nations among whom they were introduced, and  especially by the religious systems of the countries into which  they were transplanted. To maintain the established  government, laws, and religion, was the obligation of the 
Initiate everywhere; and everywhere they were the heritage of  the priests, who were nowhere willing to make the common  people co-proprietors with themselves of philosophical truth.

Masonry is not the Coliseum in ruins. It is rather a Roman  palace of the middle ages, disfigured by modem architectural  improvements, yet built on a Cyclop lean foundation laid by  the Etruscans, and with many a stone of the superstmcture  taken from dwellings and temples of the age of Hadrian and 
Antoninus.

Christianity taught the doctrine of FRATERNITY; but  repudiated that of political EQUALITY, by continually  inculcating obedience to Caesar, and to those lawftilly in  authority. Masonry was the first apostle of EQUALITY. In  the Monastery there is fraternity and equality, but no liberty. 
Masonry added that also, and claimed for man the three-fold  heritage, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY.

It was but a development of the original purpose of the 
Mysteries, which was to teach men to know and practice their  duties to themselves and their fellows, the great practical end  of all philosophy and all knowledge.

Truths are the springs from which duties flow; and it is but a  few hundred years since a new Truth began to be distinctly  seen; that MAN IS SUPREME OVER INSTITUTIONS,

AND NOT THEY OVER HIM. Man has natural empire over  all institutions. They are for him, according to his  development; not he for them. This seems to us a very simple  statement, one to which all men, everywhere, ought to assent. 
But once it was a great new Truth,—not  p. 24  revealed until governments had been in existence for at least  five thousand years. Once revealed, it imposed new duties on  men. Man owed it to himself to be free. He owed it to his  country to seek to give her freedom, or maintain her in that  possession. It made Tyranny and Usurpation the enemies of  the Human Race. It created a general outlawry of Despots and 
Despotisms, temporal and spiritual. The sphere of Duty was  immensely enlarged. Patriotism had, henceforth, a new and  wider meaning. Free Government, Free Thought, Free 
Conscience, Free Speech! All these came to be inalienable  rights, which those who had parted with them or been robbed  of them, or whose ancestors had lost them, had the right  summarily to retake. Unfortunately, as Truths always become  perverted into falsehoods, and are falsehoods when  misapplied, this Tiuth became the Gospel of Anarchy, soon  after it was first preached.

Masonry early comprehended this Truth, and recognized its  own enlarged duties. Its symbols then came to have a wider  meaning; but it also assumed the mask of Stone-masonry, and  borrowed its working-tools, and so was supplied with new  and apt symbols. It aided in bringing about the French

Revolution, disappeared with the Girondists, was bom again  with the restoration of order, and sustained Napoleon,  because, though Emperor, he acknowledged the right of the  people to select its rulers, and was at the head of a nation  refusing to receive back its old kings. He pleaded, with sabre,  musket, and cannon, the great cause of the People against 
Royalty, the right of the French people even to make a 
Corsican General their Emperor, if it pleased them.

Masonry felt that this Truth had the Omnipotence of God on  its side; and that neither Pope nor Potentate could overcome  it. It was a tmth dropped into the world's wide treasury, and  forming a part of the heritage which each generation receives,  enlarges, and holds in trust, and of necessity bequeaths to  mankind; the personal estate of man, entailed of nature to the  end of time. And Masonry early recognized it as true, that to  set forth and develop a tmth, or any human excellence of gift  or growth, is to make greater the spiritual glory of the race;  that whosoever aids the march of a Tmth, and makes the  thought a thing, writes in the same line with MOSES, and  with Him who died upon the cross, and has an intellectual  sympathy with the Deity Himself.

The best gift we can bestow on man is manhood. It is that  p. 25  which Masonry is ordained of God to bestow on its votaries:  not sectarianism and religious dogma; not a rudimental  morality, that may be found in the writings of Confucius,

Zoroaster, Seneca, and the Rabbis, in the Proverbs and 
Ecclesiastes; not a little and cheap common-school  knowledge; but manhood and science and philosophy.

Not that Philosophy or Science is in opposition to Religion. 
For Philosophy is but that knowledge of God and the Soul,  which is derived from observation of the manifested action of 
God and the Soul, and from a wise analogy. It is the  intellectual guide which the religious sentiment needs. The  true religious philosophy of an imperfect being, is not a  system of creed, but, as SOCRATES thought, an infinite  search or approximation. Philosophy is that intellectual and  moral progress, which the religious sentiment inspires and  ennobles.

As to Science, it could not walk alone, while religion was  stationary. It consists of those matured inferences from  experience which all other experience confirms. It realizes  and unites all that was truly valuable in both the old schemes  of mediation,—one heroic, or the system of action and effort;  and the mystical theory of spiritual, contemplative  communion. "Listen to me," says GALEN, "as to the voice of  the Eleusinian Hierophant, and believe that the study of 
Nature is a mystery no less important than theirs, nor less  adapted to display the wisdom and power of the Great 
Creator. Their lessons and demonstrations were obscure, but  ours are clear and unmistakable."

We deem that to be the best knowledge we can obtain of the

Soul of another man, which is furnished by his actions and his  life-long conduct. Evidence to the contrary, supplied by what  another man informs us that this Soul has said to his, would  weigh little against the former. The first Scriptures for the  human race were written by God on the Earth and Heavens. 
The reading of these Scriptures is Science. Familiarity with  the grass and trees, the insects and the infusoria, teaches us  deeper lessons of love and faith than we can glean from the  writings of FENELON and AUGUSTINE. The great Bible of 
God is ever open before mankind.

Knowledge is convertible into power, and axioms into rules of  utility and duty. But knowledge itself is not Power. Wisdom  is Power; and her Prime Minister is JUSTICE, which is the  perfected law of TRUTH. The purpose, therefore, of 
Education and Science  p. 26  is to make a man wise. If knowledge does not make him so, it  is wasted, like water poured on the sands. To know the  formulas of Masonry, is of as little value, by itself, as to know  so many words and sentences in some barbarous African or 
Australasian dialect. To know even the meaning of the  symbols, is but little, unless that adds to our wisdom, and also  to our charity, which is to justice like one hemisphere of the  brain to the other.

Do not lose sight, then, of the true object of your studies in 
Masonry. It is to add to your estate of wisdom, and not merely  to your knowledge. A man may spend a lifetime in studying a  single specialty of knowledge,-botany, conchology, or  entomology, for instance,—in committing to memory names  derived from the Greek, and classifying and reclassifying; and  yet be no wiser than when he began, ft is the great truths as to  all that most concerns a man, as to his rights, interests, and  duties, that Masonry seeks to teach her Initiates.

The wiser a man becomes, the less will he be inclined to  submit tamely to the imposition of fetters or a yoke, on his  conscience or his person. For, by increase of wisdom he not  only better knows his rights, but the more highly values them,  and is more conscious of his worth and dignity. His pride then  urges him to assert his independence. He becomes better able  to assert it also; and better able to assist others or his country,  when they or she stake all, even existence, upon the same  assertion. But mere knowledge makes no one independent,  nor fits him to be free. It often only makes him a more useful  slave. Liberty is a curse to the ignorant and brutal.

Political science has for its object to ascertain in what manner  and by means of what institutions political and personal  freedom may be secured and perpetuated: not license, or the  mere right of every man to vote, but entire and absolute  freedom of thought and opinion, alike free of the despotism of  monarch and mob and prelate; freedom of action within the  limits of the general law enacted for all; the Courts of Justice,  with impartial Judges and juries, open to all alike; weakness  and poverty equally potent in those Courts as power and  wealth; the avenues to office and honor open alike to all the  worthy; the military powers, in war or peace, in strict  subordination to the civil power; arbitrary arrests for acts not  known to the law as crimes, impossible; Romish Inquisitions, 
Star-Chambers, Military Commissions, unknown; the  p. 27  means of instruction within reach of the children of all; the  right of Free Speech; and accountability of all public officers,  civil and military.

If Masonry needed to be justified for imposing political as  well as moral duties on its Initiates, it would be enough to  point to the sad history of the world. It would not even need  that she should turn back the pages of history to the chapters  written by Tacitus: that she should recite the incredible  horrors of despotism under Caligula and Domitian, Caracalla  and Commodus, Vitellius and Maximin. She need only point  to the centuries of calamity through which the gay French  nation passed; to the long oppression of the feudal ages, of the  selfish Bourbon kings; to those times when the peasants were  robbed and slaughtered by their own lords and princes, like  sheep; when the lord claimed the first-fruits of the peasant's  marriage-bed; when the captured city was given up to  merciless rape and massacre; when the State-prisons groaned  with innocent victims, and the Church blessed the banners of  pitiless murderers, and sang Te Deums for the crowning  mercy of the Eve of St. Bartholomew.

We might turn over the pages, to a later chapter,—that of the  reign of the Fifteenth Louis, when young girls, hardly more  than children, were kidnapped to serve his lusts; when lettres  de cachet filled the Bastile with persons accused of no crime,  with husbands who were in the way of the pleasures of  lascivious wives and of villains wearing orders of nobility;  when the people were ground between the upper and the  nether millstone of taxes, customs, and excises; and when Me 
Pope's Nuncio and the Cardinal de la Roche-Ayman, devoutly  kneeling, one on each side of Madame du Barry, the king's  abandoned prostitute, put the slippers on her naked feet, as  she rose from the adulterous bed. Then, indeed, suffering and  toil were the two forms of man, and the people were but  beasts of burden.

The true Mason is he who labors strenuously to help his Order  effect its great purposes. Not that the Order can effect them by  itself; but that it, too, can help. It also is one of God's  instruments. It is a Force and a Power; and shame upon it, if it  did not exert itself, and, if need be, sacrifice its children in the  cause of humanity, as Abraham was ready to offer up Isaac on  the altar of sacrifice. It will not forget that noble allegory of 
Curtius leaping, all in armor, into the great yawning gulf that  opened to  p. 28  swallow Rome. It will TRY. It shall not be its fault if the day  never comes when man will no longer have to fear a conquest,  an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations with the armed  hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage-  royal, or a birth in the hereditary tyrannies; a partition of the  peoples by a Congress, a dismemberment by the downfall of a  dynasty, a combat of two religions, meeting head to head, like  two goats of darkness on the bridge of the Infinite: When they  will no longer have to fear famine, spoliation, prostitution  from distress, misery from lack of work, and all the  brigandages of chance in the forest of events: when nations  will gravitate about the Truth, like stars about the light, each  in its own orbit, without clashing or collision; and everywhere 
Freedom, cinctured with stars, crowned with the celestial  splendors, and with wisdom and justice on either hand, will  reign supreme.

In your studies as a Fellow-Craft you must be guided by 
REASON, LOVE and FAITH.

We do not now discuss the differences between Reason and 
Faith, and undertake to define the domain of each. But it is  necessary to say, that even in the ordinary affairs of life we  are governed far more by what we believe than by what we  know, by FAITH and ANALOGY, than by REASON. The 
"Age of Reason" of the French Revolution taught, we know,  what a folly it is to enthrone Reason by itself as supreme. 
Reason is at fault when it deals with the Infinite. There we  must revere and believe. Notwithstanding the calamities of  the virtuous, the miseries of the deserving, the prosperity of  tyrants and the murder of martyrs, we must believe there is a  wise, just, merciful, and loving God, an Intelligence and a

Providence, supreme over all, and caring for the minutest  things and events. A Faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him  who believes nothing!

We believe that the soul of another is of a certain nature and  possesses certain qualities, that he is generous and honest, or  penurious and knavish, that she is virtuous and amiable, or  vicious and ill-tempered, from the countenance alone, from  little more than a glimpse of it, without the means of knowing. 
We venture our fortune on the signature of a man on the other  side of the world, whom we never saw, upon the belief that he  is honest and trustworthy. We believe that occurrences have  taken place, upon the assertion of others. We believe that one  will acts upon  p. 29  another, and in the reality of a multitude of other phenomena  that Reason cannot explain.

But we ought not to believe what Reason authoritatively  denies, that at which the sense of right revolts, that which is  absurd or self-contradictory, or at issue with experience or  science, or that which degrades the character of the Deity, and  would make Him revengeful, malignant, cruel, or unjust.

A man's Faith is as much his own as his Reason is. His 
Freedom consists as much in his faith being free as in his will  being uncontrolled by power. All the Priests and Augurs of 
Rome or Greece had not the right to require Cicero or

Socrates to believe in the absurd mythology of the vulgar. All  the Imaums of Mohammedanism have not the right to require  a Pagan to believe that Gabriel dictated the Koran to the 
Prophet. All the Brahmins that ever lived, if assembled in one  conclave like the Cardinals, could not gain a right to compel a  single human being to believe in the Hindu Cosmogony. No  man or body of men can be infallible, and authorized to  decide what other men shall believe, as to any tenet of faith. 
Except to those who first receive it, every religion and the  truth of all inspired writings depend on human testimony and  internal evidences, to be judged of by Reason and the wise  analogies of Faith. Each man must necessarily have the right  to judge of their truth for himself; because no one man can  have any higher or better right to judge than another of equal  information and intelligence.

Domitian claimed to be the Lord God; and statues and images  of him, in silver and gold, were found throughout the known  world. He claimed to be regarded as the God of all men; and,  according to Suetonius, began his letters thus: "Our Lord and 
God commands that it should be done so and so'” and  formally decreed that no one should address him otherwise,  either in writing or by word of mouth. Palfurius Sura, the  philosopher, who was his chief delator, accusing those who  refused to recognize his divinity, however much he may have  believed in that divinity, had not the right to demand that a  single Christian in Rome or the provinces should do the same.

Reason is far from being the only guide, in morals or in  political science. Love or loving-kindness must keep it  company, to exclude fanaticism, intolerance, and persecution,  to all of which a morality too ascetic, and extreme political  principles, invariably  p. 30  lead. We must also have faith in ourselves, and in our fellows  and the people, or we shall be easily discouraged by reverses,  and our ardor cooled by obstacles. We must not listen to 
Reason alone. Force comes more from Faith and Love: and it  is by the aid of these that man scales the loftiest heights of  morality, or becomes the Saviour and Redeemer of a People. 
Reason must hold the hehn; but these supply the motive  power. They are the wings of the soul. Enthusiasm is  generally unreasoning; and without it, and Love and Faith,  there would have been no RIENZI, or TELL, or SYDNEY, or  any other of the great patriots whose names are immortal. If  the Deity had been merely and only All-wise and All-mighty, 
He would never have created the Universe.

It is GENIUS that gets Power; and its prime lieutenants are 
FORCE and WISDOM. The unruliest of men bend before the  leader that has the sense to see and the will to do. It is Genius  that rules with God-like Power; that unveils, with its  counsellors, the hidden human mysteries, cuts asunder with its  word the huge knots, and builds up with its word the  crumbled ruins. At its glance fall down the senseless idols,  whose altars have been on all the high places and in all the  sacred groves. Dishonesty and imbecility stand abashed  before it. Its single Yea or Nay revokes the wrongs of ages,  and is heard among the future generations. Its power is  immense, because its wisdom is immense. Genius is the Sun  of the political sphere. Force and Wisdom, its ministers, are  the orbs that carry its light into darkness, and answer it with  their solid reflecting Tiuth.

Development is symbolized by the use of the Mallet and 
Chisel; the development of the energies and intellect, of the  individual and the people. Genius may place itself at the head  of an unintellectual, uneducated, unenergetic nation; but in a  free country, to cultivate the intellect of those who elect, is the  only mode of securing intellect and genius for rulers. The  world is seldom ruled by the great spirits, except after  dissolution and new birth In periods of transition and  convulsion, the Long Parliaments, the Robespierres and 
Marats, and the semi-respectabilities of intellect, too often  hold the reins of power. The Cromwells and Napoleons come  later. After Marius and Sulla and Cicero the rhetorician, 
CAiSAR. The great intellect is often too sharp for the granite  of this life. Legislators may be very ordinary men; for  legislation

P- 31  is very ordinary work; it is but the final issue of a million  minds.

The power of the purse or the sword, compared to that of the  spirit, is poor and contemptible. As to lands, you may have  agrarian laws, and equal partition. But a man's intellect is all  his own, held direct from God, an inalienable fief. It is the  most potent of weapons in the hands of a paladin. If the  people comprehend Force in the physical sense, how much  more do they reverence the intellectual! Ask Hildebrand, or 
Luther, or Loyola. They fall prostrate before it, as before an  idol. The mastery of mind over mind is the only conquest  worth having. The other injures both, and dissolves at a  breath; rude as it is, the great cable falls down and snaps at  last. But this dimly resembles the dominion of the Creator. It  does not need a subject like that of Peter the Hermit. If the  stream be but bright and strong, it will sweep like a spring-  tide to the popular heart. Not in word only, but in intellectual  act lies the fascination. It is the homage to the Invisible. This  power, knotted with Love, is the golden chain let down into  the well of Truth, or the invisible chain that binds the ranks of  mankind together.

Influence of man over man is a law of nature, whether it be by  a great estate in land or in intellect. It may mean slavery, a  deference to the eminent human judgment. Society hangs  spiritually together, like the revolving spheres above. The free  country, in which intellect and genius govern, will endure. 
Where they serve, and other influences govern, the national  life is short. All the nations that have tried to govern  themselves by their smallest, by the incapables, or merely  respectables, have come to nought. Constitutions and Laws,  without Genius and Intellect to govern, will not prevent  decay. In that case they have the dry-rot and the life dies out  of them by degrees.

To give a nation the franchise of the Intellect is the only sure  mode of perpetuating freedom. This will compel exertion and  generous care for the people from those on the higher seats,  and honorable and intelligent allegiance from those below. 
Then political public life will protect all men from self-  abasement in sensual pursuits, from vulgar acts and low  greed, by giving the noble ambition of just imperial rule. To  elevate the people by teaching loving-kindness and wisdom,  with power to him who teaches best: and so to develop the  free State from the rough ashlar: this  p. 32  is the great labor in which Masonry desires to lend a helping  hand.

All of us should labor in building up the great monument of a  nation, the Holy House of the Temple. The cardinal virtues  must not be partitioned among men, becoming the exclusive  property of some, like the common crafts. ALL are  apprenticed to the partners, Duty and Honor.

Masonry is a march and a struggle toward the Light. For the  individual as well as the nation, Light is Virtue, Manliness, 
Intelligence, Liberty. Tyranny over the soul or body, is  darkness. The freest people, like the freest man, is always in  danger of re-lapsing into servitude. Wars are almost always  fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and consolidate their  power. They spring, for the most part, from evil counsels. 
When the small and the base are intrusted with power,  legislation and administration become but two parallel series  of errors and blunders, ending in war, calamity, and the  necessity for a tyrant. When the nation feels its feet sliding  backward, as if it walked on the ice, the time has come for a  supreme effort. The magnificent tyrants of the past are but the  types of those of the future. Men and nations will always sell  themselves into slavery, to gratify their passions and obtain  revenge. The tyrant's plea, necessity, is always available; and  the tyrant once in power, the necessity of providing for his  safety makes him savage. Religion is a power, and he must  control that. Independent, its sanctuaries might rebel. Then it  becomes unlawful for the people to worship God in their own  way, and the old spiritual despotisms revive. Men must  believe as Power wills, or die; and even if they may believe as  they will, all they have, lands, houses, body, and soul, are  stamped with the royal brand. "Iam the State," said Louis the 
Fourteenth to his peasants; " the very shirts on your backs are  mine, and I can take them if I will."

And dynasties so established endure, like that of the Caesars  of Rome, of the Caesars of Constantinople, of the Caliphs, the 
Stuarts, the Spaniards, the Goths, the Valois, until the race  wears out, and ends with lunatics and idiots, who still rule. 
There is no concord among men, to end the horrible bondage. 
The State falls inwardly, as well as by the outward blows of  the incoherent elements. The furious human passions, the  sleeping human indolence, the stolid human ignorance, the  rivalry of human castes, are as good for the kings as the  swords of the Paladins. The worshippers

P- 33  have all bowed so long to the old idol, that they cannot go  into the streets and choose another Grand Llama. And so the  effete State floats on down the puddled stream of Time, until  the tempest or the tidal sea discovers that the worm has  consumed its strength, and it crumbles into oblivion.

Civil and religious Freedom must go hand in hand; and 
Persecution matures them both. A people content with the  thoughts made for them by the priests of a church will be  content with Royalty by Divine Right,—the Church and the 
Throne mutually sustaining each other. They will smother  schism and reap infidelity and indifference; and while the  battle for freedom goes on around them, they will only sink  the more apathetically into servitude and a deep trance,  perhaps occasionally interrupted by furious fits of frenzy,  followed by helpless exhaustion.

Despotism is not difficult in any land that has only known one  master from its childhood; but there is no harder problem than  to perfect and perpetuate free government by the people  themselves; for it is not one king that is needed: all must be  kings. It is easy to set up Masaniello, that in a few days he  may fall lower than before. But free government grows  slowly, like the individual human faculties; and like the  forest-trees, from the inner heart outward. Liberty is not only  the common birth-right, but it is lost as well by non-user as by  mis-user. It depends far more on the universal effort than any  other human property. It has no single shrine or holy well of  pilgrimage for the nation; for its waters should burst out freely  from the whole soil.

The free popular power is one that is only known in its  strength in the hour of adversity: for all its trials, sacrifices  and expectations are its own. It is trained to think for itself,  and also to act for itself. When the enslaved people prostrate  themselves in the dust before the hurricane, like the alarmed  beasts of the field, the free people stand erect before it, in all  the strength of unity, in self-reliance, in mutual reliance, with  effrontery against all but the visible hand of God. It is neither  cast down by calamity nor elated by success.

This vast power of endurance, of forbearance, of patience, and  of performance, is only acquired by continual exercise of all  the lunctions, like the healthful physical human vigor, like the  individual moral vigor.  p. 34

And the maxim is no less true than old, that eternal vigilance  is the price of liberty. It is curious to observe the universal  pretext by which the tyrants of all times take away the  national liberties. It is stated in the statutes of Edward II., that  the justices and the sheriff should no longer be elected by the  people, on account of the riots and dissensions which had  arisen. The same reason was given long before for the  suppression of popular election of the bishops; and there is a  witness to this untruth in the yet older times, when Rome lost  her freedom, and her indignant citizens declared that  tumultuous liberty is better than disgraceful tranquillity.

With the Compasses and Scale, we can trace all the figures  used in the mathematics of planes, or in what are called 
GEOMETRY and TRIGONOMETRY, two words that are  themselves deficient in meaning. GEOMETRY, which the  letter G. in most Lodges is said to signify, means  measurement of land or the earth-or Surveying; and 
TRIGONOMETRY, the measurement of triangles, or figures  with three sides or angles. The latter is by far the most  appropriate name for the science intended to be expressed by  the word "Geometry." Neither is of a meaning sufficiently  wide: for although the vast surveys of great spaces of the  earth's surface, and of coasts, by which shipwreck and  calamity to mariners are avoided, are effected by means of  triangulation;—though it was by the same method that the 
French astronomers measured a degree of latitude and so  established a scale of measures on an immutable basis; though  it is by means of the immense triangle that has for its base a  line drawn in imagination between the place of the earth now  and its place six months hence in space, and for its apex a  planet or star, that the distance of Jupiter or Sirius from the  earth is ascertained; and though there is a triangle still more  vast, its base extending either way from us, with and past the  horizon into immensity, and its apex infinitely distant above  us; to which corresponds a similar infinite triangle below—  what is above equalling what is below, immensity equalling  immensity;—yet the Science of Numbers, to which Pythagoras  attached so much importance, and whose mysteries are found  everywhere in the ancient religions, and most of all in the 
Kabalah and in the Bible, is not sufficiently expressed by  either the word "Geometry" or the word " Trigonometry ." For  that science includes these, with Arithmetic, and also with 
Algebra, Logarithms, the Integral and Differential  p. 35

[paragraph continues] Calculus; and by means of it are worked out the  great problems of Astronomy or the Laws of the Stars.

Virtue is but heroic bravery, to do the thing thought to be true,  in spite of all enemies of flesh or spirit, in despite of all  temptations or menaces. Man is accountable for the  uprightness of his doctrine, but not for the rightness of it. 
Devout enthusiasm is far easier than a good action. The end of  thought is action; the sole purpose of Religion is an Ethic. 
Theory, in political science, is worthless, except for the  purpose of being realized in practice.

In every credo, religious or political as in the soul of man,  there are two regions, the Dialectic and the Ethic; and it is  only when the two are harmoniously blended, that a perfect  discipline is evolved. There are men who dialectically are 
Christians, as there are a multitude who dialectically are 
Masons, and yet who are ethically Infidels, as these are  ethically of the Profane, in the strictest sense:—intellectual  believers, but practical atheists:—men who will write you 
"Evidences," in perfect faith in their logic, but cannot carry  out the Christian or Masonic doctrine, owing to the strength,  or weakness, of the flesh. On the other hand, there are many  dialectical skeptics, but ethical believers, as there are many 
Masons who have never undergone initiation; and as ethics  are the end and purpose of religion, so are ethical believers  the most worthy. He who does right is better than he who  thinks right.

But you must not act upon the hypothesis that all men are  hypocrites, whose conduct does not square with their  sentiments. No vice is more rare, for no task is more difficult,  than systematic hypocrisy. When the Demagogue becomes a 
Usurper it does not follow that he was all the time a hypocrite. 
Shallow men only so judge of others.

The truth is, that creed has, in general, very little influence on  the conduct; in religion, on that of the individual; in politics,  on that of party. As a general thing, the Mahometan, in the 
Orient, is far more honest and trustworthy than the Christian. 
A Gospel of Love in the mouth, is an Avatar of Persecution in  the heart. Men who believe in eternal damnation and a literal  sea of fire and brimstone, incur the certainty of it, according  to their creed, on the slightest temptation of appetite or  passion. Predestination insists on the necessity of good works. 
In Masonry, at the least flow of passion, one speaks ill of  another behind his back: and so  p. 36  far from the "Brotherhood" of Blue Masonry being real, and  the solemn pledges contained in the use of the word "Brother"  being complied with, extraordinary pains are taken to show  that Masonry is a sort of abstraction, which scorns to interfere  in worldly matters. The rule may be regarded as universal,  that, where there is a choice to be made, a Mason will give his  vote and influence, in politics and business, to the less  qualified profane in preference to the better qualified Mason. 
One will take an oath to oppose any unlawful usurpation of  power, and then become the ready and even eager instrument  of a usurper. Another will call one "Brother," and then play  toward him the part of Judas Iscariot, or strike him, as Joab  did Abner, under the fifth rib, with a lie whose authorship is  not to be traced. Masonry does not change human nature, and  cannot make honest men out of bom knaves.

While you are still engaged in preparation, and in  accumulating principles for Iliture use, do not forget the  words of the Apostle James: "For if any be a hearer of the  word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his  natural face in a glass, for he beholdeth himself, and goeth  away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was;  but whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and  continueth, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the  work, this man shall be blessed in his work. If any man  among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue,  but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain. . . . 
Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being an abstraction. A  man is justified by works, and not by faith only... . The  devils believe,—and tremble. ... As the body without the  heart is dead, so is faith without works."

In political science, also, free governments are erected and  free constitutions framed, upon some simple and intelligible  theory. Upon whatever theory they are based, no sound  conclusion is to be reached except by carrying the theory out  without flinching, both in argument on constitutional  questions and in practice. Shrink from the true theory through  timidity, or wander from it through want of the logical  faculty, or transgress against it through passion or on the plea  of necessity or expediency, and you have denial or invasion of  rights, laws that offend against first principles, usurpation of  illegal powers, or abnegation and abdication of legitimate  authority.

P- 37

Do not forget, either, that as the showy, superficial, impudent  and self-conceited will almost always be preferred, even in  utmost stress of danger and calamity of the State, to the man  of solid learning, large intellect, and catholic sympathies,  because he is nearer the common popular and legislative  level, so the highest truth is not acceptable to the mass of  mankind.

When SOLON was asked if he had given his countrymen the  best laws, he answered, "The best they are capable of  receiving." This is one of the profoundest utterances on  record; and yet like all great truths, so simple as to be rarely  comprehended. It contains the whole philosophy of History. It  utters a truth which, had it been recognized, would have saved  men an immensity of vain, idle disputes, and have led them  into the clearer paths of knowledge in the Past. It means this,- 
-that all truths are Truths of Period, and not truths for eternity;  that whatever great fact has had strength and vitality enough  to make itself real, whether of religion, morals, government,  or of whatever else, and to find place in this world, has been a  truth for the time, and as good as men were capable of  receiving.

So, too, with great men. The intellect and capacity of a people  has a single measure,—that of the great men whom Providence  gives it, and whom it receives. There have always been men  too great for their time or their people. Every people makes  such men only its idols, as it is capable of comprehending.

To impose ideal truth or law upon an incapable and merely  real man, must ever be a vain and empty speculation. The  laws of sympathy govern in this as they do in regard to men  who are put at the head. We do not know, as yet, what  qualifications the sheep insist on in a leader. With men who  are too high intellectually, the mass have as little sympathy as  they have with the stars. When BURKE, the wisest statesman 
England ever had, rose to speak, the House of Commons was  depopulated as upon an agreed signal. There is as little  sympathy between the mass and the highest TRUTHS. The  highest truth, being incomprehensible to the man of realities,  as the highest man is, and largely above his level, will be a  great unreality and falsehood to an unintellectual man. The  profoundest doctrines of Christianity and Philosophy would  be mere jargon and babble to a Potawatomie Indian. The  popular explanations of the symbols of Masonry are fitting for  the multitude that have swarmed into the Temples,—being  fully up to the level  p. 38  of their capacity. Catholicism was a vital tiuth in its earliest  ages, but it became obsolete, and Protestantism arose,  flourished, and deteriorated. The doctrines of ZOROASTER  were the best which the ancient Persians were fitted to  receive; those of CONFUCIUS were fitted for the Chinese;  those of MOHAMMED for the idolatrous Arabs of his age. 
Each was Tiuth for the time. Each was a GOSPEL, preached  by a REFORMER; and if any men are so little fortunate as to  remain content therewith, when others have attained a higher  tiuth, it is their misfortune and not their fault. They are to be  pitied for it, and not persecuted.

Do not expect easily to convince men of the truth, or to lead  them to think aright. The subtle human intellect can weave its  mists over even the clearest vision. Remember that it is  eccentric enough to ask unanimity from a jury; but to ask it  from any large number of men on any point of political faith  is amazing. You can hardly get two men in any Congress or 
Convention to agree;—nay, you can rarely get one to agree  with himself. The political church which chances to be  supreme anywhere has an indefinite number of tongues. How  then can we expect men to agree as to matters beyond the  cognizance of the senses? How can we compass the Infinite  and the Invisible with any chain of evidence? Ask the small  sea-waves what they murmur among the pebbles! How many  of those words that come from the invisible shore are lost, like  the birds, in the long passage? How vainly do we strain the  eyes across the long Infinite! We must be content, as the  children are, with the pebbles that have been stranded, since it  is forbidden us to explore the hidden depths.

The Yellow-Craft is especially taught by this not to become  wise in his own conceit. Pride in unsound theories is worse  than ignorance. Humility becomes a Mason. Take some quiet,  sober moment of life, and add together the two ideas of Pride  and Man; behold him, creature of a span, stalking through  infinite space in all the grandeur of littleness! Perched on a  speck of the Universe, every wind of Heaven strikes into his  blood the coldness of death; his soul floats away from his  body like the melody from the string. Day and night, like dust  on the wheel, he is rolled along the heavens, through a  labyrinth of worlds, and all the creations of God are flaming  on every side, further than even his imagination can reach. Is  this a creature to make for himself a crown of glory, to deny  his own flesh, to mock at his fellow, sprung with him from  that dust  p. 39  to which both will soon return? Does the proud man not err? 
Does he not suffer? Does he not die? When he reasons, is he  never stopped short by difficulties? When he acts, does he  never succumb to the temptations of pleasure? When he lives,  is he free from pain? Do the diseases not claim him as their  prey? When he dies, can he escape the common grave? Pride  is not the heritage of man. Humility should dwell with frailty,  and atone for ignorance, error and imperfection.

Neither should the Mason be over-anxious for office and  honor, however certainly he may feel that he has the capacity  to serve the State. He should neither seek nor spurn honors. It  is good to enjoy the blessings of fortune; it is better to submit  without a pang to their loss. The greatest deeds are not done  in the glare of light, and before the eyes of the populace. He  whom God has gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it  were, an additional sense; and among the vast and noble  scenes of nature, we find the balm for the wounds we have  received among the pitiful shifts of policy; for the attachment  to solitude is the surest preservative from the ills of life.

But Resignation is the more noble in proportion as it is the  less passive. Retirement is only a morbid selfishness, if it  prohibit exertions for others; as it is only dignified and noble,  when it is the shade whence the oracles issue that are to  instruct mankind; and retirement of this nature is the sole  seclusion which a good and wise man will covet or command. 
The very philosophy which makes such a man covet the quiet,  will make him eschew the inutility of the hermitage. Very  little praiseworthy would LORD BOLINGBROKE have  seemed among his haymakers and ploughmen, if among  haymakers and ploughmen he had looked with an indifferent  eye upon a profligate minister and a venal Parliament. Very  little interest would have attached to his beans and vetches, if  beans and vetches had caused him to forget that if he was  happier on a farm he could be more useful in a Senate, and  made him forego, in the sphere of a bailiff, all care for re¬  entering that of a legislator.

Remember, also, that there is an education which quickens the 
Intellect, and leaves the heart hollower or harder than before. 
There are ethical lessons in the laws of the heavenly bodies, in  the properties of earthly elements, in geography, chemistry,  geology, and all the material sciences. Things are symbols of 
Truths.  p. 40

[paragraph continues] Properties are symbols of Truths. Science, not  teaching moral and spiritual truths, is dead and dry, of little  more real value than to commit to the memory a long row of  unconnected dates, or of the names of bugs or butterflies.

Christianity, it is said, begins from the burning of the false  gods by the people themselves. Education begins with the  burning of our intellectual and moral idols: our prejudices,  notions, conceits, our worthless or ignoble purposes. 
Especially it is necessary to shake off the love of worldly  gain. With Freedom comes the longing for worldly  advancement. In that race men are ever falling, rising,  running, and falling again. The lust for wealth and the abject  dread of poverty delve the furrows on many a noble brow.

The gambler grows old as he watches the chances. Lawful  hazard drives Youth away before its time; and this Youth  draws heavy bills of exchange on Age. Men live, like the  engines, at high pressure, a hundred years in a hundred  months; the ledger becomes the Bible, and the day-book the 
Book of the Morning Prayer.

Hence flow overreachings and sharp practice, heartless traffic  in which the capitalist buys profit with the lives of the  laborers, speculations that coin a nation's agonies into wealth,  and all the other devilish enginery of Mammon. This, and  greed for office, are the two columns at the entrance to the 
Temple of Moloch. It is doubtful whether the latter,  blossoming in falsehood, trickery, and fraud, is not even more  pernicious than the former. At all events they are twins, and  fitly mated; and as either gains control of the unfortunate  subject, his soul withers away and decays, and at last dies out. 
The souls of half the human race leave them long before they  die. The two greeds are twin plagues of the leprosy, and make  the man unclean; and whenever they break out they spread  until "they cover all the skin of him that hath the plague, from  his head even to his foot." Even the raw flesh of the heart  becomes unclean with it.

Alexander of Macedon has left a saying behind him which has  survived his conquests: "Nothing is nobler than work." Work  only can keep even kings respectable. And when a king is a  king indeed, it is an honorable office to give tone to the  manners and morals of a nation; to set the example of virtuous  conduct, and restore in spirit the old schools of chivalry, in  which the young  p. 41  manhood may be nurtured to real greatness. Work and wages  will go together in men's minds, in the most royal institutions. 
We must ever come to the idea of real work. The rest that  follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows  rest.

Let no Fellow-Craft imagine that the work of the lowly and  uninfluential is not worth the doing. There is no legal limit to  the possible influences of a good deed or a wise word or a  generous effort. Nothing is really small. Whoever is open to  the deep penetration of nature knows this. Although, indeed,  no absolute satisfaction may be vouchsafed to philosophy,  any more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the  effect, the man of thought and contemplation falls into  unfathomable ecstacies in view of all the decompositions of  forces resulting in unity. All works for all. Destruction is not  annihilation, but regeneration.

Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits  the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the  hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can  calculate the path of the molecule? How do we know that the  creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of  sand? Who, then, understands the reciprocal flow and ebb of  the infinitely great and the infinitely small; the echoing of  causes in the abysses of beginning, and the avalanches of  creation? A flesh-worm is of account; the small is great; the  great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity. There are  marvellous relations between beings and things; in this  inexhaustible Whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn: all  need each other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into  the azure depths, without knowing what it does with them;  night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. 
Every bird which flies has the thread of the Infinite in its  claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor, and the  tap of a swallow's bill, breaking the egg; and it leads forward  the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of a Socrates.

Where the telescope ends the microscope begins. Which of  them the grander view? A bit of mould is a Pleiad of flowers—  a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

There is the same and a still more wonderful interpenetration  between the things of the intellect and the things of matter.

Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused,  multiplied one by another, to such a degree as to bring the  material world and the moral world into the same light. 
Phenomena are perpetually  p. 42  folded back upon themselves. In the vast cosmical changes  the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities,  enveloping all in the invisible mystery of the emanations,  losing no dream from no single sleep, sowing an animalcule  here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding in  curves; making a force of Light, and an element of Thought;  disseminated and indivisible, dissolving all save that point  without length, breadth, or thickness, The MYSELF; reducing  everything to the Soul-atom; making everything blossom into 
God; entangling all activities, from the highest to the lowest,  in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism; hanging the flight  of an insect upon the movement of the earth; subordinating,  perhaps, if only by the identity of the law, the eccentric  evolutions of the comet in the firmament, to the whirlings of  the infusoria in the drop of water. A mechanism made of  mind, the first motor of which is the gnat, and its last wheel  the zodiac.

A peasant-boy, guiding Bliicher by the right one of two roads,  the other being impassable for artillery, enables him to reach 
Waterloo in time to save Wellington from a defeat that would  have been a rout; and so enables the kings to imprison 
Napoleon on a barren rock in mid-ocean. An unfaithful smith,  by the slovenly shoeing of a horse, causes his lameness, and,  he stumbling, the career of his world-conquering rider ends,  and the destinies of empires are changed. A generous officer  permits an imprisoned monarch to end his game of chess  before leading him to the block; and meanwhile the usurper  dies, and the prisoner reascends the throne. An unskillful  workman repairs the compass, or malice or stupidity  disarranges it, the ship mistakes her course, the waves  swallow a Caesar, and a new chapter is written in the history  of a world. What we call accident is but the adamantine chain  of indissoluble connection between all created things. The  locust, hatched in the Arabian sands, the small wonu that  destroys the cotton-boll, one making famine in the Orient, the  other closing the mills and starving the workmen and their  children in the Occident, with riots and massacres, are as  much the ministers of God as the earthquake; and the fate of  nations depends more on them than on the intellect of its  kings and legislators. A civil war in America will end in  shaking the world; and that war may be caused by the vote of  some ignorant prize-fighter or crazed fanatic in a city or in a 
Congress, or of some stupid boor in an obscure country  parish. The  p. 43  electricity of universal sympathy, of action and reaction,  pervades everything, the planets and the motes in the  sunbeam. FAUST, with his types, or LUTHER, with his  sermons, worked greater results than Alexander or Hannibal. 
A single thought sometimes suffices to overturn a dynasty. A  silly song did more to unseat James the Second than the  acquittal of the Bishops. Voltaire, Condorcet, and Rousseau  uttered words that will ring, in change and revolutions,  throughout all the ages.

Remember, that though life is short, Thought and the  influences of what we do or say are immortal; and that no  calculus has yet pretended to ascertain the law of proportion  between cause and effect. The hammer of an English  blacksmith, smiting down an insolent official, led to a  rebellion which came near being a revolution. The word well  spoken, the deed fitly done, even by the feeblest or humblest,  cannot help but have their effect. More or less, the effect is  inevitable and eternal. The echoes of the greatest deeds may  die away like the echoes of a cry among the cliffs, and what  has been done seem to the human judgment to have been  without result. The unconsidered act of the poorest of men  may fire the train that leads to the subterranean mine, and an  empire be rent by the explosion.

The power of a free people is often at the disposal of a single  and seemingly an unimportant individual;—a terrible and  truthful power; for such a people feel with one heart, and  therefore can lift up their myriad arms for a single blow. And,  again, there is no graduated scale for the measurement of the  influences of different intellects upon the popular mind. Peter  the Hermit held no office, yet what a work he wrought!

From the political point of view there is but a single  principle,—the sovereignty of man over himself. This  sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called LIBERTY. 
Where two or several of these sovereignties associate, the 
State begins. But in this association there is no abdication. 
Each sovereignty parts with a certain portion of itself to form  the common right. That portion is the same for all. There is  equal contribution by all to the joint sovereignty. This identity  of concession which each makes to all, is EQUALITY. The  common right is nothing more or less than the protection of  all, pouring its rays on each. This protection of each by all, is 
FRATERNITY.  p. 44

Liberty is the summit, Equality the base. Equality is not all  vegetation on a level, a society of big spears of grass and  stunted oaks, a neighborhood of jealousies, emasculating each  other. It is, civilly, all aptitudes having equal opportunity;  politically, all votes having equal weight; religiously, all  consciences having equal rights.

Equality has an organ;—gratuitous and obligatory instruction. 
We must begin with the right to the alphabet. The primary  school obligatory upon all; the higher school offered to all. 
Such is the law. From the same school for all springs equal  society. Instruction! Light! all comes from Light, and all  returns to it.

We must learn the thoughts of the common people, if we  would be wise and do any good work. We must look at men,  not so much for what Fortune has given to them with her  blind old eyes, as for the gifts Nature has brought in her lap,  and for the use that has been made of them. We profess to be  equal in a Church and in the Lodge: we shall be equal in the  sight of God when Fie judges the earth. We may well sit on  the pavement together here, in communion and conference,  for the few brief moments that constitute life.

A Democratic Government undoubtedly has its defects,  because it is made and administered by men, and not by the 
Wise Gods. It cannot be concise and sharp, like the despotic. 
When its ire is aroused it develops its latent strength, and the  sturdiest rebel trembles. But its habitual domestic rule is  tolerant, patient, and indecisive. Men are brought together,  first to differ, and then to agree. Affirmation, negation,  discussion, solution: these are the means of attaining truth. 
Often the enemy will be at the gates before the babble of the  disturbers is drowned in the chorus of consent. In the 
Legislative office deliberation will often defeat decision. 
Liberty can play the fool like the Tyrants.

Refined society requires greater minuteness of regulation; and  the steps of all advancing States are more and more to be  picked among the old rubbish and the new materials. The  difficulty lies in discovering the right path through the chaos  of contusion. The adjustment of mutual rights and wrongs is  also more difficult in democracies. We do not see and  estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and  clearly from the level or the waving land as from the elevation  of a lone peak, towering above the plain; for each looks  through his own mist.  p. 45

Abject dependence on constituents, also, is too common. It is  as miserable a thing as abject dependence on a minister or the  favorite of a Tyrant. It is rare to find a man who can speak out  the simple truth that is in him, honestly and frankly, without  fear, favor, or affection, either to Emperor or People.

Moreover, in assemblies of men, faith in each other is almost  always wanting, unless a terrible pressure of calamity or  danger from without produces cohesion. Hence the  constructive power of such assemblies is, generally deficient. 
The chief triumphs of modem days, in Europe, have been in  pulling down and obliterating; not in building up. But Repeal  is not Reform. Time must bring with him the Restorer and 
Rebuilder.

Speech, also, is grossly abused in Republics; and if the use of  speech be glorious, its abuse is the most villainous of vices. 
Rhetoric, Plato says, is the art of ruling the minds of men. But  in democracies it is too common to hide thought in words, to  overlay it, to babble nonsense. The gleams and glitter of  intellectual soap-and-water bubbles are mistaken for the  rainbow-glories of genius. The worthless pyrites is  continually mistaken for gold. Even intellect condescends to  intellectual jugglery, balancing thoughts as a juggler balances  pipes on his chin. In all Congresses we have the inexhaustible  flow of babble, and Faction's clamorous knavery in  discussion, until the divine power of speech, that privilege of  man and great gift of God, is no better than the screech of  parrots or the mimicry of monkeys. The mere talker, however  fluent, is barren of deeds in the day of trial.

There are men voluble as women, and as well skilled in  fencing with the tongue: prodigies of speech, misers in deeds. 
Too much talking, like too much thinking, destroys the power  of action. In human nature, the thought is only made perfect  by deed. Silence is the mother of both. The trumpeter is not  the bravest of the brave. Steel and not brass wins the day. The  great doer of great deeds is mostly slow and slovenly of  speech. There are some men bom and bred to betray. 
Patriotism is their trade, and their capital is speech. But no  noble spirit can plead like Paul and be false to itself as Judas.

Imposture too commonly rules in republics; they seem to be  ever in their minority; their guardians are self-appointed; and  the unjust thrive better than the just. The Despot, like the  night-lion roaring, drowns all the clamor of tongues at once,  and  p. 46  speech, the birthright of the free man, becomes the bauble of  the enslaved.

It is quite tme that republics only occasionally, and as it were  accidentally, select their wisest, or even the less incapable  among the incapables, to govern them and legislate for them. 
If genius, armed with learning and knowledge, will grasp the  reins, the people will reverence it; if it only modestly offers  itself for office, it will be smitten on the face, even when, in  the straits of distress and the agonies of calamity, it is  indispensable to the salvation of the State. Put it upon the  track with the showy and superficial, the conceited, the  ignorant, and impudent, the trickster and charlatan, and the  result shall not be a moment doubtful. The verdicts of 
Legislatures and the People are like the verdicts of juries,—  sometimes right by accident.

Offices, it is true, are showered, like the rains of Heaven,  upon the just and the unjust. The Roman Augurs that used to  laugh in each other's faces at the simplicity of the vulgar,  were also tickled with their own guile; but no Augur is needed  to lead the people astray. They readily deceive themselves.

Let a Republic begin as it may, it will not be out of its  minority before imbecility will be promoted to high places;  and shallow pretence, getting itself puffed into notice, will  invade all the sanctuaries. The most unscrupulous partisanship  will prevail, even in respect to judicial trusts; and the most  unjust appointments constantly be made, although every  improper promotion not merely confers one undeserved favor,  but may make a hundred honest cheeks smart with injustice.

The country is stabbed in the front when those are brought  into the stalled seats who should slink into the dim gallery.

Every stamp of Honor, ill-clutched, is stolen from the 
Treasuiy of Merit.

Yet the entrance into the public service, and the promotion in  it, affect both the rights of individuals and those of the nation. 
Injustice in bestowing or withholding office ought to be so  intolerable in democratic communities that the least trace of it  should be like the scent of Treason. It is not universally true  that all citizens of equal character have an equal claim to  knock at the door of every public office and demand  admittance. When any man presents himself for service he has  a right to aspire to the highest body at once, if he can show his  fitness for such a beginning,—that  p. 47  he is fitter than the rest who offer themselves for the same  post. The entry into it can only justly be made through the  door of merit. And whenever any one aspires to and attains  such high post, especially if by unfair and disreputable and  indecent means, and is afterward found to be a signal failure,  he should at once be beheaded. He is the worst among the  public enemies.

When a man sufficiently reveals himself, all others should be  proud to give him due precedence. When the power of  promotion is abused in the grand passages of life whether by 
People, Legislature, or Executive, the unjust decision recoils  on the judge at once. That is not only a gross, but a willful  shortness of sight, that cannot discover the deserving. If one  will look hard, long, and honestly, he will not fail to discern  merit, genius, and qualification; and the eyes and voice of the 
Press and Public should condemn and denounce injustice  wherever she rears her horrid head.

"The tools to the workmen !" no other principle will save a 
Republic from destruction, either by civil war or the dry-rot. 
They tend to decay, do all we can to prevent it, like human  bodies. If. they try the experiment of governing themselves by  their smallest, they slide downward to the unavoidable abyss  with tenfold velocity; and there never has been a Republic  that has not followed that fatal course.

But however palpable and gross the inherent defects of  democratic governments, and fatal as the results finally and  inevitably are, we need only glance at the reigns of Tiberius, 
Nero, and Caligula, of Heliogabalus and Caracalla, of 
Domitian and Corn-modus, to recognize that the difference  between freedom and despotism is as wide as that between 
Heaven and Hell. The cruelty, baseness, and insanity of  tyrants are incredible. Let him who complains of the fickle  humors and inconstancy of a free people, read Pliny's  character of Domitian. If the great man in a Republic cannot  win office without descending to low arts and whining  beggary and the judicious use of sneaking lies, let him remain  in retirement, and use the pen. Tacitus and Juvenal held no  office. Let History and Satire punish the pretender as they  crucify the despot. The revenges of the intellect are terrible  and just.

Let Masonry use the pen and the printing-press in the free 
State against the Demagogue; in the Despotism against the 
Tyrant. History offers examples and encouragement. All  history, for four thousand years, being fdled with violated  rights and the  p. 48  sufferings of the people, each period of history brings with it  such protest as is possible to it. Under the Caesars there was  no insurrection, but there was a Juvenal. The arousing of  indignation replaces the Gracchi. Under the Caesars there is  the exile of Syene; there is also the author of the Annals. As  the Neros reign darkly they should be pictured so. Work with  the graver only would be pale; into the grooves should be  poured a concentrated prose that bites.

Despots are an aid to thinkers. Speech enchained is speech  terrible. The writer doubles and triples his style, when silence  is imposed by a master upon the people. There springs from  this silence a certain mysterious fullness, which fdters and  freezes into brass fn the thoughts. Compression in the history  produces conciseness in the historian. The granitic solidity of  some celebrated prose is only a condensation produced by the 
Tyrant. Tyranny constrains the writer to shortenings of  diameter which are in-creases of strength. The Ciceronian  period, hardly sufficient upon Verres, would lose its edge  upon Caligula.

The Demagogue is the predecessor of the Despot. One springs  from the other's loins. He who will basely fawn on those who  have office to bestow, will betray like Iscariot, and prove a  miser-able and pitiable failure. Let the new Junius lash such  men as they deserve, and History make them immortal in  infamy; since their influences culminate in ruin. The Republic  that employs and honors the shallow, the superficial, the base,  who crouch

Unto the offal of an office promised,"  at last weeps tears of blood for its fatal error. Of such supreme  folly, the sure fruit is damnation. Let the nobility of every  great heart, condensed into justice and truth, strike such  creatures like a thunderbolt! If you can do no more, you can at  least condemn by your vote, and ostracise by denunciation.

It is true that, as the Czars are absolute, they have it in their  power to select the best for the public service. It is true that  the beginner of a dynasty generally does so; and that when  monarchies are in their prime, pretence and shallowness do  not thrive and prosper and get power, as they do in Republics. 
All do not gabble in the Parliament of a Kingdom, as in the 
Congress of a Democracy. The incapables do not go  undetected there, all their lives.  p. 49

But dynasties speedily decay and run out. At last they dwindle  down into imbecility; and the dull or flippant Members of 
Congresses are at least the intellectual peers of the vast  majority of kings. The great man, the Julius Caesar, the 
Charlemagne, Cromwell, Napoleon, reigns of right. He is the  wisest and the strongest. The incapables and imbeciles  succeed and are usurpers; and fear makes them cruel. After 
Julius came Caracalla and Galba; after Charlemagne, the  lunatic Charles the Sixth. So the Saracenic dynasty dwindled  out; the Capets, the Stuarts, the Bourbons; the last of these  producing Bomba, the ape of Domitian.

Man is by nature cruel, like the tigers. The barbarian, and the  tool of the tyrant, and the civilized fanatic, enjoy the  sufferings of others, as the children enjoy the contortions of  maimed flies. Absolute Power, once in fear for the safety of  its tenure, cannot but be cruel.

As to ability, dynasties invariably cease to possess any after a  few lives. They become mere shams, governed by ministers,  favorites, or courtesans, like those old Etruscan kings,  slumbering for long ages in their golden royal robes,  dissolving forever at the first breath of day. Let him who  complains of the short-comings of democracy ask himself if  he would prefer a Du Barry or a Pompadour, governing in the  name of a Louis the Lifteenth, a Caligula making his horse a  consul, a Domitian, "that most savage monster," who  sometimes drank the blood of relatives, sometimes employing  himself with slaughtering the most distinguished citizens  before whose gates fear and terror kept watch; a tyrant of  frightful aspect, pride on his forehead, fire in his eye,  constantly seeking darkness and secrecy, and only emerging  from his solitude to make solitude. After all, in a free  government, the Laws and the Constitution are above the 
Incapables, the Courts correct their legislation, and posterity  is the Grand Inquest that passes judgment on them. What is  the exclusion of worth and intellect and knowledge from civil  office compared with trials before Jeffries, tortures in the dark  caverns of the Inquisition, Alva-butcheries in the Netherlands,  the Eve of Saint Bartholomew, and the Sicilian Vespers?

The Abbe Barruel in his Memoirs for the History of 
Jacobinism, declares that Masonry in France gave, as its  secret, the  p. 50  words Equality and Liberty, leaving it for every honest and  religious Mason to explain them as would best suit his  principles; but retained the privilege of unveiling in the higher 
Degrees the meaning of those words, as interpreted by the 
French Revolution. And he also excepts English Masons from  his anathemas, because in England a Mason is a peaceable  subject of the civil authorities, no matter where he resides,  engaging in no plots or conspiracies against even the worst  government. England, he says, disgusted with an Equality and  a Liberty, the consequences of which she had felt in the  struggles of her Lollards, Anabaptists, and Presbyterians, had

"purged her Masonry" from all explanations tending to  overturn empires; but there still remained adepts whom  disorganizing principles bound to the Ancient Mysteries.

Because true Masonry, unemasculated, bore the banners of 
Freedom and Equal Rights, and was in rebellion against  temporal and spiritual tyranny, its Lodges were proscribed in 
1735, by an edict of the States of Holland. In 1737, Louis XV.  forbade them in France. In 1738, Pope Clement XII. issued  against them his famous Bull of Excommunication, which  was renewed by Benedict XIV.; and in 1743 the Council of 
Berne also proscribed them. The title of the Bull of Clement  is, "The Condemnation of the Society of Conventicles de 
Liberi Muratori, or of the Freemasons, under the penalty of  ipso facto excommunication, the absolution from which is  reserved to the Pope alone, except at the point of death." And  by it all bishops, ordinaries, and inquisitors were empowered  to punish Freemasons, "as vehemently suspected of heresy,"  and to call in, if necessary, the help of the secular arm; that is,  to cause the civil authority to put them to death.

Also, false and slavish political theories end in brutalizing the 
State. For example, adopt the theory that offices and  employments in it are to be given as rewards for services  rendered to party, and they soon become the prey and spoil of  faction, the booty of the victory of faction;—and leprosy is in  the flesh of the State. The body of the commonwealth  becomes a mass of corruption, like a living carcass rotten with  syphilis. All unsound theories in the end develop themselves  in one foul and loathsome disease or other of the body politic. 
The State, like the man, must use constant effort to stay in the  paths of virtue and manliness. The  p- 51  habit of electioneering and begging for office culminates in  bribery with office, and conniption in office.

A chosen man has a visible trust from God, as plainly as if the  commission were engrossed by the notary. A nation cannot  renounce the executorship of the Divine decrees. As little can 
Masonry. It must labor to do its duty knowingly and wisely. 
We must remember that, in free States, as well as in  despotisms, Injustice, the spouse of Oppression, is the fruitful  parent of Deceit, Distrust, Hatred, Conspiracy, Treason, and 
Unfaithfulness. Even in assailing Tyranny we must have 
Truth and Reason as our chief weapons. We must march into  that fight like the old Puritans, or into the battle with the  abuses that spring up in free government, with the flaming  sword in one hand, and the Oracles of God in the other.

The citizen who cannot accomplish well the smaller purposes  of public life, cannot compass the larger. The vast power of  endurance, forbearance, patience, and performance, of a free  people, is acquired only by continual exercise of all the  functions, like the healthful physical human vigor. If the  individual citizens have it not, the State must equally be  without it. It is of the essence of a free government, that the  people should not only be concerned in making the laws, but  also in their execution. No man ought to be more ready to  obey and administer the law than he who has helped to make  it. The business of government is carried on for the benefit of  all, and every co-partner should give counsel and co¬  operation.

Remember also, as another shoal on which States are  wrecked, that free States always tend toward the depositing of  the citizens in strata, the creation of castes, the perpetuation of  the jus divinum to office in families. The more democratic the 
State, the more sure this result. For, as free States advance in  power, there is a strong tendency toward centralization, not  from deliberate evil intention, but from the course of events  and the indolence of human nature. The executive powers  swell and enlarge to inordinate dimensions; and the Executive  is always aggressive with respect to the nation. Offices of all  kinds are multiplied to reward partisans; the brute force of the  sewerage and lower strata of the mob obtains large  representation, fust in the lower offices, and at last in Senates;  and Bureaucracy raises its bald head, bristling with pens,  girded with spectacles, and bunched with ribbon. The art  p. 52  of Government becomes like a Craft, and its guilds tend to  become exclusive, as those of the Middle Ages.

Political science may be much improved as a subject of  speculation; but it should never be divorced from the actual  national necessity. The science of governing men must always  be practical, rather than philosophical. There is not the same  amount of positive or universal truth here as in the abstract  sciences; what is true in one country may be very false in  another; what is untrue to-day may become true in another  generation, and the truth of to-day be reversed by the  judgment of to-morrow. To distinguish the casual from the  enduring, to separate the unsuitable from the suitable, and to  make progress even possible, are the proper ends of policy. 
But without actual knowledge and experience, and  communion of labor, the dreams of the political doctors may  be no better than those of the doctors of divinity. The reign of  such a caste, with its mysteries, its myrmidons, and its  corrupting influence, may be as fatal as that of the despots. 
Thirty tyrants are thirty times worse than one.

Moreover, there is a strong temptation for the governing  people to become as much slothful and sluggards as the  weakest of absolute kings. Only give them the power to get  rid, when caprice prompts them, of the great and wise men,  and elect the little, and as to all the rest they will relapse into  indolence and indifference. The central power, creation of the  people, organized and cunning if not enlightened, is the  perpetual tribunal set up by them for the redress of wrong and  the rale of justice. It soon supplies itself with all the requisite  machinery, and is ready and apt for all kinds of interference. 
The people may be a child all its life. The central power may  not be able to suggest the best scientific solution of a  problem; but it has the easiest means of carrying an idea into  effect. If the purpose to be attained is a large one, it requires a  large comprehension; it is proper for the action of the central  power. If it be a small one, it may be thwarted by  disagreement. The central power must step in as an arbitrator  and prevent this. The people may be too averse to change, too  slothful in their own business, unjust to a minority or a  majority. The central power must take the reins when the  people drop them.

France became centralized in its government more by the  apathy and ignorance of its people than by the tyranny of its  kings. When the inmost parish-life is given up to the direct  guardianship  p. 53  of the State, and the repair of the belfry of a country church  requires a written order from the central power, a people is in  its dotage. Men are thus nurtured in imbecility, from the dawn  of social life. When the central government feeds part of the  people it prepares all to be slaves. When it directs parish and  county affairs, they are slaves already. The next step is to  regulate labor and its wages.

Nevertheless, whatever follies the free people may commit,  even to the putting of the powers of legislation in the hands of  the little competent and less honest, despair not of the final  result. The terrible teacher, EXPERIENCE, writing his  lessons on hearts desolated with calamity and wrung by  agony, will make them wiser in time. Pretence and grimace  and sordid beggary for votes will some day cease to avail. 
Have FAITH, and struggle on, against all evil influences and  discouragements! FAITH is the Saviour and Redeemer of  nations. When Christianity had grown weak, profitless, and  powerless, the Arab Restorer and Iconoclast came, like a  cleansing hurricane. When the battle of Damascus was about  to be fought, the Christian bishop, at the early dawn, in his  robes, at the head of his clergy, with the Cross once so  triumphant raised in the air, came down to the gates of the  city, and laid open before the army the Testament of Christ. 
The Christian general, THOMAS, laid his hand on the book,  and said, "Oh God! IF our faith be true, aid us, and deliver us  not into the hands of its enemies!" But KHALED, "the Sword  of God," who had marched from victory to victory, exclaimed  to his wearied soldiers, " Let no man sleep! There will be rest  enough in the bowers of Paradise; sweet will be the repose  never more to be followed by labor." The faith of the Arab  had become stronger than that of the Christian, and he  conquered.

The Sword is also, in the Bible, an emblem of SPEECH, or of  the utterance of thought. Thus, in that vision or apocalypse of  the sublime exile of Patmos, a protest in the name of the ideal,  overwhelming the real world, a tremendous satire uttered in  the name of Religion and Liberty, and with its fiery  reverberations smiting the throne of the Caesars, a sharp two-  edged sword comes out of the mouth of the Semblance of the 
Son of Man, encircled by the seven golden candlesticks, and  holding in his right hand seven stars. "The Lord," says Isaiah, 
"hath made my mouth like a sharp sword." "I have slain  them," says Hosea, "by the words  p. 54  of my mouth." "The word of God," says the writer of the  apostolic letter to the Hebrews, "is quick and powerful, and  sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the  dividing asunder of soul and spirit." "The sword of the Spirit,  which is the Word of God," says Paul, writing to the 
Christians at Ephesus. "I will fight against them with the  sword of my mouth," it is said in the Apocalypse, to the angel  of the church at Pergamos.

The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal  wave; but, like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It  is heard by few, remembered by still fewer, and fades away,  like an echo in the mountains, leaving no token of power. It is  nothing to the living and coming generations of men. It was  the written human speech, that gave power and permanence to  human thought. It is this that makes the whole human history  but one individual life.

To write on the rock is to write on a solid parchment; but it  requires a pilgrimage to see it. There is but one copy, and 
Time wears even that. To write on skins or papyrus was to  give, as it were, but one tardy edition, and the rich only could  procure it. The Chinese stereotyped not only the unchanging  wisdom of old sages, but also the passing events. The process  tended to suffocate thought, and to hinder progress; for there  is continual wandering in the wisest minds, and Truth writes  her last words, not on clean tablets, but on the scrawl that 
Error has made and often mended.

Printing made the movable letters prolific. Thenceforth the  orator spoke almost visibly to listening nations; and the author  wrote, like the Pope, his oecumenic decrees, urbi et orbi, and  ordered them to be posted up in all the market-places;  remaining, if he chose, impervious to human sight. The doom  of tyrannies was thenceforth sealed. Satire and invective  became potent as armies. The unseen hands of the Juniuses  could launch the thunderbolts, and make the ministers  tremble. One whisper from this giant fills the earth as easily  as Demosthenes filled the Agora. It will soon be heard at the  antipodes as easily as in the next street. It travels with the  lightning under the oceans. It makes the mass one man,  speaks to it in the same common language, and elicits a sure  and single response. Speech passes into thought, and thence  promptly into act. A nation becomes truly one, with one large  heart and a single throbbing pulse. Men are invisibly present  p. 55  to each other, as if already spiritual beings; and the thinker  who sits in an Alpine solitude, unknown to or forgotten by all  the world, among the silent herds and hills, may flash his  words to all the cities and over all the seas.

Select the thinkers to be Legislators; and avoid the gabblers. 
Wisdom is rarely loquacious. Weight and depth of thought are  unfavorable to volubility. The shallow and superficial are  generally voluble and often pass for eloquent. More words,  less thought,—is the general rule. The man who endeavors to  say something worth remembering in every sentence,  becomes fastidious, and condenses like Tacitus. The vulgar  love a more diffuse stream. The ornamentation that does not  cover strength is the gewgaws of babble.

Neither is dialectic subtlety valuable to public men. The 
Christian faith has it, had it formerly more than now; a  subtlety that might have entangled Plato, and which has  rivalled in a fruitless fashion the mystic lore of Jewish Rabbis  and Indian Sages. It is not this which converts the heathen. It  is a vain task to balance the great thoughts of the earth, like  hollow straws, on the finger-tips of disputation. It is not this  kind of warfare which makes the Cross triumphant in the  hearts of the unbelievers; but the actual power that lives in the 
Faith.

So there is a political scholasticism that is merely useless. The  dexterities of subtle logic rarely stir the hearts of the people,  or convince them. The true apostle of Liberty, Fraternity and 
Equality makes it a matter of life and death. His combats are  like those of Bossuet,—combats to the death. The true  apostolic fire is like the lightning: it flashes conviction into  the soul. The true word is verily a two-edged sword. Matters  of government and political science can be fairly dealt with  only by sound reason, and the logic of common sense: not the  common sense of the ignorant, but of the wise. The acutest  thinkers rarely succeed in be-coming leaders of men. A  watchword or a catchword is more potent with the people than  logic, especially if this be the least metaphysical. When a  political prophet arises, to stir the dreaming, stagnant nation,  and hold back its feet from the irretrievable descent, to heave  the land as with an earthquake, and shake the silly-shallow  idols from their seats, his words will come straight from God's  own mouth, and be thundered into the conscience. He will  reason, teach, warn, and rule. The real "Sword of the Spirit"  p. 56  is keener than the brightest blade of Damascus. Such men rule  a land, in the strength of justice, with wisdom and with power. 
Still, the men of dialectic subtlety often rule well, because in  practice they forget their finely-spun theories, and use the  trenchant logic of common sense. But when the great heart  and large intellect are left to the rust in private life, and small  attorneys, brawlers in politics, and those who in the cities  would be only the clerks of notaries, or practitioners in the  disreputable courts, are made national Legislators, the country  is in her dotage, even if the beard has not yet grown upon her  chin.

In a free country, human speech must needs be free; and the 
State must listen to the maunderings of folly, and the  screechings of its geese, and the brayings of its asses, as well  as to the golden oracles of its wise and great men. Even the  despotic old kings allowed their wise fools to say what they  liked. The true alchemist will extract the lessons of wisdom  from the babblings of folly. He will hear what a man has to  say on any given subject, even if the speaker end only in  proving himself prince of fools. Even a fool will sometimes  hit the mark. There is some truth in all men who are not  compelled to suppress their souls and speak other men's  thoughts. The finger even of the idiot may point to the great  highway.

A people, as well as the sages, must learn to forget. If it  neither learns the new nor forgets the old, it is fated, even if it  has been royal for thirty generations. To unlearn is to learn;  and also it is sometimes needful to learn again the forgotten. 
The antics of fools make the current follies more palpable, as  fashions are shown to be absurd by caricatures, which so lead  to their extirpation. The buffoon and the zany are useful in  their places. The ingenious artificer and craftsman, like 
Solomon, searches the earth for his materials, and transforms  the misshapen matter into glorious workmanship. The world  is conquered by the head even more than by the hands. Nor  will any assembly talk forever. After a time, when it has  listened long enough, it quietly puts the silly, the shallow, and  the superficial to one side,—it thinks, and sets to work.

The human thought, especially in popular assemblies, runs in  the most singularly crooked channels, harder to trace and  follow than the blind currents of the ocean. No notion is so  absurd that it may not find a place there. The master-workman  must train  p. 57  these notions and vagaries with his two-handed hammer.

They twist out of the way of the sword-thrusts; and are  invulnerable all over, even in the heel, against logic. The  martel or mace, the battle-axe, the great double-edged two-  handed sword must deal with follies; the rapier is no better  against them than a wand, unless it be the rapier of ridicule.

The SWORD is also the symbol of war and of the soldier. 
Wars, like thunder-storms, are often necessary to purify the  stagnant atmosphere. War is not a demon, without remorse or  reward. It restores the brotherhood in letters of fire. When  men are seated in their pleasant places, sunken in ease and  indolence, with Pretence and Incapacity and Littleness  usurping all the high places of State, war is the baptism of  blood and fire, by which alone they can be renovated. It is the  hurricane that brings the elemental equilibrium, the concord  of Power and Wisdom. So long as these continue obstinately  divorced, it will continue to chasten.

In the mutual appeal of nations to God, there is the  acknowledgment of His might. It lights the beacons of Faith  and Freedom, and heats the furnace through which the earnest  and loyal pass to immortal glory. There is in war the doom of  defeat, the quenchless sense of Duty, the stirring sense of 
Honor, the measureless solemn sacrifice of devotedness, and  the incense of success. Even in the flame and smoke of battle,  the Mason discovers his brother, and fulfills the sacred  obligations of Fraternity.

Two, or the Duad, is the symbol of Antagonism; of Good and 
Evil, Light and Darkness. It is Cain and Abel, Eve and Lilith, 
Jachin and Boaz, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon.

THREE, or the Triad, is most significantly expressed by the  equilateral and the right-angled triangles. There are three  principal colors or rays in the rainbow, which by intermixture  make seven. The three are the blue, the yellow, and the red. 
The Trinity of the Deity, in one mode or other, has been an  article in all creeds. He creates, preserves, and destroys. He is  the generative power, the productive capacity, and the result. 
The immaterial man, according to the Kabalah, is composed  of vitality, or life, the breath of life; of soul or mind, and  spirit. Salt, sulphur, and mercury are the great symbols of the  alchemists. To them man was body, soul, and spirit.

FOUR is expressed by the square, or four-sided right-angled  p. 58  figure. Out of the symbolic Garden of Eden flowed a river,  dividing into four streams,—PISON, which flows around the  land of gold, or light; GIHON, which flows around the land of 
Ethiopia or Darkness; HIDDEKEL, running eastward to 
Assyria; and the EUPHRATES. Zechariah saw four chariots  coming out from between two mountains of bronze, in the  first of which were red horses; in the second, black ; in the  third, white ; and in the fourth, grizzled : "and these were the  four winds of the heavens, that go forth from standing before  the Lord of all the earth." Ezekiel saw the four living  creatures, each with four faces and four wings, the faces of a  man and a lion, an ox and an eagle', and the four wheels going  upon their four sides; and Saint John beheld the four beasts,  full of eyes before and behind, the LION, the young Ox, the 
MAN, and the flying EAGLE. Four was the signature of the 
Earth. Therefore, in the 148th Psalm, of those who must  praise the Lord on the land, there are four times four, and four  in particular of living creatures. Visible nature is described as  the four quarters of the world, and the four corners of the  earth. "There are four," says the old Jewish saying, "which  take the first place in this world: man, among the creatures;  the eagle among birds; the ox among cattle; and the lion  among wild beasts." Daniel saw four great beasts come up  from the sea.

FIVE is the Duad added to the Triad. It is expressed by the  five-pointed or blazing star, the mysterious Pentalpha of 
Pythagoras. It is indissolubly connected with the number  seven. Christ fed His disciples and the multitude with five  loaves and two fishes, and of the fragments there remained  twelve, that is, five and seven, baskets full. Again He fed them  with seven loaves and a few little fishes, and there remained  seven baskets full. The five apparently small planets, Mercury, 
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, with the two greater ones,  the Sun and Moon, constituted the seven celestial spheres.

SEVEN was the peculiarly sacred number. There were seven  planets and spheres presided over by seven archangels. There  were seven colors in the rainbow; and the Phoenician Deity  was called the HEPTAKIS or God of seven rays; seven days  of the week; and seven and five made the number of months,  tribes, and apostles. Zechariah saw a golden candlestick, with  seven lamps and seven pipes to the lamps, and an olive-tree on  each side. Since  p. 59  he says, "the seven eyes of the Lord shall rejoice, and shall  see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel." John, in the 
Apocalypse, writes seven epistles to the seven churches. In the  seven epistles there are twelve promises. What is said of the  churches in praise or blame, is completed in the number three. 
The refrain, "who has ears to hear," etc., has ten words,  divided by three and seven, and the seven by three and four,  and the seven epistles are also so divided. In the seals,  trumpets, and vials, also, of this symbolic vision, the seven are  divided by four and three. He who sends his message to 
Ephesus, "holds the seven stars in his right hand, and walks  amid the seven golden lamps."

In six days, or periods, God created the Universe, and paused  on the seventh day. Of clean beasts, Noah was directed to take  by sevens into the ark; and of fowls by sevens', because in  seven days the rain was to commence. On the seventeenth day  of the month, the rain began; on the seventeenth day of the  seventh month, the ark rested on Ararat. When the dove  returned, Noah waited seven days before he sent her forth  again; and again seven, after she returned with the olive-leaf. 
Enoch was the seventh patriarch, Adam included, and Lamech  lived 111 years.

There were seven lamps in the great candlestick of the 
Tabernacle and Temple, representing the seven planets. Seven  times Moses sprinkled the anointing oil upon the altar. The  days of consecration of Aaron and his sons were seven in  number. A woman was unclean seven days after child-birth;  one infected with leprosy was shut up seven days; seven times  the leper was sprinkled with the blood of a slain bird; and  seven days afterwards he must remain abroad out of his tent. 
Seven times, in purifying the leper, the priest was to sprinkle  the consecrated oil; and seven times to sprinkle with the blood  of the sacrificed bird the house to be purified. Seven times the  blood of the slain bullock was sprinkled on the mercy-seat;  and seven times on the altar. The seventh year was a Sabbath  of rest; and at the end of seven times seven years came the  great year of jubilee. Seven days the people ate unleavened  bread, in the month of Abib. Seven weeks were counted from  the time of first putting the sickle to the wheat. The Feast of  the Tabernacles lasted seven days.

Israel was in the hand of Midian seven years before Gideon  delivered them. The bullock sacrificed by him was seven  years old. Samson told Delilah to bind him with seven green  withes; and  she wove the seven locks of his head, and afterwards shaved  them off. Balaam told Barak to build for him seven altars. 
Jacob served seven years for Leah and seven for Rachel. Job  had seven sons and three daughters, making the perfect  number ten. He had also seven thousand sheep and three  thousand camels. His friends sat down with him seven days  and seven nights. His friends were ordered to sacrifice seven  bullocks and seven rams; and again, at the end, he had seven  sons and three daughters, and twice seven thousand sheep,  and lived an hundred and forty, or twice seven times ten  years. Pharaoh saw in his dream seven fat and seven lean kine,  seven good ears and seven blasted ears of wheat; and there  were seven years of plenty, and seven of famine. Jericho fell,  when seven priests, with seven trumpets, made the circuit of  the city on seven successive days; once each day for six days,  and seven times on the seventh. "The seven eyes of the Lord,"  says Zechariah, "run to and fro through the whole earth." 
Solomon was seven years in building the Temple. Seven  angels, in the Apocalypse, pour out seven plagues, from seven  vials of wrath. The scarlet-colored beast, on which the woman  sits in the wilderness, has seven heads and ten horns. So also  has the beast that rises up out of the sea. Seven thunders  uttered their voices. Seven angels sounded seven trumpets. 
Seven lamps of fire, the seven spirits of God, burned before  the throne; and the Lamb that was slain had seven horns and  seven eyes.

EIGHT is the first cube, that of two. NINE is the square of  three, and represented by the triple triangle.

TEN includes all the other numbers. It is especially seven and  three', and is called the number of perfection. Pythagoras  represented it by the TETRACTYS, which had many mystic  meanings. This symbol is sometimes composed of dots or  points, sometimes of commas or yods, and in the Kabalah, of  the letters of the name of Deity. It is thus arranged:

9

9 5

? 5 ?

9 ) > >  p. 61

The Patriarchs from Adam to Noah, inclusive, are ten in  number, and the same number is that of the Commandments.

TWELVE is the number of the lines of equal length that form  a cube. It is the number of the months, the tribes, and the  apostles; of the oxen under the Brazen Sea, of the stones on  the breast-plate of the high priest.

III.

THE MASTER.  sjc sjc sjc

To understand literally the symbols and allegories of Oriental books as to ante-historical  matters, is willfully to close our eyes against the Light. To translate the symbols into the  trivial and commonplace, is the blundering of mediocrity.

All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see , and the  true objects of religion are THE SEEN. The earliest instruments of education were  symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to  external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and  mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and  spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, however  they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. "To retract," for  example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a  picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would be. The very word 
"spirit " means "breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe.

To present a visible symbol to the eye of another is not necessarily to inform him of the  meaning which that symbol has to you. Hence the philosopher soon superadded to the  symbols explanations addressed to the ear, susceptible of more precision, but less  effective and impressive than the painted or sculptured forms which he endeavored to  explain. Out of these explanations grew by degrees a variety of narrations, whose true  object and meaning were gradually forgotten, or lost in contradictions and incongruities. 
And when these were abandoned, and Philosophy resorted to definitions and formulas,  its language was but a more complicated symbolism, attempting in the dark to grapple  with and picture ideas impossible to be expressed. For as with the visible symbol, so  with the word: to utter it to you does not inform you of the exact meaning which it has  to me; and thus religion and philosophy became to a great extent disputes as to the  meaning  p. 63  of words. The most abstract expression for DEITY, which language can supply, is but a  sign or symbol for an object beyond our comprehension, and not more truthful and  adequate than the images of OSIRIS and VISHNU, or their names, except as being less  sensuous and explicit. We avoid sensuousness only by resorting to simple negation. We  come at last to define spirit by saying that it is not matter. Spirit is—spirit.

A single example of the symbolism of words will indicate to you one branch of 
Masonic study. We find in the English Rite this phrase: "I will always hail, ever  conceal, and never reveal;" and in the Catechism, these:

Q.'. "Ihail."

A-'- "Iconceal'"  and ignorance, misunderstanding the word "hail," has interpolated the phrase, "From  whence do you hailV"

But the word is really ", hele ," from the Anglo-Saxon verb ^ elan, helan, to cover, hide,  or conceal. And this word is rendered by the Latin verb tegere, to cover or roof over. 
"That ye fro me no thynge woll hele," says Gower. "They hele fro me no priuyte," says  the Romaunt of the Rose. "To heal a house," is a common phrase in Sussex; and in the  west of England, he that covers a house with slates is called a Healer. Wherefore, to 
"heal" means the same thing as to "tile, "--itself symbolic, as meaning, primarily, to  cover a house with tiles,— and means to cover, hide, or conceal. Thus language too is  symbolism, and words are as much misunderstood and misused as more material  symbols are.

Symbolism tended continually to become more complicated; and all the powers of 
Heaven were reproduced on earth, until a web of fiction and allegory was woven, partly  by art and partly by the ignorance of error, which the wit of man, with his limited means  of explanation, will never unravel. Even the Hebrew Theism became involved in  symbolism and image-worship, borrowed probably from an older creed and remote  regions of Asia,--the worship of the Great Semitic Nature-God AL or ELS and its  symbolical representations of JEHOVAH Himself were not even confined to poetical or  illustrative language. The priests were monotheists: the people idolaters.

There are dangers inseparable from symbolism, which afford an impressive lesson in  regard to the similar risks attendant on the use of language. The imagination, called in  to assist the reason,  p. 64  usurps its place or leaves its ally helplessly entangled in its web. Names which stand for  things are confounded with them; the means are mistaken for the end; the instrument of  interpretation for the object; and thus symbols come to usurp an independent character  as truths and persons. Though perhaps a necessary path, they were a dangerous one by  which to approach the Deity; in which many, says PLUTARCH, "mistaking the sign for  the thing signified, fell into a ridiculous superstition; while others, in avoiding one  extreme, plunged into the no less hideous gulf of irreligion and impiety."

It is through the Mysteries, CICERO says, that we have learned the first principles of  life; wherefore the term "initiation" is used with good reason; and they not only teach us  to live more happily and agreeably, but they soften the pains of death by the hope of a  better life hereafter.

The Mysteries were a Sacred Drama, exhibiting some legend significant of nature's  changes, of the visible Universe in which the Divinity is revealed, and whose import  was in many respects as open to the Pagan as to the Christian. Nature is the great 
Teacher of man; for it is the Revelation of God. It neither dogmatizes nor attempts to  tyrannize by compelling to a particular creed or special interpretation. It presents its  symbols to us, and adds nothing by way of explanation. It is the text without the  commentary; and, as we well know, it is chiefly the commentary and gloss that lead to  error and heresy and persecution. The earliest instructors of mankind not only adopted  the lessons of Nature, but as far as possible adhered to her method of imparting them. In  the Mysteries, beyond the current traditions or sacred and enigmatic recitals of the 
Temples, few explanations were given to the spectators, who were left, as in the school  of nature, to make inferences for themselves. No other method could have suited every  degree of cultivation and capacity. To employ nature's universal symbolism instead of  the technicalities of language, rewards the humblest inquirer, and discloses its secrets to  every one in proportion to his preparatory training and his power to comprehend them. 
If their philosophical meaning was above the comprehension of some, their moral and  political meanings are within the reach of all.

These mystic shows and performances were not the reading of a lecture, but the opening  of a problem. Requiring research, they were calculated to arouse the dormant intellect. 
They implied no  p. 65  hostility to Philosophy, because Philosophy is the great expounder of symbolism;  although its ancient interpretations were often ill-founded and incorrect. The alteration  from symbol to dogma is fatal to beauty of expression, and leads to intolerance and  assumed infallibility.

If, in teaching the great doctrine of the divine nature, of the Soul, and in striving to  explain its longings after immortality, and in proving its superiority over the souls of the  animals, which have no aspirations Heavenward, the ancients struggled in vain to  express the nature of the soul, by comparing it to FIRE and LIGHT, it will be well for  us to consider whether, with all our boasted knowledge, we have any better or clearer  idea of its nature, and whether we have not despairingly taken refuge in having none at  all. And if they erred as to its original place of abode, and understood literally the mode  and path of its descent, these were but the accessories of the great Truth, and probably,  to the Initiates, mere allegories, designed to make the idea more palpable and  impressive to the mind.

They are at least no more fit to be smiled at by the self-conceit of a vain ignorance, the  wealth of whose knowledge consists solely in words, than the bosom of Abraham, as a  home for the spirits of the just dead; the gulf of actual fire, for the eternal torture of  spirits', and the City of the New Jerusalem, with its walls of jasper and its edifices of  pure gold like clear glass, its foundations of precious stones, and its gates each of a  single pearl. "I knew a man," says PAUL, "caught up to the third Heaven;.... that he  was caught up into Paradise, and heard ineffable words, which it is not possible for a  man to utter." And nowhere is the antagonism and conflict between the spirit and body  more frequently and forcibly insisted on than in the writings of this apostle, nowhere the 
Divine nature of the soul more strongly asserted. "With the mind," he says, "I serve the  law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin... .As many as are led by the Spirit of 
God, are the sons of GOD.... The earnest expectation of the created waits for the  manifestation of the sons of God.... The created shall be delivered from the bondage  of corruption, of the flesh liable to decay, into the glorious liberty of the children of 
God."

Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of  p. 66  falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful  through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so as a means  of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed for wealth. Experience will  probably prove that these odious and detestable vices will grow most rankly and spread  most rapidly in a Republic. When office and wealth become the gods of a people, and  the most unworthy and unfit most aspire to the former, and fraud becomes the highway  to the latter, the land will reek with falsehood and sweat lies and chicane. When the  offices are open to all, merit and stem integrity and the dignity of unsullied honor will  attain them only rarely and by accident. To be able to serve the country well, will cease  to be a reason why the great and wise and learned should be selected to render service. 
Other qualifications, less honorable, will be more available. To adapt one's opinions to  the popular humor; to defend, apologize for, and justify the popular follies; to advocate  the expedient and the plausible; to caress, cajole, and flatter the elector; to beg like a  spaniel for his vote, even if he be a negro three removes from barbarism; to profess  friendship for a competitor and stab him by innuendo; to set on foot that which at third  hand shall become a lie, being cousin-german to it when uttered, and yet capable of  being explained away,--who is there that has not seen these low arts and base appliances  put into practice, and becoming general, until success cannot be surely had by any more  honorable means?~the result being a State ruled and ruined by ignorant and shallow  mediocrity, pert self-conceit, the greenness of unripe intellect, vain of a school-boy's  smattering of knowledge.

The faithless and the false in public and in political life, will be faithless and false in  private. The jockey in politics, like the jockey on the race-course, is rotten from skin to  core. Everywhere he will see first to his own interests, and whoso leans on him will be  pierced with a broken reed. His ambition is ignoble, like himself; and therefore he will  seek to attain office by ignoble means, as he will seek to attain any other coveted  object,--land, money, or reputation.

At length, office and honor are divorced. The place that the small and shallow, the  knave or the trickster, is deemed competent and fit to fill, ceases to be worthy the  ambition of the great and capable; or if not, these shrink from a contest, the weapons to  be used wherein are unfit for a gentleman to handle. Then the habits  p. 67  of unprincipled advocates in law courts are naturalized in Senates, and pettifoggers  wrangle there, when the fate of the nation and the lives of millions are at stake. States  are even begotten by villainy and brought forth by fraud, and rascalities are justified by  legislators claiming to be honorable. Then contested elections are decided by perjured  votes or party considerations; and all the practices of the worst times of corruption are  revived and exaggerated in Republics.

It is strange that reverence for truth, that manliness and genuine loyalty, and scorn of  littleness and unfair advantage, and genuine faith and godliness and large-heartedness  should diminish, among statesmen and people, as civilization advances, and freedom  becomes more general, and universal suffrage implies universal worth and fitness! In  the age of Elizabeth, without universal suffrage, or Societies for the Diffusion of Useful 
Knowledge, or popular lecturers, or Lycasa, the statesman, the merchant, the burgher,  the sailor, were all alike heroic, fearing God only, and man not at all. Let but a hundred  or two years elapse, and in a Monarchy or Republic of the same race, nothing is less  heroic than the merchant, the shrewd speculator, the office-seeker, fearing man only,  and God not at all. Reverence for greatness dies out, and is succeeded by base envy of  greatness. Every man is in the way of many, either in the path to popularity or wealth.

There is a general feeling of satisfaction when a great statesman is displaced, or a  general, who has been for his brief hour the popular idol, is unfortunate and sinks from  his high estate. It becomes a misfortune, if not a crime, to be above the popular level.

We should naturally suppose that a nation in distress would take counsel with the wisest  of its sons. But, on the contrary, great men seem never so scarce as when they are most  needed, and small men never so bold to insist on infesting place, as when mediocrity  and incapable pretence and sophomoric greenness, and showy and sprightly  incompetency are most dangerous. When France was in the extremity of revolutionary  agony, she was governed by an assembly of provincial pettifoggers, and Robespierre, 
Marat, and Couthon ruled in the place of Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and Carnot. England  was governed by the Rump Parliament, after she had beheaded her king. Cromwell  extinguished one body, and Napoleon the other.

Fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deceit in national affairs are the  p. 68  signs of decadence in States and precede convulsions or paralysis. To bully the weak  and crouch to the strong, is the policy of nations governed by small mediocrity. The  tricks of the canvass for office are re-enacted in Senates. The Executive becomes the  dispenser of patronage, chiefly to the most unworthy; and men are bribed with offices  instead of money, to the greater ruin of the Commonwealth. The Divine in human  nature disappears, and interest, greed, and selfishness takes it place. That is a sad and  true allegory which represents the companions of Ulysses changed by the enchantments  of Circe into swine.

"Ye cannot," said the Great Teacher, "serve God and Mammon." When the thirst for  wealth becomes general, it will be sought for as well dishonestly as honestly; by frauds  and overreachings, by the knaveries of trade, the heartlessness of greedy speculation, by  gambling in stocks and commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community. Men  will speculate upon the needs of their neighbors and the distresses of their country. 
Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes, will be blown up by cunning knavery,  with stupid credulity as its assistants and instrument. Huge bankruptcies, that startle a  country like the earth-quakes, and are more fatal, fraudulent assignments, engulfment of  the savings of the poor, expansions and collapses of the currency, the crash of banks,  the depreciation of Government securities, prey on the savings of self-denial, and  trouble with their depredations the first nourishment of infancy and the last sands of  life, and fill with inmates the churchyards and lunatic asylums. But the sharper and  speculator thrives and fattens. If his country is fighting by a levy en masse for her very  existence, he aids her by depreciating her paper, so that he may accumulate fabulous  amounts with little outlay. If his neighbor is distressed, he buys his property for a song. 
If he administers upon an estate, it turns out insolvent, and the orphans are paupers. If  his bank explodes, he is found to have taken care of himself in time. Society worships  its paper-and-credit kings, as the old Hindus and Egyptians worshipped their worthless  idols, and often the most obsequiously when in actual solid wealth they are the veriest  paupers. No wonder men think there ought to be another world, in which the injustices  of this may be atoned for, when they see the friends of ruined families begging the  wealthy sharpers to give alms to prevent  p. 69  the orphaned victims from starving, until they may find ways of supporting themselves.

States are chiefly avaricious of commerce and of territory. The latter leads to the  violation of treaties, encroachments upon feeble neighbors, and rapacity toward their  wards whose lands are coveted. Republics are, in this, as rapacious and unprincipled as 
Despots, never learning from history that inordinate expansion by rapine and fraud has  its inevitable consequences in dismemberment or subjugation. When a Republic begins  to plunder its neighbors, the words of doom are already written on its walls. There is a  judgment already pronounced of God upon whatever is unrighteous in the conduct of  national affairs. When civil war tears the vitals of a Republic, let it look back and see if  it has not been guilty of injustices; and if it has, let it humble itself in the dust!

When a nation becomes possessed with a spirit of commercial greed, beyond those just  and fair limits set by a due regard to a moderate and reasonable degree of general and  individual prosperity, it is a nation possessed by the devil of commercial avarice, a  passion as ignoble and demoralizing as avarice in the individual; and as this sordid  passion is baser and more unscrupulous than ambition, so it is more hateful, and at last  makes the infected nation to be regarded as the enemy of the human race. To grasp at  the lion's share of commerce, has always at last proven the ruin of States, because it  invariably leads to injustices that make a State detestable; to a selfishness and crooked  policy that forbid other nations to be the friends of a State that cares only for itself.

Commercial avarice in India was the parent of more atrocities and greater rapacity, and  cost more human lives, than the nobler ambition for extended empire of Consular 
Rome. The nation that grasps at the commerce of the world cannot but become selfish,  calculating, dead to the noblest impulses and sympathies which ought to actuate States. 
It will submit to insults that wound its honor, rather than endanger its commercial  interests by war; while, to subserve those interests, it will wage unjust war, on false or  frivolous pretexts, its free people cheerfully allying themselves with despots to crush a  commercial rival that has dared to exile its kings and elect its own ruler.

Thus the cold calculations of a sordid self-interest, in nations  p. 70  commercially avaricious, always at last displace the sentiments and lofty impulses of 
Honor and Generosity by which they rose to greatness; which made Elizabeth and 
Cromwell alike the protectors of Protestants beyond the four seas of England, against  crowned Tyranny and mitred Persecution; and, if they had lasted, would have forbidden  alliances with Czars and Autocrats and Bourbons to re-enthrone the Tyrannies of 
Incapacity, and arm the Inquisition anew with its instruments of torture. The soul of the  avaricious nation petrifies, like the soul of the individual who makes gold his god. The 
Despot will occasionally act upon noble and generous impulses, and help the weak  against the strong, the right against the wrong. But commercial avarice is essentially  egotistic, grasping, faithless, overreaching, crafty, cold, ungenerous, selfish, and  calculating, controlled by considerations of self-interest alone. Heartless and merciless,  it has no sentiments of pity, sympathy, or honor, to make it pause in its remorseless  career; and it crushes down all that is of impediment in its way, as its keels of  commerce crush under them the murmuring and unheeded waves.

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial supremacy, upon  some shallow pretext, is despicable, and more than aught else demonstrates to what  immeasurable depths of baseness men and nations can descend. Commercial greed  values the lives of men no more than it values the lives of ants. The slave-trade is as  acceptable to a people enthralled by that greed, as the trade in ivory or spices, if the  profits are as large. It will by-and-by endeavor to compound with God and quiet its own  conscience, by compelling those to whom it sold the slaves it bought or stole, to set  them free, and slaughtering them by hecatombs if they refuse to obey the edicts of its  philanthropy.

Justice in no wise consists in meting out to another that exact measure of reward or  punishment which we think and decree his merit, or what we call his crime, which is  more often merely his error, deserves. The justice of the father is not incompatible with  forgiveness by him of the errors and offences of his child. The Infinite Justice of God  does not consist in meting out exact measures of punishment for human frailties and  sins. We are too apt to erect our own little and narrow notions of what is right and just  into the law of justice, and to insist that God shall adopt that as His law; to measure off  something with our own little  tape-line, and call it God's love of justice. Continually we seek to ennoble our own  ignoble love of revenge and retaliation, by misnaming it justice.

Nor does justice consist in strictly governing our conduct toward other men by the rigid  mles of legal right. If there were a community anywhere, in which all stood upon the  strictness of this rule, there should be written over its gates, as a warning to the  unfortunates desiring admission to that inhospitable realm, the words which DANTE  says are written over the great gate of Hell: "LET THOSE WHO ENTER HERE 
LEAVE HOPE BEHIND!" It is not just to pay the laborer in field or factory or  workshop his current wages and no more, the lowest market-value of his labor, for so  long only as we need that labor and he is able to work; for when sickness or old age  overtakes him, that is to leave him and his family to starve; and God will curse with  calamity the people in which the children of the laborer out of work eat the boiled grass  of the field, and mothers strangle their children, that they may buy food for themselves  with the charitable pittance given for burial expenses. The rules of what is ordinarily  termed "Justice," may be punctiliously observed among the fallen spirits that are the  aristocracy of Hell.

Justice, divorced from sympathy, is selfish indifference, not in the least more laudable  than misanthropic isolation. There is sympathy even among the hair-like oscillatorias, a  tribe of simple plants, armies of which may be discovered, with the aid of the  microscope, in the tiniest bit of scum from a stagnant pool. For these will place  themselves, as if it were by agreement, in separate companies, on the side of a vessel  containing them, and seem marching upward in rows; and when a swarm grows weary  of its situation, and has a mind to change its quarters, each army holds on its way  without confusion or intermixture, proceeding with great regularity and order, as if  under the directions of wise leaders. The ants and bees give each other mutual  assistance, beyond what is required by that which human creatures are apt to regard as  the strict law of justice.

Surely we need but reflect a little, to be convinced that the individual man is but a  fraction of the unit of society, and that he is indissolubly connected with the rest of his  race. Not only the actions, but the will and thoughts of other men make or mar his

P- 72  fortunes, control his destinies, are unto him life or death, dishonor or honor. The  epidemics, physical and moral, contagious and infectious, public opinion, popular  delusions, enthusiasms, and the other great electric phenomena and currents, moral and  intellectual, prove the universal sympathy. The vote of a single and obscure man, the  utterance of self-will, ignorance, conceit, or spite, deciding an election and placing 
Folly or Incapacity or Baseness in a Senate, involves the country in war, sweeps away  our fortunes, slaughters our sons, renders the labors of a life unavailing, and pushes on,  helpless, with all our intellect to resist, into the grave.

These considerations ought to teach us that justice to others and to ourselves is the  same; that we cannot define our duties by mathematical lines ruled by the square, but  must fill with them the great circle traced by the compasses; that the circle of humanity  is the limit, and we are but the point in its centre, the drops in the great Atlantic, the  atom or particle, bound by a mysterious law of attraction which we term sympathy to  every other atom in the mass; that the physical and moral welfare of others cannot be  indifferent to us; that we have a direct and immediate interest in the public morality and  popular intelligence, in the well-being and physical comfort of the people at large. The  ignorance of the people, their pauperism and destitution, and consequent degradation,  their brutalization and demoralization, are all diseases; and we cannot rise high enough  above the people, nor shut ourselves up from them enough, to escape the miasmatic  contagion and the great magnetic currents.

Justice is peculiarly indispensable to nations. The unjust State is doomed of God to  calamity and ruin. This is the teaching of the Eternal Wisdom and of history. 
"Righteousness exalteth a nation; but wrong is a reproach to nations." "The Throne is  established by Righteousness. Let the lips of the Ruler pronounce the sentence that is 
Divine; and his mouth do no wrong in judgment!" The nation that adds province to  province by fraud and violence, that encroaches on the weak and plunders its wards,  and violates its treaties and the obligation of its contracts, and for the law of honor and  fair-dealing substitutes the exigencies of greed and the base precepts of policy and craft  and the ignoble tenets of expediency, is predestined to destruction; for here, as with the  individual, the consequences of wrong are inevitable and eternal.

A sentence is written against all that is unjust, written by God

P- 73  in the nature of man and in the nature of the Universe, because it is in the nature of the 
Infinite God. 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. If its  consequences pass by the doer, they fall upon and crush his children. It is a  philosophical, physical, and moral truth, in the form of a threat, that God visits the  iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth generation of those who  violate His laws. After a long while, the day of reckoning always comes, to nation as to  individual; and always the knave deceives himself, and proves a failure.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice and wrong pay to virtue and justice. It is .Satan  attempting to clothe himself in the angelic vesture of light. It is equally detestable in  morals, politics, and religion; in the man and in the nation. To do injustice under the  pretence of equity and fairness; to reprove vice in public and commit it in private; to  pretend to charitable opinion and censoriously condemn; to profess the principles of 
Masonic beneficence, and close the ear to the wail of distress and the cry of suffering;  to eulogize the intelligence of the people, and plot to deceive and be-tray them by  means of their ignorance and simplicity; to prate of purity, and peculate; of honor, and  basely abandon a sinking cause; of disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for place and  power, are hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful. To steal the  livery of the Court of God to serve the Devil withal; to pretend to believe in a God of  mercy and a Redeemer of love, and persecute those of a different faith; to devour  widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers; to preach continence, and  wallow in lust; to inculcate humility, and in pride surpass Lucifer; to pay tithe, and omit  the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith; to strain at a gnat, and  swallow a camel; to make clean the outside of the cup and platter, keeping them full  within of extortion and excess; to appear outwardly righteous unto men, but within be  full of hypocrisy and iniquity, is indeed to be like unto whited sepulchres, which appear  beautiful outward, but are within full of bones of the dead and of all uncleanness.

The Republic cloaks its ambition with the pretence of a desire and duty to "extend the  area of freedom," and claims it as its "manifest destiny" to annex other Republics or the 
States or Provinces of others to itself, by open violence, or under obsolete,  p. 74  empty, and fraudulent titles. The Empire founded by a successful soldier, claims its  ancient or natural boundaries, and makes necessity and its safety the plea for open  robbery. The great Merchant Nation, gaining foothold in the Orient, finds a continual  necessity for extending its dominion by arms, and subjugates India. The great Royalties  and Despotisms, without a plea, partition among themselves a Kingdom, dismember 
Poland, and prepare to wrangle over the dominions of the Crescent. To maintain the  balance of power is a plea for the obliteration of States. Carthage, Genoa, and Venice,  commercial Cities only, must acquire territory by force or fraud, and become States. 
Alexander marches to the Indus; Tamerlane seeks universal empire; the Saracens  conquer Spain and threaten Vienna.

The thirst for power is never satisfied. It is insatiable. Neither men nor nations ever  have power enough. When Rome was the mistress of the world, the Emperors caused  themselves to be worshipped as gods. The Church of Rome claimed despotism over the  soul, and over the whole life from the cradle to the grave. It gave and sold absolutions  for past and future sins. It claimed to be infallible in matters of faith. It decimated

Europe to purge it of heretics. It decimated America to convert the Mexicans and 
Peruvians. It gave and took away thrones; and by excommunication and interdict closed  the gates of Paradise against Nations, Spain, haughty with its dominion over the Indies,  endeavored to crush out Protestantism in the Netherlands, while Philip the Second  married the Queen of England, and the pair sought to win that kingdom back to its  allegiance to the Papal throne. After-ward Spain attempted to conquer it with her 
"invincible" Armada. Napoleon set his relatives and captains on thrones, and parcelled  among them half of Europe. The Czar rules over an empire more gigantic than Rome. 
The history of all is or will be the same,--acquisition, dismemberment, ruin. There is a  judgment of God against all that is unjust.

To seek to subjugate the will of others and take the soul captive, because it is the  exercise of the highest power, seems to be the highest object of human ambition. It is at  the bottom of all proselyting and propagandism, from that of Mesmer to that of the 
Church of Rome and the French Republic. That was the apostolate alike of Joshua and  of Mahomet. Masonry alone preaches Toleration, the right of man to abide by his own  faith, the right

P- 75  of all States to govern themselves. It rebukes alike the monarch who seeks to extend his  dominions by conquest, the Church that claims the right to repress heresy by fire and  steel, and the confederation of States that insist on maintaining a union by force and  restoring brotherhood by slaughter and subjugation.

It is natural, when we are wronged, to desire revenge; and to persuade ourselves that we  desire it less for our own satisfaction than to prevent a repetition of the wrong, to which  the doer would be encouraged by immunity coupled with the profit of the wrong. To  submit to be cheated is to encourage the cheater to continue; and we are quite apt to  regard ourselves as God's chosen instruments to inflict His vengeance, and for Him and  in His stead to discourage wrong by making it fruitless and its punishment sure. 
Revenge has been said to be "a kind of wild justice;" but it is always taken in anger, and  therefore is unworthy of a great soul, which ought not to suffer its equanimity to be  disturbed by ingratitude or villainy. The injuries done us by the base are as much  unworthy of our angry notice as those done us by the insects and the beasts; and when  we crush the adder, or slay the wolf or hyena, we should do it without being moved to  anger, and with no more feeling of revenge than we have in rooting up a noxious weed.

And if it be not in human nature not to take revenge by way of punishment, let the 
Mason truly consider that in doing so he is God's agent, and so let his revenge be  measured by justice and tempered by mercy. The law of God is, that the consequences  of wrong and cruelty and crime shall be their punishment; and the injured and the  wronged and the indignant are as much His instruments to enforce that law, as the  diseases and public detestation, and the verdict of history and the execration of posterity  are. No one will say that the Inquisitor who has racked and burned the innocent; the 
Spaniard who hewed Indian infants, living, into pieces with his sword, and fed the  mangled limbs to his blood-hounds; the military tyrant who has shot men without trial,  the knave who has robbed or betrayed his State, the fraudulent banker or bankrupt who  has beggared orphans, the public officer who has violated his oath, the judge who has  sold injustice, the legislator who has enabled Incapacity to work the ruin of the State,  ought not to be punished. Let them be so; and let the injured or the sympathizing be the  instruments of God's just vengeance; but always out of a higher feeling than mere  personal revenge.  p. 76

Remember that every moral characteristic of man finds its prototype among creatures of  lower intelligence; that the cruel foulness of the hyena, the savage rapacity of the wolf,  the merciless rage of the tiger, the crafty treachery of the panther, are found among  mankind, and ought to excite no other emotion, when found in the man, than when  found in the beast. Why should the true man be angry with the geese that hiss, the  peacocks that strut, the asses that bray, and the apes that imitate and chatter, although  they wear the human form? Always, also, it remains true, that it is more noble to forgive  than to take revenge; and that, in general, we ought too much to despise those who  wrong us, to feel the emotion of anger, or to desire revenge.

At the sphere of the Sun, you are in the region of LIGHT. * * * * The Hebrew  word for gold, ZAHAB, also means Light, of which the Sun is to the Earth the great  source. So, in the great Oriental allegory of the Hebrews, the River PISON compasses  the land of Gold or Light, and the River GIHON the land of Ethiopia or Darkness.

What light is, we no more know than the ancients did. According to the modem  hypothesis, it is not composed of luminous particles shot out from the sun with  immense velocity; but that body only impresses, on the ether which fills all space, a  powerful vibratory movement that extends, in the form of luminous waves, beyond the  most distant planets, supplying them with light and heat. To the ancients, it was an  outflowing from the Deity. To us, as to them, it is the apt symbol of truth and  knowledge. To us, also, the upward journey of the soul through the Spheres is  symbolical; but we are as little infonned as they whence the soul comes, where it has its  origin, and whither it goes after death. They endeavored to have some belief and faith,  some creed, upon those points. At the present day, men are satisfied to think nothing in  regard to all that, and only to believe that the soul is a something separate from the body  and out-living it, but whether existing before it, neither to inquire nor care. No one asks  whether it emanates from the Deity, or is created out of nothing, or is generated like the  body, and the issue of the souls of the father and the mother. Let us not smile, therefore,  at the ideas of the ancients, until we have a better belief; but accept their symbols as  meaning that the soul is of a Divine nature, originating in a sphere nearer the Deity, and  returning to that when freed from the enthrallment

P- 77  of the body; and that it can only return there when purified of all the sordidness and sin  which have, as it were, become part of its substance, by its connection with the body.

It is not strange that, thousands of years ago, men worshipped the Sun, and that to-day  that worship continues among the Parsees. Originally they looked beyond the orb to the  invisible God, of whom the Sun's light, seemingly identical with generation and life,  was the manifestation and outflowing. Long before the Chaldeean shepherds watched it  on their plains, it came up regularly, as it now does, in the morning, like a god, and  again sank, like a king retiring, in the west, to return again in due time in the same array  of majesty. We worship Immutability. It was that steadfast, immutable character of the 
Sun that the men of Baalbec worshipped. His light-giving and life-giving powers were  secondary attributes. The one grand idea that compelled worship was the characteristic  of God which they saw reflected in his light, and fancied they saw in its originality the  changelessness of Deity. He had seen thrones crumble, earthquakes shake the world and  hurl down mountains. Beyond Olympus, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, he had gone  daily to his abode, and had come daily again in the morning to behold the temples they  built to his worship. They personified him as BRAHMA, AMUN, OSIRIS, BEL, 
ADONIS, MALKARTH, MITHRAS, and APOLLO; and the nations that did so grew  old and died. Moss grew on the capitals of the great columns of his temples, and he  shone on the moss. Grain by grain the dust of his temples crumbled and fell, and was  borne off on. the wind, and still he shone on crumbling column and architrave. The roof  fell crashing on the pavement, and he shone in on the Holy of Holies with unchanging  rays. It was not strange that men worshipped the Sun.

There is a water-plant, on whose broad leaves the drops of water roll about without  uniting, like drops of mercury. So arguments on points of faith, in politics or religion,  roll over the surface of the mind. An argument that convinces one mind has no effect on  another. Few intellects, or souls that are the negations of intellect, have any logical  power or capacity. There is a singular obliquity in the human mind that makes the false  logic more effective than the true with nine-tenths of those who are regarded as men of  intellect. Even among the judges, not one in ten can argue logically. Each mind sees the  truth, distorted through its own  medium. Truth, to most men, is like matter in the spheroidal state. Like a drop of cold  water on the surface of a red-hot metal plate, it dances, trembles, and spins, and never  comes into contact with it; and the mind may be plunged into truth, as the hand  moistened with sulphurous acid may into melted metal, and be not even wanned by the  immersion.

The word Khairum or Khurum is a compound one. Gesenius renders Khiirum by the  word noble or free-born : Khur meaning white, noble. It also means the opening of a  window, the socket of the eye. Khri also means white , or an opening ; and Khris, the orb  of the Sun, in Job viii. 13 and x. 7. Krishna is the Hindu Sun-God. Khur, the Parsi  word, is the literal name of the Sun.

From Kur or Khur, the Sun, comes Khora, a name of Lower Egypt. The Sun, Bryant  says in his Mythology, was called Kur, and Plutarch says that the Persians called the 
Sun Kiiros. Kurios, Lord, in Greek, like Adonai', Lord, in Phoenician and Hebrew, was  applied to the Sun. Many places were sacred to the Sun, and called Kura, Kuria, 
Kuropolis, Kurene, Kureschata, Kuresta, and Corusia in Scythia.

The Egyptian Deity called by the Greeks "Horus," was Her-Ra, or Har-oeris, Hor or 
Har, the Sun. Hari is a Hindu name of the Sun. Ari-al, Ar-es, Ar, Aryaman, Areimonios,  the AR meaning Fire or Flame, are of the same kindred. Hermes or Har-mes, {Aram, 
Remus, Haram, Harameias), was Kadmos, the Divine Light or Wisdom. Mar-kuri, says 
Movers, is Mar, the Sun.

In the Hebrew, AOOR, is Light, Fire, or the Sun. Cyrus, said Ctesias, was so named  from Kuros, the Sun. Kuris, Hesychius says, was Adonis. Apollo, the Sun-god, was  called Kurraios, from Kurra, a city in Phocis. The people of Kurene, originally 
Ethiopians or Cuthites, worshipped the Sun under the title of Achoor and Achor.

We know, through a precise testimony in the ancient annals of Tsur, that the principal  festivity of Mal-karth, the incarnation of the Sun at the Winter Solstice, held at Tsur,  was called his rebirth or his awakening, and that it was celebrated by means of a pyre,  on which the god was supposed to regain, through the aid of fire, a new life. This  festival was celebrated in the month Peritius (Barith), the second day of which  corresponded to the 25th of December. KHUR-UM, King of Tyre, Movers says, first  performed

P- 79  this ceremony. These facts we learn from Josephus, Servius on the /Eneid, and the

Dionysiacs of Nonnus; and through a coincidence that cannot be fortuitous, the same  day was at Rome the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the festal day of the invincible Sun. 
Under this title, HERCULES, HAR -acles, was worshipped at Tsur. Thus, while the  temple was being erected, the death and resurrection of a Sun-God was annually  represented at Tsur, by Solomon's ally, at the winter solstice, by the pyre of MAL- 
KARTH, the Tsurian Haracles.

AROERIS or HAR-oera, the elder HORUS, is from the same old root that in the 
Hebrew has the form Aur, or, with the definite article prefixed, Haur , Light, or the 
Light, splendor, flame, the Sun and. his rays. The hieroglyphic of the younger HORUS  was the point in a circle; of the Elder, a pair of eyes; and the festival of the thirtieth day  of the month Epiphi , when the sun and moon were supposed to be in the same right line  with the earth, was called " The birth-day of the eyes ofHorus."

In a papyrus published by Champollion, this god is styled "Haroeri, Lord of the Solar 
Spirits, the beneficent eye of the Sun." Plutarch calls him " Har-pocrates;" but there is  no trace of the latter part of the name in the hieroglyphic legends. He is the son of 
OSIRIS and Isis; and is represented sitting on a throne supported by lions', the same  word, in Egyptian, meaning Lion and Sun. So Solomon made a great throne of ivory,  plated with gold, with six steps, at each arm of which was a lion, and one on each side  to each step, making seven on each side.

Again, the Hebrew word Tl, Khi, means "living;" and DX"i, ram "was, or shall be, raised  or lifted up." The latter is the same as Din ,dtik ,nn room, arddm, harum, whence 
Aram, for Syria, or Aramcea, High-land. Khairum, therefore, would mean "was raised  up to life, or living."

So, in Arabic, hrm, an unused root, meant, "was high," "made great," "exalted'," and 
Hirm means an ox, the symbol of the Sun in Taurus, at the Vernal Equinox.

KHURUM, therefore, improperly called Hiram, is KHUR-OM, the same as Her-ra, 
Her-mes, and Her-acles , the "Heracles Tyrius Invictus," the personification of Light and  the Son, the Mediator, Redeemer, and Saviour. From the Egyptian word Ra came the 
Coptic Ouro, and the Hebrew Aur, Light. Har-oeri, is Hor or Har, the chief or master. 
Hor is also heat; and hora, season or  p. 80  hour; and hence in several African dialects, as names of the Sun, Airo, Ayero, eer, uiro,  ghurrah, and the like. The royal name rendered Pharaoh, was PHRA, that is, Pai-ra,  the Sun.

The legend of the contest between Hor-ra and Set , or Set-nu-bi, the same as Bar or Bal,  is older than that of the strife between Osiris and Typhon; as old, at least, as the  nineteenth dynasty. It is called in the Book of the Dead, "The day of the battle between 
Horns and Set." The later myth connects itself with Phoenicia and Syria. The body of 
OSIRIS went ashore at Gebal or Byblos, sixty miles above Tsur. You will not fail to  notice that in the name of each murderer of Khurum, that of the Evil God Bal is found.

Har-oeri was the god of TIME, as well as of Life. The Egyptian legend was that the 
King of Byblos cut down the tamarisk-tree containing the body of OSIRIS, and made of  it a column for his palace. Isis, employed in the palace, obtained possession of the  column, took the body out of it, and carried it away. Apuleius describes her as "a  beautiful female, over whose divine neck her long thick hair hung in graceful ringlets;"  and in the procession female attendants, with ivory combs, seemed to dress and  ornament the royal hair of the goddess. The palm-tree, and the lamp in the shape of a  boat, appeared in the procession. If the symbol we are speaking of is not a mere modem  invention, it is to these things it alludes.

The identity of the legends is also confirmed by this hieroglyphic picture, copied from  an ancient Egyptian monument, which may also enlighten you as to the Lion's grip and  the Master's gavel.

nx, in the ancient Phoenician character, • and in the Samaritan, / *, A B, 
(the two letters representing the numbers 1, 2, or Unity and Duality, means Father , and  is a primitive noun, common to all the Semitic languages.

It also means an Ancestor, Originator, Inventor, Head, Chief or Ruler, Manager, 
Overseer, Master, Priest, Prophet.

■ax is simply Father, when it is in construction, that is, when it precedes another word,  and in English the preposition "of' is interposed, as ^X-’DX, Abi-Al, the Father of Al.

Also, the final Yod means "my"; so that ’3X by itself means "My father." ’’nx ttt, David  my father, 2 Chron. ii. 3.

1 (Vav) final is the possessive pronoun "his"; and vnx, Abiu (which we read "Abif')  means "of my father's." Its full meaning, as connected with the name of Khurum, no  doubt is, "formerly one of my father's servants," or "slaves."

The name of the Phoenician artificer is, in Samuel and Kings, DTn and 2]—DlTn Sam. v. 
11; 1 Kings v. 15; 1 Kings vii. 40]. In Chronicles it is min, with the addition of 2] .’2X 
Chron. ii. 12]; and of 2] T»3X Chron. iv. 16].

It is merely absurd 'to add the word "Abif," or " Abiff " as part of the name of the  artificer. And it is almost as absurd to add the word " Abi ," which was a title and not part  of the name. Joseph says [Gen. xlv. 8], "God has constituted me ’Ab I’Paraah, as Father  to Paraah, i.e., Vizier or Prime Minister." So Haman was called the Second Father of 
Artaxerxes; and when King Khurum used the phrase "Khurum Abi," he meant that the  artificer he sent Schlomoh was the principal or chief workman in his line at Tsur.

A medal copied by Montfaucon exhibits a female nursing a child, with ears of wheat in  her hand, and the legend (Iao). She is seated on clouds, a star at her head, and three ears  of wheat rising from an altar before her.

HORUS was the mediator, who was buried three days, was regenerated, and triumphed  over the evil principle.

The word HERI, in Sanscrit, means Shepherd, as well as Saviour. CRISHNA is called 
Heri, as JESUS called Himself the Good Shepherd.

Tin, Khur, means an aperture of a window, a cave, or the eye. Also it means white. In

"in also means an opening, and noble, free-born, high-bom.  p. 82

[paragraph continues] Din, KHURM means consecrated, devoted; in /Ethiopic, !

It is the name of a city, [Josh. xix. 38]; and of a man, [Ezr. ii. 32, x. 31; Neh. iii. 11].  rrpn, Khirah, means nobility, a noble race.

Buddha is declared to comprehend in his own person the essence of the Hindu Trimurti;  and hence the tri-literal mono-syllable Om or Aum is applied to him as being essentially  the same as Brahma-Vishnu-Siva. He is the same as Hermes, Thoth, Taut, and Teutates. 
One of his names is Heri-maya or Hermaya, which are evidently the same name as 
Hermes and Khirm or Khurm. Heri, in Sanscrit, means Lord.

A learned Brother places over the two symbolic pillars, from right to left, the two words  and in' 1 and BAL: followed by the hieroglyphic equivalent, 
of the Sun-God, Amun-ra. Is it an accidental coincidence, that in the name of  each murderer are the two names of the Good and Evil Deities of the Hebrews; for Yu-  bel is but Yehu-Bal or Yeho-Bal ? and that the three final syllables of the names, a , o,  um , make A-'-U-'-M-'. the sacred word of the Hindoos, meaning the Triune-God, Life¬  giving, Life-preserving, Life-destroying: represented by the mystic character T ?

The genuine Acacia , also, is the thorny tamarisk, the same tree which grew up around  the body of Osiris. It was a sacred tree among the Arabs, who made of it the idol Al- 
Uzza, which Mohammed destroyed. It is abundant as a bush in the Desert of Thur: and  of it the "crown of thorns" was composed, which was set on the forehead of Jesus of 
Nazareth. It is a fit type of immortality on account of its tenacity of life; for it has been  known, when planted as a door-post, to take root again and shoot out budding boughs  over the threshold.

Every commonwealth must have its periods of trial and transition, especially if it  engages in war. It is certain at some time to be wholly governed by agitators appealing  to all the baser elements of the popular nature; by moneyed corporations; by those  enriched by the depreciation of government securities or paper; by small attorneys,  schemers, money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers—an ignoble oligarchy, enriched  by the distresses of the State, and fattened on the miseries of the people. Then all the  deceitful visions of equality and the rights of man end; and the  p. 83  wronged and plundered State can regain a real liberty only by passing through "great  varieties of untried being," purified in its transmigration by fire and blood.

In a Republic, it soon comes to pass that parties gather round the negative and positive  poles of some opinion or notion, and that the intolerant spirit of a triumphant majority  will allow no deviation from the standard of orthodoxy which it has set up for itself. 
Freedom of opinion will be professed and pretended to, but every one will exercise it at  the peril of being banished fro n political communion with those who hold the reins and  prescribe the policy to be pursued. Slavishness to party and obsequiousness to the  popular whims go hand in hand. Political independence only occurs in a fossil state; and  men's opinions grow out of the acts they have been constrained to do or sanction. 
Flattery, either of individual or people, corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and  adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. A Cassar, securely seated in  power, cares less for it than a free democracy; nor will his appetite for it grow to  exorbitance, as that of a people will, until it becomes insatiate. The effect of liberty to  individuals is, that they may do what they please; to a people, it is to a great extent the  same. If accessible to flattery, as this is always interested, and resorted to on low and  base motives, and for evil purposes, either individual or people is sure, in doing what it  pleases, to do what in honor and conscience should have been left undone. One ought  not even to risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints; and as both  individuals and peoples are prone to make a bad use of power, to flatter them, which is  a sure way to mislead them, well deserves to be called a crime.

The first principle in a Republic ought to be, "that no man or set of men is entitled to  exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in  consideration of public services; which not being descendible, neither ought the offices  of magistrate, legislature, nor judge, to be hereditary." It is a volume of Truth and 
Wisdom, a lesson for the study of nations, embodied in a single sentence, and expressed  in language which every man can understand. If a deluge of despotism were to  overthrow the world, and destroy all institutions under which freedom is protected, so  that they should no longer be remembered among men, this sentence, preserved, would  be sufficient  p. 84  to rekindle the fires of liberty and revive the race of free men.

But, to preserve liberty, another must be added: "that a free State does not confer office  as a reward, especially for questionable services, unless she seeks her own ruin; but all  officers are employed by her, in consideration solely of their will and ability to render  service in the future; and therefore that the best and most competent are always to be  preferred."

For, if there is to be any other rule, that of hereditary succession is perhaps as good as  any. By no other rule is it possible to preserve the liberties of the State. By no other to  intrust the power of making the laws to those only who have that keen instinctive sense  of injustice and wrong which enables them to detect baseness and corruption in their  most secret hiding-places, and that moral courage and generous manliness and gallant  independence that make them fearless in dragging out the perpetrators to the light of  day, and calling down upon them the scorn and indignation of the world. The flatterers  of the people are never such men. On the contrary, a time always comes to a Republic,  when it is not content, like Tiberius, with a single Sejanus, but must have a host; and  when those most prominent in the lead of affairs are men without reputation,  statesmanship, ability, or information, the mere hacks of party, owing their places to  trickery and want of qualification, with none of the qualities of head or heart that make  great and wise men, and, at the same time, filled with all the narrow conceptions and  bitter intolerance of political bigotry. These die; and the world is none the wiser for  what they have said and done. Their names sink in the bottomless pit of oblivion; but  their acts of folly or knavery curse the body politic and at last prove its ruin.

Politicians, in a free State, are generally hollow, heartless, and selfish. Their own  aggrandisement is the end of their patriotism; and they always look with secret  satisfaction on the disappointment or fall of one whose loftier genius and superior  talents over-shadow their own self-importance, or whose integrity and incorruptible  honor are in the way of their selfish ends. The influence of the small aspirants is always  against the great man. His accession to power may be almost for a lifetime. One of  themselves will be more easily displaced, and each hopes to succeed him; and so it at  length comes to pass that men impudently  p. 85  aspire to and actually win the highest stations, who are unfit for the lowest clerkships;  and incapacity and mediocrity become the surest passports to office.

The consequence is, that those who feel themselves competent and qualified to serve  the people, refuse with disgust to enter into the struggle for office, where the wicked  and jesuitical doctrine that all is fair in politics is an excuse for every species of low  villainy; and those who seek even the highest places of the State do not rely upon the  power of a magnanimous spirit, on the sympathizing impulses of a great soul, to stir and  move the people to generous, noble, and heroic resolves, and to wise and manly action;  but, like spaniels erect on their hind legs, with fore-paws obsequiously suppliant, fawn,  flatter, and actually beg for votes. Rather than descend to this, they stand  contemptuously aloof, disdainfully refusing to court the people, and acting on the  maxim, that "mankind has no title to demand that we shall serve them in spite of  themselves."

It is lamentable to see a country split into factions, each following this or that great or  brazen-ffonted leader with a blind, unreasoning, unquestioning hero-worship; it is  contemptible to see it divided into parties, whose sole end is the spoils of victory, and  their chiefs the low, the base, the venal and the small. Such a country is in the last  stages of decay, and near its end, no matter how prosperous it may seem to be. It  wrangles over the volcano and the earthquake. But it is certain that no government can  be conducted by the men of the people, and for the people, without a rigid adherence to  those principles which our reason commends as fixed and sound. These must be the  tests of parties, men, and measures. Once determined, they must be inexorable in their  application, and all must either come up to the standard or declare against it. Men may  betray: principles never can. Oppression is one invariable consequence of misplaced  confidence in treacherous man, it is never the result of the working or application of a  sound, just, well-tried principle. Compromises which bring fundamental principles into  doubt, in order to unite in one party men of antagonistic creeds, are frauds, and end in  min, the just and natural consequence of fraud. Whenever you have settled upon your  theory and creed, sanction no departure from it in practice, on any ground of  expediency. It is the Master's word.  p. 86

[paragraph continues] Yield it up neither to flattery nor force! Let no defeat or persecution rob  you of it! Believe that he who once blundered in statesmanship will blunder again; that  such blunders are as fatal as crimes; and that political near-sightedness does not  improve by age. There are always more impostors than seers among public men, more  false prophets than true ones, more prophets of Baal than of Jehovah; and Jerusalem is  always in danger from the Assyrians.

Sallust said that after a State has been corrupted by luxury and idleness, it may by its  mere greatness bear up under the burden of its vices. But even while he wrote, Rome, of  which he spoke, had played out her masquerade of freedom. Other causes than luxury  and sloth destroy Republics. If small, their larger neighbors extinguish them by  absorption. If of great extent, the cohesive force is too feeble to hold them together, and  they fall to pieces by their own weight. The paltry ambition of small men disintegrates  them. The want of wisdom in their councils creates exasperating issues. Usurpation of  power plays its part, incapacity seconds corruption, the storm rises, and the fragments  of the incoherent raft strew the sandy shores, reading to mankind another lesson for it to  disregard.

The Forty-seventh Proposition is older than Pythagoras. It is this: "In every right-angled  triangle, the sum of the squares of the base and perpendicular is equal to the square of  the hypothenuse."  p. 87

The square of a number is the product of that number, multi-plied by itself. Thus, 4 is  the square of 2, and 9 of 3.

The first ten numbers are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;  their squares are 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100;

and

3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19  are the differences between each square and that which precedes it; giving us the sacred  numbers, 3, 5, 7, and 9.

Of these numbers, the square of 3 and 4, added together, gives the square of 5; and  those of 6 and 8, the square of 10; and if a right-angled triangle be formed, the base  measuring 3 or 6 parts, and the perpendicular 4 or 8 parts, the hypothenuse will be 5 or 
10 parts; and if a square is erected on each side, these squares being subdivided into  squares each side of which is one part in length, there will be as many of these in the  square erected on the hypothenuse as in the other two squares together.

Now the Egyptians arranged their deities in Triads—One FATHER or the Spirit or Active 
Principle or Generative Power; the MOTHER, or Matter, or the Passive Principle, or  the Conceptive Power; and the SON, Issue or Product , the Universe, proceeding from  the two principles. These were OSIRIS, ISIS, and HORUS. In the same way, PLATO  gives us Thought the Father, Primitive Matter the Mother, and Kosmos the World, the 
Son, the Universe animated by a soul. Triads of the same kind are found in the Kabalah.

PLUTARCH says, in his book De Iside et Osiride, "But the better and diviner nature  consists of three, that which exists within the Intellect only, and Matter, and that which  proceeds from these, which the Greeks call Kosmos; of which three, Plato is wont to  call the Intelligible, the 'Idea, Exemplar, and Father'; Matter, 'the Mother, the Nurse, and  the place and receptacle of generation'; and the issue of these two, 'the Offspring and 
Genesis,"' the Kosmos, "a word signifying equally Beauty and Order, or the Universe  itself." You will not fail to notice that Beauty is symbolized by the Junior Warden in the 
South. Plutarch continues to say that the Egyptians compared the universal nature to  what they called the most beautiful and perfect triangle, as Plato does, in that nuptial  diagram, as it is termed, which he has introduced into his Commonwealth. Then he adds  that this triangle is right-angled, and its sides respectively as 3, 4, and 5; and he says, 
"We must suppose that the perpendicular is designed by them  p. 88  to represent the masculine nature, the base the feminine, and that the hypothenuse is to  be looked upon as the offspring of both; and accordingly the first of them will aptly  enough represent OSIRIS, or the prime cause; the second, ISIS, or the receptive  capacity; the last, HORUS, or the common effect of the other two. For 3 is the first  number which is composed of even and odd; and 4 is a square whose side is equal to the  even number 2; but 5, being generated, as it were, out of the preceding numbers, 2 and 
3, may be said to have an equal relation to both of them, as to its common parents."

The clasped hands is another symbol which was used by PYTHAGORAS. It  represented the number 10, the sacred number in which all the preceding numbers were  contained; the number expressed by the mysterious TETRACTYS, a figure borrowed  by him and the Hebrew priests alike from the Egyptian sacred science, and which ought  to be replaced among the symbols of the Master's Degree, where it of right belongs. The 
Hebrews formed it thus, with the letters of the Divine name:

The Tetractys thus leads you, not only to the study of the Pythagorean philosophy as to  numbers, but also to the Kabalah, and will aid you in discovering the True Word, and  understanding what was meant by "The Music of the Spheres." Modem science  strikingly confirms the ideas of Pythagoras in regard to the properties of numbers, and  that they govern in the Universe. Long before his time, nature had extracted her cube-  roots and her squares.

All the FORCES at man's disposal or under man's control, or subject to man's influence,  are his working tools. The friendship and sympathy that knit heart to heart are a force  like the attraction  p. 89  of cohesion, by which the sandy particles became the solid rock. If this law of attraction  or cohesion were taken away, the material worlds and suns would dissolve in an instant  into thin invisible vapor. If the ties of friendship, affection, and love were annulled,  mankind would become a raging multitude of wild and savage beasts of prey. The sand

hardens into rock under the immense superincumbent pressure of the ocean, aided  sometimes by the irresistible energy of fire; and when the pressure of calamity and  danger is upon an order or a country, the members or the citizens ought to be the more  closely united by the cohesion of sympathy and inter-dependence.

Morality is a force. It is the magnetic attraction of the heart toward Truth and Virtue.

The needle, imbued with this mystic property, and pointing unerringly to the north,  carries the mariner safely over the trackless ocean, through storm and darkness, until his  glad eyes behold the beneficent beacons that welcome him to safe and hospitable  harbor. Then the hearts of those who love him are gladdened, and his home made  happy; and this gladness and happiness are due to the silent, unostentatious, unerring  monitor that was the sailor's guide over the weltering waters. But if drifted too far  northward, he finds the needle no longer true, but pointing elsewhere than to the north,  what a feeling of helplessness falls upon the dismayed mariner, what utter loss of  energy and courage! It is as if the great axioms of morality were to fail and be no longer  true, leaving the human soul to drift helplessly, eyeless like Prometheus, at the mercy of  the uncertain, faithless currents of the deep.

Honor and Duty are the pole-stars of a Mason, the Dioscuri, by never losing sight of  which he may avoid disastrous shipwreck. These Palinurus watched, until, overcome by  sleep, and the vessel no longer guided truly, he fell into and was swallowed up by the  insatiable sea. So the Mason who loses sight of these, and is no longer governed by  their beneficent and potential force, is lost, and sinking out of sight, will disappear  unhonored and unwept.

The force of electricity, analogous to that of sympathy, and by means of which great  thoughts or base suggestions, the utterances of noble or ignoble natures, flash  instantaneously over the nerves of nations; the force of growth, fit type of immortality,  lying dormant three thousand years in the wheat-grains buried with  p. 90  their mummies by the old Egyptians; the forces of expansion and contraction,  developed in the earthquake and the tornado, and giving birth to the wonderful  achievements of steam, have their parallelisms in the moral world, in individuals, and  nations. Growth is a necessity for nations as for men. Its cessation is the beginning of  decay. In the nation as well as the plant it is mysterious, and it is irresistible. The  earthquakes that rend nations asunder, overturn thrones, and engulf monarchies and  republics, have been long prepared for, like the volcanic eruption. Revolutions have  long roots in the past. The force exerted is in direct proportion to the previous restraint  and compression. The true statesman ought to see in progress the causes that are in due  time to produce them; and he who does not is but a blind leader of the blind.

The great changes in nations, like the geological changes of the earth, are slowly and  continuously wrought. The waters, falling from Heaven as rain and dews, slowly  disintegrate the granite mountains; abrade the plains, leaving hills and ridges of  denudation as their monuments; scoop out the valleys, fill up the seas, narrow the rivers,  and after the lapse of thousands on thousands of silent centuries, prepare the great  alluvia for the growth of that plant, the snowy envelope of whose seeds is to employ the  looms of the world, and the abundance or penury of whose crops shall determine  whether the weavers and spinners of other realms shall have work to do or starve.

So Public Opinion is an immense force; and its currents are as inconstant and  incomprehensible as those of the atmosphere. Nevertheless, in free governments, it is  omnipotent; and the business of the statesman is to find the means to shape, control, and  direct it. According as that is done, it is beneficial and conservative, or destructive and  ruinous. The Public Opinion of the civilized world is International Law; and it is so  great a force, though with no certain and fixed boundaries, that it can even constrain the  victorious despot to be generous, and aid an oppressed people in its struggle for  independence.

Habit is a great force; it is second nature, even in trees. It is as strong in nations as in  men. So also are Prejudices, which are given to men and nations as the passions are,--as  forces, valuable, if properly and skillfully availed of; destructive, if unskillfully  handled.

P 91

Above all, the Love of Country, State Pride, the Love of Home, are forces of immense  power. Encourage them all. Insist upon them in your public men. Permanency of home  is necessary to patriotism. A migratory race will have little love of country. State pride  is a mere theory and chimera, where men remove from State to State with indifference,  like the Arabs, who camp here to-day and there to-morrow.

If you have Eloquence, it is a mighty force. See that you use it for good purposes—to  teach, exhort, ennoble the people, and not to mislead and corrupt them. Corrupt and  venal orators are the assassins of the public liberties and of public morals.

The Will is a force; its limits as yet unknown. It is in the power of the will that we  chiefly see the spiritual and divine in man. There is a seeming identity between his will  that moves other men, and the Creative Will whose action seems so incomprehensible. 
It is the men of will and action, not the men of pure intellect, that govern the world.

Finally, the three greatest moral forces are FAITH, which is the only true WISDOM,  and the very foundation of all government; HOPE, which is STRENGTH, and insures  success; and CHARITY, which is BEAUTY, and alone makes animated, united effort  possible. These forces are within the reach of all men; and an association of men,  actuated by them, ought to exercise an immense power in the world. If Masonry does  not, it is because she has ceased to possess them.

Wisdom in the man or statesman, in king or priest, largely consists in the due  appreciation of these forces; and upon the general wow-appreciation of some of them the  fate of nations often depends. What hecatombs of lives often hang upon the not  weighing or not sufficiently weighing the force of an idea, such as, for example, the  reverence for a flag, or the blind attachment to a form or constitution of government!

What errors in political economy and statesmanship are committed in consequence of  the over-estimation or under-estimation of particular values, or the non-estimation of  some among them! Everything, it is asserted, is the product of human labor; but the  gold or the diamond which one accidentally finds without labor is not so. What is the  value of the labor bestowed by the husbandman upon his crops, compared with the  value of the sunshine and rain, without with his labor avails nothing? Commerce  p. 92  carried on by the labor of man, adds to the value of the products of the field, the mine,  or the workshop, by their transportation to different markets; but how much of this  increase is due to the rivers down which these products float, to the winds that urge the  keels of commerce over the ocean!

Who can estimate the value of morality and manliness in a State, of moral worth and  intellectual knowledge? These are the sunshine and rain of the State. The winds, with  their change-able, fickle, fluctuating currents, are apt emblems of the fickle humors of  the populace, its passions, its heroic impulses, its enthusiasms. Woe to the statesman  who does not estimate these as values!

Even music and song are sometimes found to have an incalculable value. Every nation  has some song of a proven value, more easily counted in lives than dollars. The 
Marseillaise was worth to revolutionary France, who shall say how many thousand  men?

Peace also is a great element of prosperity and wealth; a value not to be calculated. 
Social intercourse and association of men in beneficent Orders have a value not to be  estimated in coin. The illustrious examples of the Past of a nation, the memories and  immortal thoughts of her great and wise thinkers, statesmen, and heroes, are the  invaluable legacy of that Past to the Present and Future. And all these have not only the  values of the loftier and more excellent and priceless kind, but also an actual money-  value, since it is only when co-operating with or aided or enabled by these, that human  labor creates wealth. They are of the chief elements of material wealth, as they are of  national manliness, heroism, glory, prosperity, and immortal renown.

Providence has appointed the three great disciplines of War, the Monarchy and the 
Priesthood, all that the CAMP, the PALACE, and the TEMPLE may symbolize, to train  the multitudes forward to intelligent and premeditated combinations for all the great  purposes of society. The result will at length be free governments among men, when  virtue and intelligence become qualities of the multitudes; but for ignorance such  governments are impossible. Man advances only by degrees. The removal of one  pressing calamity gives courage to attempt the removal of the remaining evils,  rendering men more sensitive to them, or perhaps sensitive for the first time. Serfs that  writhe under the whip are not disquieted about their political rights; manumitted from  personal slavery, they become  p.93  sensitive to political oppression. Liberated from arbitrary power, and governed by the  law alone, they begin to scrutinize the law itself, and desire to be governed, not only by  law, but by what they deem the best law. And when the civil or temporal despot-ism has  been set aside, and the municipal law has been moulded on the principles of an  enlightened jurisprudence, they may wake to the discovery that they are living under  some priestly or ecclesiastical despotism, and become desirous of working a  reformation there also.

It is quite true that the advance of humanity is slow, and that it often pauses and  retrogrades. In the kingdoms of the earth we do not see despotisms retiring and yielding  the ground to self-governing communities. We do not see the churches and priesthoods  of Christendom relinquishing their old task of governing men by imaginary terrors. 
Nowhere do we see a populace that could be safely manumitted from such a  government. We do not see the great religious teachers aiming to discover truth for  themselves and for others; but still ruling the world, and contented and compelled to  rule the world, by whatever dogma is already accredited; themselves as much bound  down by this necessity to govern, as the populace by their need of government. Poverty  in all its most hideous forms still exists in the great cities; and the cancer of pauperism  has its roots in the hearts of kingdoms. Men there take no measure of their wants and  their own power to supply them, but live and multiply like the beasts of the field,~ 
Providence having apparently ceased to care for them. Intelligence never visits these, or  it makes its appearance as some new development of villainy. War has not ceased; still  there are battles and sieges. Homes are still unhappy, and tears and anger and spite  make hells where there should be heavens. So much the more necessity for Masonry!

So much wider the field of its labors! So much the more need for it to begin to be true  to itself, to revive from its asphyxia, to repent of its apostasy to its true creed!

Undoubtedly, labor and death and the sexual passion are essential and permanent  conditions of human existence, and render perfection and a millennium on earth  impossible. Always,--it is the decree of Fate!—the vast majority of men must toil to live,  and cannot find time to cultivate the intelligence. Man, knowing he is to die, will not  sacrifice the present enjoyment for a greater one in the future. The love of woman  cannot die out; and it has a  p. 94  terrible and uncontrollable fate, increased by the refinements of civilization. Woman is  the veritable syren or goddess of the young. But society can be improved; and free  government is possible for States; and freedom of thought and conscience is no longer  wholly utopian. Already we see that Emperors prefer to be elected by universal  suffrage; that States are conveyed to Empires by vote; and that Empires are  administered with something of the spirit of a Republic, being little else than  democracies with a single head, ruling through one man, one representative, instead of  an assembly of representatives. And if Priesthoods still govern, they now come before  the laity to prove, by stress of argument, that they ought to govern. They are obliged to  evoke the very reason which they are bent on supplanting.

Accordingly, men become daily more free, because the freedom of the man lies in his  reason. He can reflect upon his own future conduct, and summon up its consequences;  he can take wide views of human life, and lay down rules for constant guidance. Thus  he is relieved of the tyranny of sense and passion, and enabled at any time to live  according to the whole light of the knowledge that is within him, instead of being  driven, like a dry leaf on the wings of the wind, by every present impulse. Herein lies  the freedom of the man as regarded in connection with the necessity imposed by the  omnipotence and fore-knowledge of God. So much light, so much liberty. When  emperor and church appeal to reason there is naturally universal suffrage.

Therefore no one need lose courage, nor believe that labor in the cause of Progress will  be labor wasted. There is no waste in nature, either of Matter, Force, Act, or Thought. A 
Thought is as much the end of life as an Action; and a single Thought sometimes works  greater results than a Revolution, even Revolutions themselves. Still there should not be  divorce between Thought and Action. The true Thought is that in which life culminates. 
But all wise and true Thought produces Action. It is generative, like the light; and light  and the deep shadow of the passing cloud are the gifts of the prophets of the race. 
Knowledge, laboriously acquired, and inducing habits of sound Thought,--the reflective  character,--must necessarily be rare. The multitude of laborers cannot acquire it. Most  men attain to a very low standard of it. It is incompatible with the ordinary and  indispensable avocations of life. A whole world of error as well as of labor, go to make  p. 95  one reflective man. In the most advanced nation of Europe there are more ignorant than  wise, more poor than rich, more automatic laborers, the mere creatures of habit, than  reasoning and reflective men. The proportion is at least a thousand to one. Unanimity of  opinion is so obtained. It only exists among the multitude who do not think, and the  political or spiritual priesthood who think for that multitude, who think how to guide  and govern them. When men begin to reflect, they begin to differ. The great problem is  to find guides who will not seek to be tyrants. This is needed even more in respect to the  heart than the head. Now, every man earns his special share of the produce of human  labor, by an incessant scramble, by trickery and deceit. Useful knowledge, honorably  acquired, is too often used after a fashion not honest or reasonable, so that the studies of  youth are far more noble than the practices of manhood. The labor of the farmer in his  fields, the generous returns of the earth, the benignant and favoring skies, tend to make  him earnest, provident, and grateful; the education of the market-place makes him  querulous, crafty, envious, and an intolerable niggard.

Masonry seeks to be this beneficent, unambitious, disinterested guide; and it is the very  condition of all great structures that the sound of the hammer and the clink of the trowel  should be always heard in some part of the building. With faith in man, hope for the  future of humanity, loving-kindness for our fellows, Masonry and the Mason must  always work and teach. Let each do that for which he is best fitted. The teacher also is a  workman. Praiseworthy as the active navigator is, who comes and goes and makes one  clime partake of the treasures of the other, and one to share the treasures of all, he who  keeps the beacon-light upon the hill is also at his post.

Masonry has already helped cast down some idols from their pedestals, and grind to  impalpable dust some of the links of the chains that held men's souls in bondage. That  there has been progress needs no other demonstration than that you may now reason  with men, and urge upon them, without danger of the rack or stake, that no doctrines  can be apprehended as truths if they contradict each other, or contradict other truths  given us by God. Long before the Reformation, a monk, who had found his way to  heresy without the help of Martin Luther, not venturing to breathe aloud into any living  ear his anti-papal and treasonable  p. 96  doctrines, wrote them on parchment, and sealing up the perilous record, hid it in the  massive walls of his monastery. There was no friend or brother to whom he could  intrust his secret or pour forth his soul. It was some consolation to imagine that in a  future age some one might find the parchment, and the seed be found not to have been  sown in vain. What if the truth should have to lie donnant as long before germinating as  the wheat in the Egyptian mummy? Speak it, nevertheless, again and again, and let it  take its chance!

The rose of Jericho grows in the sandy deserts of Arabia and on the Syrian housetops. 
Scarcely six inches high, it loses its leaves after the flowering season, and dries up into  the form of a ball. Then it is uprooted by the winds, and carried, blown, or tossed across  the desert, into the sea. There, feeling the contact of the water, it unfolds itself, expands  its branches, and expels its seeds from their seed-vessels. These, when saturated with  water, are carried by the tide and laid on the seashore. Many are lost, as many  individual lives of men are useless. But many are thrown back again from the seashore  into the desert, where, by the virtue of the sea-water that they have imbibed, the roots  and leaves sprout and they grow into fruitful plants, which will, in their turns, like their  ancestors, be whirled into the sea. God will not be less careful to provide for the  germination of the truths you may boldly utter forth. "Cast," He has said, "thy bread  upon the waters, and after many days it shall return to thee again."

Initiation does not change: we find it again and again, and always the same, through all  the ages. The last disciples of Pascalis Martinez are still the children of Orpheus; but  they adore the realizer of the antique philosophy, the Incarnate Word of the Christians.

Pythagoras, the great divulger of the philosophy of numbers, visited all the sanctuaries  of the world. He went into Judaea, where he procured himself to be circumcised, that he  might be admitted to the secrets of the Kabalah, which the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel,  not without some reservations, communicated to him. Then, not without some  difficulty, he succeeded in being admitted to the Egyptian initiation, upon the  recommendation of King Amasis. The power of his genius supplied the deficiencies of  the imperfect communications of the Hierophants, and he himself became a Master and  a Revealer,  p. 97

Pythagoras defined God: a Living and Absolute Verity clothed with Light. 
He said that the Word was Number manifested by Fonn.

He made all descend from the Tetractys, that is to say, from the Quaternary. 
God, he said again, is the Supreme Music, the nature of which is Harmony.

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

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

Pythagoras said, "Even as there are three divine notions and three intelligible regions,  so there is a triple word, for the Hierarchical Order always manifests itself by threes. 
There are the word simple, the word hieroglyphical, and the word symbolic: in other  terms, there are the word that expresses, the word that conceals, and the word that  signifies; the whole hieratic intelligence is in the perfect knowledge of these three  degrees."

Pythagoras enveloped doctrine with symbols, but carefully eschewed personifications  and images, which, he thought, sooner or later produced idolatry.

The Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, was carried from Chaldeea by 
Abraham, taught to the Egyptian priesthood by Joseph, recovered and purified by 
Moses, concealed under symbols in the Bible, revealed by the Saviour to Saint John,  and contained, entire, under hieratic figures analogous to those of all antiquity, in the 
Apocalypse of that Apostle.

The Kabalists consider God as the Intelligent, Animated, Living Infinite. He is not, for  them, either the aggregate of existences, or existence in the abstract, or a being  philosophically definable. He is in all, distinct from all, and greater than all. His name  even is ineffable; and yet this name only expresses the human ideal of His divinity. 
What God is in Himself, it is not given to man to comprehend.

God is the absolute of Faith; but the absolute of Reason is BEING, mn\ "lam that I  am" is a wretched translation.

Being, Existence, is by itself, and because it Is. The reason of Being, is Being itself. We  may inquire, "Why does something exist?" that is, "Why does such or such a thing  exist?" But we cannot, without being absurd, ask, "Why Is Being?" That would be to  suppose Being before Being. If Being had a  p. 98  cause, that cause would necessarily Be; that is, the cause and effect would be identical.

Reason and science demonstrate to us that the modes of Existence and Being balance  each other in equilibrium according to harmonious and hierarchic laws. But a hierarchy  is synthetized, in ascending, and becomes ever more and more monarchial. Yet the  reason cannot pause at a single chief, without being alanned. at the abysses which it  seems to leave above this Supreme Mon-arch. Therefore it is silent, and gives place to  the Faith it adores.

What is certain, even for science and the reason, is, that the idea of God is the grandest,  the most holy, and the most useful of all the aspirations of man; that upon this belief  morality reposes, with its eternal sanction. This belief, then, is in humanity, the most  real of the phenomena of being; and if it were false, nature would affirm the absurd;  nothingness would give form to life, and God would at the same time be and not be.

It is to this philosophic and incontestable reality, which is termed The Idea of God, that  the Kabalists give a name. In this name all others are contained. Its cyphers contain all  the numbers; and the hieroglyphics of its letters express all the laws and all the things of  nature.

BEING IS BEING: the reason of Being is in Being: in the Be-ginning is the Word, and  the Word in logic formulated Speech, the spoken Reason; the Word is in God, and is 
God Himself, manifested to the Intelligence. Here is what is above all the philosophies. 
This we must believe, under the penalty of never truly knowing anything, and relapsing  into the absurd skepticism of Pyrrho. The Priesthood, custodian of Faith, wholly rests  upon this basis of knowledge, and it is in its teachings we must recognize the Divine 
Principle of the Eternal Word.

Light is not Spirit, as the Indian Hierophants believed it to be; but only the instrument  of the Spirit. It is not the body of the Protoplastes, as the Theurgists of the school of 
Alexandria taught, but the first physical manifestation of the Divine afflatus. God  eternally creates it, and man, in the image of God, modifies and seems to multiply it.

The high magic is styled "The Sacerdotal Art," and "The Royal Art." In Egypt, Greece,  and Rome, it could not but share the greatnesses and decadences of the Priesthood and  of Royalty. Every philosophy hostile to the national worship and to its mysteries,  p. 99  was of necessity hostile to the great political powers, which lose their grandeur, if they  cease, in the eyes of the multitudes, to be the images of the Divine Power. Every Crown  is shattered, when it clashes against the Tiara.

Plato, writing to Dionysius the Younger, in regard to the nature of the First Principle,  says: "I must write to you in enigmas, so that if my letter be intercepted by land or sea,  he who shall read it may in no degree comprehend it." And then he says, "All things  surround their King; they are, on account of Him, and He alone is the cause of good  things, Second for the Seconds and Third for the Thirds."

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

"The King " is AINSOPH, Being Supreme and Absolute. From this centre, which is  everywhere , all things ray forth; but we especially conceive of it in three manners and in  three different spheres. In the Divine world (AZILUTH), which is that of the First 
Cause, and wherein the whole Eternity of Things in the beginning existed as Unity, to  be afterward, during Eternity uttered forth, clothed with form, and the attributes that  constitute them matter, the First Principle is Single and First, and yet not the VERY 
Illimitable Deity, incomprehensible, undefinable; but Himself in so far as manifested by  the Creative Thought. To compare littleness with infinity,—Arkwright, as inventor of  the spinning-jenny, and not the man Arkwright otherwise and beyond that. All we can  know of the Very God is, compared to His Wholeness, only as an infinitesimal fraction  of a unit, compared with an infinity of Units.

In the World of Creation, which is that of Second Causes [the Kabalistic World 
BRIAH], the Autocracy of the First Principle is complete, but we conceive of it only as  the Cause of the Second Causes. Here it is manifested by the Binary, and is the Creative 
Principle passive. Finally: in the third world, YEZIRAH, or of Formation, it is revealed  in the perfect Form, the Form of Forms, the World, the Supreme Beauty and 
Excellence, the Created Perfection. Thus the Principle is at once the First, the Second,  and the Third, since it is All in All, the Centre and Cause of all. It is not the genius of 
Plato that we here admire. We recognize only the exact knowledge of the Initiate.

The great Apostle Saint John did not borrow from the philosophy of Plato the opening  of his Gospel. Plato, on the contrary,  p. 100  drank at the same springs with Saint John and Philo; and John in the opening verses of  his paraphrase, states the first principles of a dogma common to many schools, but in  language especially belonging to Philo, whom it is evident he had read. The philosophy  of Plato, the greatest of human Revealers, could yearn toward the Word made man; the 
Gospel alone could give him to the world.

Doubt, in presence of Being and its harmonies; skepticism, in the face of the eternal  mathematics and the immutable laws of Life which make the Divinity present and  visible everywhere, as the Human is known and visible by its utterances of word and  act,—is this not the most foolish of superstitions, and the most inexcusable as well as the  most dangerous of all credulities? Thought, we know, is not a result or consequence of  the organization of matter, of the chemical or other action or reaction of its particles,  like effervescence and gaseous explosions. On the contrary, the fact that Thought is  manifested and realized in act human or act divine, proves the existence of an Entity, or 
Unity, that thinks. And the Universe is the Infinite Utterance of one of an infinite  number of Infinite Thoughts, which cannot but emanate from an Infinite and Thinking 
Source. The cause is always equal, at least, to the effect; and matter cannot think, nor  could it cause itself, or exist without cause, nor could nothing produce either forces or  things; for in void nothingness no Forces can inhere. Admit a self-existent Force, and its 
Intelligence, or an Intelligent cause of it is admitted, and at once GOD IS.

The Hebrew allegory of the Fall of Man, which is but a special variation of a universal  legend, symbolizes one of the grandest and most universal allegories of science.

Moral Evil is Falsehood in actions; as Falsehood is Crime in words.

Injustice is the essence of Falsehood; and every false word is an injustice.

Injustice is the death of the Moral Being, as Falsehood is the poison of the Intelligence.

The perception of the Light is the dawn of the Eternal Life, in Being. The Word of God,  which creates the Light, seems to be uttered by every Intelligence that can take  cognizance of Forms and will look. "Let the Light BE! The Light, in fact, exists, in its  condition of splendor, for those eyes alone that gaze at it; and the Soul, amorous of the  spectacle of the beauties of the Universe,  p. 101  and applying its attention to that luminous writing of the Infinite Book, which is called 
"The Visible," seems to utter, as God did on the dawn of the first day, that sublime and  creative word, "BE! LIGHT!"

It is not beyond the tomb, but in life itself, that we are to seek for the mysteries of death. 
Salvation or reprobation begins here below, and the terrestrial world too has its Heaven  and its Hell. Always, even here below, virtue is rewarded; always, even here below,  vice is punished; and that which makes us sometimes believe in the impunity of evil¬  doers is that riches, those instruments of good and of evil, seem sometimes to be given  them at hazard. But woe to unjust men, when they possess the key of gold! It opens, for  them, only the gate of the tomb and of Hell.

All the true Initiates have recognized the usefulness of toil and sorrow. "Sorrow," says a 
German poet, "is the dog of that unknown shepherd who guides the flock of men." To  learn to suffer, to learn to die, is the discipline of Eternity, the immortal Novitiate.

The allegorical picture of Cebes, in which the Divine Comedy of Dante was sketched in

Plato's time, the description whereof has been preserved for us, and which many  painters of the middle age have reproduced by this description, is a monument at once  philosophical and magical. It is a most complete moral synthesis, and at the same time  the most audacious demonstration ever given of the Grand Arcanum, of that secret  whose revelation would overturn Earth and Heaven. Let no one expect us to give them  its explanation! He who passes behind the veil that hides this mystery, understands that  it is in its very nature inexplicable, and that it is death to those who win it by surprise, as  well as to him who reveals it.

This secret is the Royalty of the Sages, the Crown of the Initiate whom we see  redescend victorious from the summit of Trials, in the fine allegory of Cebes. The 
Grand Arcanum makes him master of gold and the light, which are at bottom the same  thing, he has solved the problem of the quadrature of the circle, he directs the perpetual  movement, and he possesses the philosophical stone. Here the Adepts will understand  us. There is neither interruption in the toil of nature, nor gap in her work. The 
Harmonies of Heaven correspond to those of Earth, and the Eternal Life accomplishes  its evolutions in accordance with the same laws  p. 102  as the life of a dog. "God has arranged all things by weight, number, and measure," says  the Bible; and this luminous doctrine was also that of Plato.

Humanity has never really had but one religion and one worship. This universal light  has had its uncertain mirages, its deceitful reflections, and its shadows; but always, after  the nights of Error, we see it reappear, one and pure like the Sun.

The magnificences of worship are the life of religion, and if Christ wishes poor  ministers, His Sovereign Divinity does not wish paltry altars. Some Protestants have not  comprehended that worship is a teaching, and that we must not create in the imagination  of the multitude a mean or miserable God. Those oratories that resemble poorly-  furnished offices or inns, and those worthy ministers clad like notaries or lawyer's  clerks, do they not necessarily cause religion to be regarded as a mere puritanic  formality, and God as a Justice of the Peace?

We scoff at the Augurs. It is so easy to scoff, and so difficult well to comprehend. Did  the Deity leave the whole world without Light for two score centuries, to illuminate  only a little comer of Palestine and a brutal, ignorant, and ungrateful people? Why  always calumniate God and the Sanctuary? Were there never any others than rogues  among the priests? Could no honest and sincere men be found among the Hierophants  of Ceres or Diana, of Dionusos or Apollo, of Hermes or Mithras? Were these, then, all  deceived, like the rest? Who, then, constantly deceived them, without betraying  themselves, during a series of centuries?~for the cheats are not immortal! Arago said,  that outside of the pure mathematics, he who utters the word "impossible," is wanting in  prudence and good sense.

The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed; for Satan is not a  black god, but the negation of God. The Devil is the personification of Atheism or 
Idolatry.

For the Initiates, this is not a Person , but a Force, created for good, but which may  serve for evil. It is the instrument of Liberty or Free Will. They represent this Force,  which presides over the physical generation, under the mythologic and homed form of  the God PAN; thence came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent,  and the Light-bearer or Phosphor, of which the poets have made the false Lucifer of the  legend.

Gold, to the eyes of the Initiates, is Light condensed. They  p. 103  style the sacred numbers of the Kabalah "golden numbers," and the moral teachings of 
Pythagoras his "golden verses." For the same reason, a mysterious book of Apuleius, in  which an ass figures largely, was called "The Golden Ass."

The Pagans accused the Christians of worshipping an ass, and they did not invent this  reproach, but it came from the Samaritan Jews, who, figuring the data of the Kabalah in  regard to the Divinity by Egyptian symbols, also represented the Intelligence by the  figure of the Magical Star adored under the name of Remphan, Science under the  emblem of Anubis, whose name they changed to Nibbas, and the vulgar faith or  credulity under the figure of Thartac, a god represented with a book, a cloak, and the  head of an ass. According to the Samaritan Doctors, Christianity was the reign of 
Thartac , blind Faith and vulgar credulity erected into a universal oracle, and preferred  to Intelligence and Science.

Synesius, Bishop of Ptolema'is, a great Kabalist, but of doubtful orthodoxy, wrote:

"The people will always mock at things easy to be misunderstood; it must needs have  impostures."

"A Spirit," he said, "that loves wisdom and contemplates the Truth close at hand, is  forced to disguise it, to induce the multitudes to accept it.... Fictions are necessary to  the people, and the Tmth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to  contemplate it in all its brilliance. If the sacerdotal laws allowed the reservation of  judgments and the allegory of words, I would accept the proposed dignity on condition  that I might be a philosopher at home, and abroad a narrator of apologues and parables

In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? 
The truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their  imperfect reason."

Moral disorders produce physical ugliness, and in some sort realize those frightful faces  which tradition assigns to the demons.

The first Druids were the true children of the Magi, and their initiation came from 
Egypt and Chaldeea, that is to say, from the pure sources of the primitive Kabalah. They  adored the Trinity under the names of Isis or Hesus, the Supreme Harmony; of Belen or 
Bel , which in Assyrian means Lord, a name corresponding to that of ADONAI; and of 
Camul or Camael, a name that in the Kabalah personifies the Divine Justice. Below this  triangle of Light they supposed a divine reflection, also composed of three personified  p. 104  rays: first, Teutates or Teuth, the same as the Thoth of the Egyptians, the Word, or the 
Intelligence formulated; then Force and Beauty, whose names varied like their  emblems. Finally, they completed the sacred Septenary by a mysterious image that  represented the progress of the dogma and its future realizations. This was a young girl  veiled, holding a child in her arms; and they dedicated this image to "The Virgin who  will become a mother;-- Virgini pariturce."

Hertha or Wertha, the young Isis of Gaul, Queen of Heaven, the Virgin who was to bear  a child, held the spindle of the Fates, filled with wool half white and half black; because  she presides over all forms and all symbols, and weaves the garment of the Ideas.

One of the most mysterious pantacles of the Kabalah, contained in the Enchiridion of 
Leo III., represents an equilateral triangle reversed, inscribed in a double circle. On the  triangle are written, in such manner as to form the prophetic Tau, the two Hebrew  words so often found appended to the Ineffable Name, nnbs and mxns, ALOHAYIM, or  the Powers, and TSABAOTH, or the starry Armies and their guiding spirits; words also  which symbolize the Equilibrium of the Forces of Nature and the Harmony of Numbers. 
To the three sides of the triangle belong the three great Names Mix ,mrp, and iOW, 
LAHAVEH, ADONAI, and AGLA. Above the first is written in Latin, Formatio, above  the second Reformatio , and above the third, Transformatio. So Creation is ascribed to  the FATHER, Redemption or Reformation to the SON, and Sanctification or 
Transformation to the HOLY SPIRIT, answering unto the mathematical laws of Action, 
Reaction, and Equilibrium. IAHAVEH is also, in effect, the Genesis or Formation of  dogma, by the elementary signification of the four letters of the Sacred Tetragram; 
ADONAI is the realization of this dogma in the Human Form, in the Visible LORD,  who is the Son of God or the perfect Man; and AGLA (formed of the initials of the four  words Ath Gebur Laulaim Adonai) expresses the synthesis of the whole dogma and the  totality of the Kabalistic science, clearly indicating by the hieroglyphics of which this  admirable name is formed the Triple Secret of the Great Work.

Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and Alchemy, conceals  its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the Elect, and uses false  explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols to mislead those who deserve only to  be misled;  p. 105  to conceal the Truth, which it calls Light, from them, and to draw them away from it. 
Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert it. So 
God Himself incapacitates many men, by color-blindness, to distinguish colors, and  leads the masses away from the highest Truth, giving them the power to attain only so  much of it as it is profitable to them to know. Every age has had a religion suited to its  capacity.

The Teachers, even of Christianity, are, in general, the most ignorant of the true  meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of which so little is known as the 
Bible. To most who read it, it is as incomprehensible as the Sohar.

So Masonry jealously conceals its secrets, and intentionally leads conceited interpreters  astray. There is no sight under the sun more pitiful and ludicrous at once, than the  spectacle of the Prestons and the Webbs, not to mention the later incarnations of 
Dullness and Commonplace, undertaking to "explain" the old symbols of Masonry, and  adding to and "improving" them, or inventing new ones.

To the Circle inclosing the central point, and itself traced between two parallel lines, a  figure purely Kabalistic, these persons have added the superimposed Bible, and even  reared on that the ladder with three or nine rounds, and then given a vapid interpretation  of the whole, so profoundly absurd as actually to excite admiration.

SECRET MASTER.

MASONRY is a succession of allegories, the mere vehicles of  great lessons in morality and philosophy. You will more fully  appreciate its spirit, its object, its purposes, as you advance in  the different Degrees, which you will find to constitute a  great, complete, and harmonious system.

If you have been disappointed in the first three Degrees, as  you have received them, and if it has seemed to you that the  performance has not come up to the promise, that the lessons  of morality are not new, and the scientific instruction is but  rudimentary, and the symbols are imperfectly explained,  remember that the ceremonies and lessons of those Degrees  have been for ages more and more accommodating  themselves, by curtailment and sinking into commonplace, to  the often limited memory and capacity of the Master and 
Instructor, and to the intellect and needs of the Pupil and 
Initiate; that they have come to us from an age when symbols  were used, not to reveal but to conceal, when the commonest  learning was confined to a select few, and the simplest  principles of morality seemed newly discovered truths; and  that these antique and simple Degrees now stand like the  broken columns of a roofless Druidic temple, in their rude and  mutilated greatness; in many parts, also, corrupted by time,  and disfigured by modem additions and absurd  interpretations. They are but the entrance to the great Masonic 
Temple, the triple columns of the portico.

You have taken the first step over its threshold, the first step  toward the inner sanctuary and heart of the temple. You are in  the path that leads up the slope of the mountain of Truth; and  p. 107  it depends upon your secrecy, obedience, and fidelity,  whether you will advance or remain stationary.

Imagine not that you will become indeed a Mason by learning  what is commonly called the "work," or even by becoming  familiar with our traditions. Masonry has a history, a  literature, a philosophy. Its allegories and traditions will teach  you much; but much is to be sought elsewhere. The streams of  learning that now flow lull and broad must be followed to  their heads in the springs that well up in the remote past, and  you will there find the origin and meaning of Masonry.

A few rudimentary lessons in architecture, a few universally  admitted maxims of morality, a few unimportant traditions,  whose real meaning is unknown or misunderstood, will no  longer satisfy the earnest inquirer after Masonic truth. Let  whoso is content with these, seek to climb no higher. He who  desires to understand the harmonious and beautiful  proportions of Freemasonry must read, study, reflect, digest,  and discriminate. The true Mason is an ardent seeker after  knowledge; and he knows that both books and the antique  symbols of Masonry are vessels which come down to us full-  freighted with the intellectual riches of the Past; and that in  the lading of these argosies is much that sheds light on the  history of Masonry, and proves its claim to be acknowledged  the benefactor of mankind, bom in the very cradle of the race.

Knowledge is the most genuine and real of human treasures;  for it is Light, as Ignorance is Darkness. It is the development  of the human soul, and its acquisition the growth of the soul,  which at the birth of man knows nothing, and therefore, in  one sense, may be said to be nothing. It is the seed, which has  in it the power to grow, to acquire, and by acquiring to be  developed, as the seed is developed into the shoot, the plant,  the tree. "We need not pause at the common argument that by  learning man excelleth man, in that wherein man excelleth  beasts; that by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and  their motions, where in body he cannot come, and the like.

Let us rather regard the dignity and excellency of knowledge  and learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire,  which is immortality or continuance. For to this tendeth  generation, and raising of Houses and Families; to this  buildings, foundations, and monuments; to this tendeth the  desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the  strength of all other human desires." That our influences shall  p. 108  survive us, and be living forces when we are in our graves;  and not merely that our names shall be remembered; but  rather that our works shall be read, our acts spoken of, our  names recollected and. mentioned when we are dead, as  evidences that those influences live and rule, sway and control  some portion of mankind and of the world,—this is the  aspiration of the human soul. "We see then how far the  monuments of genius and learning are more durable than  monuments of power or of the hands. For have not the verses  of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more,  without the loss of a syllable or letter, during which time  infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have decayed and  been demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures or  statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, no, nor of the Kings or  great personages of much later years; for the originals cannot  last, and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But  the images of men's genius and knowledge remain in books,  exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual  renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because  they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others,  provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in  succeeding ages; so that if the invention of the ship was  thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from  place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in  participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be  magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas of time,  and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom,  illumination, and inventions, the one of the other."

To learn, to attain knowledge, to be wise, is a necessity for  every truly noble soul; to teach, to communicate that  knowledge, to share that wisdom with others, and not  churlishly to lock up his exchequer, and place a sentinel at the  door to drive away the needy, is equally an impulse of a noble  nature, and the worthiest work of man.

"There was a little city," says the Preacher, the son of David, 
"and few men within it; and there came a great King against it  and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now there  was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom  delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor  man. Then, said I, wisdom is better than strength:  nevertheless, the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his  words are not heard." If it should chance to you, my brother,  to do mankind good service, and be  p. 109  rewarded with indifference and forgetfulness only, still be not  discouraged, but remember the further advice of the wise 
King. "In the morning sow the seed, and in the evening  withhold not thy hand; for thou knowest not which shall  prosper, this or that, or whether both shall be alike good."

Sow you the seed, whoever reaps. Learn, that you may be  enabled to do good; and do so because it is right, finding in  the act itself ample, reward and recompense.

To attain the truth, and to serve our fellows, our country, and  mankind—this is the noblest destiny of man. Hereafter and all  your life it is to be your object. If you desire to ascend to that  destiny, advance! If you have other and less noble objects,  and are contented with a lower flight, halt here! let others  scale the heights, and Masonry fulfill her mission.

If you will advance, gird up your loins for the struggle! for the  way is long and toilsome. Pleasure, all smiles, will beckon  you on the one hand, and Indolence will invite you to sleep  among the flowers, upon the other. Prepare, by secrecy,  obedience, and fidelity, to resist the allurements of both!

Secrecy is indispensable in a Mason of whatever Degree. It is  the first and almost the only lesson taught to the Entered 
Apprentice. The obligations which we have each assumed  toward every Mason that lives, requiring of us the  performance of the most serious and onerous duties toward  those personally unknown to us until they demand our aid,—  duties that must be performed, even at the risk of life, or our  solemn oaths be broken and violated, and we be branded as  false Masons and faithless men, teach us how profound a folly  it would he to betray our secrets to those who, bound to us by  no tie of common obligation, might, by obtaining them, call  on us in their extremity, when the urgency of the occasion  should allow us no time for inquiry, and the peremptory  mandate of our obligation compel us to do a brother's duty to  a base impostor.

The secrets of our brother, when communicated to us, must be  sacred, if they be such as the law of our country warrants us to  keep. We are required to keep none other, when the law that  we are called on to obey is indeed a law, by having emanated  from the only source of power, the People. Edicts which  emanate from the mere arbitrary will of a despotic power,  contrary to the law of God or the Great Law of Nature,  destructive of the inherent rights  p. no  of man, violative of the right of free thought, free speech, free  conscience, it is lawful to rebel against and strive to abrogate.

For obedience to the Law does not mean submission to  tyranny; nor that, by a profligate sacrifice of every noble  feeling, we should offer to despotism the homage of  adulation. As every new victim falls, we may lift our voice in  still louder flattery. We may fall at the proud feet, we may  beg, as a boon, the honor of kissing that bloody hand which  has been lifted against the helpless. We may do more: we may  bring the altar and the sacrifice, and implore the God not to  ascend too soon to Heaven. This we may do, for this we have  the sad remembrance that beings of a human form and soul  have done. But this is all we can do. We can constrain our  tongues to be false, our features to bend themselves to the  semblance of that passionate adoration which we wish to  express, our knees to fall prostrate; but our heart we cannot  constrain. There virtue must still have a voice which is not to  be drowned by hymns and acclamations; there the crimes  which we laud as virtues, are crimes still, and he whom we  have made a God is the most contemptible of mankind; if,  indeed, we do not feel, perhaps, that we are ourselves still  more contemptible.

But that law which is the fair expression of the will and  judgment of the people, is the enactment of the whole and of  every individual. Consistent with the law of God and the great  law of nature, consistent with pure and abstract right as  tempered by necessity and the general interest, as contra¬  distinguished from the private interest of individuals, it is  obligatory upon all, because it is the work of all, the will of  all, the solemn judgment of all, from which there is no appeal.

In this Degree, my brother, you are especially to leam the  duty of obedience to that law. There is one true and original  law, conformable to reason and to nature, diffused over all,  invariable, eternal, which calls to the fulfillment of duty, and  to abstinence from injustice, and calls with that irresistible  voice which is felt in all its authority wherever it is heard.

This law cannot be abrogated or diminished, or its sanctions  affected, by any law of man. A whole senate, a whole people,  cannot dissent from its paramount obligation. It requires no  commentator to render it distinctly intelligible: nor is it one  thing at Rome, another at Athens; one thing now, and another  in the ages to come; but in all times and in all nations, it is,  and has been, and will be, one

P . 111  and everlasting;—one as that God, its great Author and 
Promulgator, who is the Common Sovereign of all mankind,  is Himself One. No man can disobey it without flying, as it  were, from his own bosom, and repudiating his nature; and in  this very act he will inflict on himself the severest of  retributions, even though he escape what is regarded as  punishment.

It is our duty to obey the laws of our country, and to be  careful that prejudice or passion, fancy or affection, error and  illusion, be not mistaken for conscience. Nothing is more  usual than to pretend conscience in all the actions of man  which are public and cannot be concealed. The disobedient  refuse to submit to the laws, and they also in many cases  pretend conscience; and so disobedience and rebellion  become conscience, in which there is neither knowledge nor  revelation, nor truth nor charity, nor reason nor religion. 
Conscience is tied to laws. Right or sure conscience is right  reason reduced to practice, and conducting moral actions,  while perverse conscience is seated in the fancy or affections- 
-a heap of irregular principles and irregular defects—and is the  same in conscience as deformity is in the body, or  peevishness in the affections. It is not enough that the  conscience be taught by nature; but it must be taught by God,  conducted by reason, made operative by discourse, assisted by  choice, instructed by laws and sober principles; and then it is  right, and it may be sure. All the general measures of justice,  are the laws of God, and therefore they constitute the general  rules of government for the conscience; but necessity also  hath a large voice in the arrangement of human affairs, and  the disposal of human relations, and the dispositions of  human laws; and these general measures, like a great river  into little streams, are deduced into little rivulets and  particularities, by the laws and customs, by the sentences and  agreements of men, and by the absolute despotism of  necessity, that will not allow perfect and abstract justice and  equity to be the sole rule of civil government in an imperfect  world; and that must needs be law which is for the greatest  good of the greatest number.

When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it. It is  better thou shouldest not vow than thou shouldest vow and  not pay. Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be  hasty to utter anything before God: for God is in Heaven, and  thou art upon earth; therefore let thy words be few. Weigh  well  p. 112  what it is you promise; but once the promise and pledge are  given remember that he who is false to his obligation will be  false to his family, his friends, his country, and his God.

Fides servanda est: Faith plighted is ever to be kept, was a  maxim and an axiom even among pagans. The virtuous

Roman said, either let not that which seems expedient be  base, or if it be base, let it not seem expedient. What is there  which that so-called expediency can bring, so valuable as that  which it takes away, if it deprives you of the name of a good  man and robs you of your integrity and honor? In all ages, he  who violates his plighted word has been held unspeakably  base. The word of a Mason, like the word of a knight in the  times of chivalry, once given must be sacred; and the  judgment of his brothers, upon him who violates his pledge,  should be stem as the judgments of the Roman Censors  against him who violated his oath. Good faith is revered  among Masons as it was among the Romans, who placed its  statue in the capitol, next to that of Jupiter Maximus Optimus;  and we, like them, hold that calamity should always be chosen  rather than baseness; and with the knights of old, that one  should always die rather than be dishonored.

Be faithful, therefore, to the promises you make, to the  pledges you give, and to the vows that you assume, since to  break either is base and dishonorable.

Be faithful to your family, and perform all the duties of a  good father, a good son, a good husband, and a good brother.

Be faithful to your friends; for tme friendship is of a nature  not only to survive through all the vicissitudes of life, but to  continue through an endless duration; not only to stand the  shock of conflicting opinions, and the roar of a revolution that  shakes the world, but to last when the heavens are no more,  and to spring fresh from the ruins of the universe.

Be faithful to your country, and prefer its dignity and honor to  any degree of popularity and honor for yourself; consulting its  interest rather than your own, and rather than the pleasure and  gratification of the people, which are often at variance with  their welfare.

Be faithful to Masonry, which is to be faithful to the best  interests of mankind. Labor, by precept and example, to  elevate the standard of Masonic character, to enlarge its  sphere of influence, to popularize its teachings, and to make  all men know it for the  p. 113

[paragraph continues] Great Apostle of Peace, Harmony, and Good¬  will on earth among men; of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Masonry is useful to all men: to the learned, because it affords  them the opportunity of exercising their talents upon subjects  eminently worthy of their attention; to the illiterate, because it  offers them important instruction; to the young, because it  presents them with salutary precepts and good examples, and  accustoms them to reflect on the proper mode of living; to the  man of the world, whom it furnishes with noble and useful  recreation; to the traveller, whom it enables to find friends  and brothers in countries where else he would be isolated and  solitary; to the worthy man in misfortune, to whom it gives  assistance; to the afflicted, on whom it lavishes consolation;  to the charitable man, whom it enables to do more good, by  uniting with those who are charitable like himself; and to all  who have souls capable of appreciating its importance, and of  enjoying the charms of a friendship founded on the same  principles of religion, morality, and philanthropy.

A Freemason, therefore, should be a man of honor and of  conscience, preferring his duty to everything beside, even to  his life; independent in his opinions, and of good morals;  submissive to the laws, devoted to humanity, to his country,  to his family; kind and indulgent to his brethren, friend of all  virtuous men, and ready to assist his fellows by all means in  his power.

Thus will you be faithful to yourself, to your fellows, and to 
God, and thus will you do honor to the name and rank of 
SECRET MASTER; which, like other Masonic honors,  degrades if it is not deserved.

V.

PERFECT MASTER.

THE Master Khurum was an industrious and an honest man. 
What he was employed to do he did diligently, and he did it  well and faithfully. He received no wages that were not his  due. Industry and honesty are the virtues peculiarly inculcated  in this Degree. They are common and homely virtues; but not  for that beneath our notice. As the bees do not love or respect  the drones, so Masonry neither loves nor respects the idle and  those who live by their wits; and least of all those parasitic  acari that live upon themselves. For those who are indolent  are likely to become dissipated and vicious; and perfect  honesty, which ought to be the common qualification of all, is  more rare than diamonds. To do earnestly and steadily, and to  do faithfully and honestly that which we have to do—perhaps  this wants but little, when looked at from every point of view,  of including the whole body of the moral law; and even in  their commonest and homeliest application, these virtues  belong to the character of a Perfect Master.

Idleness is the burial of a living man. For an idle person is so  useless to any purposes of God and man, that he is like one  who is dead, unconcerned in the changes and necessities of  the world; and he only lives to spend his time, and eat the  fruits of the earth. Like a vermin or a wolf, when his time  comes, he dies and perishes, and in the meantime is nought. 
He neither ploughs nor carries burdens: all that he does is  either unprofitable or mischievous.

It is a vast work that any man may do, if he never be idle: and  it is a huge way that a man may go in virtue, if he never go  out of his way by a vicious habit or a great crime: and he who  perpetually  p. 115  reads good books, if his parts be answerable, will have a huge  stock of knowledge.

St. Ambrose, and from his example, St. Augustine, divided  every day into these tertias of employment: eight hours they  spent in the necessities of nature and recreation: eight hours in  charity, in doing assistance to others, dispatching their  business, reconciling their emnities, reproving their vices,  correcting their errors, instructing their ignorance, and in  transacting the affairs of their dioceses; and the other eight  hours they spent in study and prayer.

We think, at the age of twenty, that life is much too long for  that which we have to learn and do; and that there is an almost  fabulous distance between our age and that of our grandfather. 
But when, at the age of sixty, if we are fortunate enough to  reach it, or unfortunate enough, as the case may be, and  according as we have profitably invested or wasted our time,  we halt, and look back along the way we have come, and cast  up and endeavor to balance our accounts with time and  opportunity, we find that we have made life much too short,  and thrown away a huge portion of our time. Then we, in our  mind, deduct from the sum total of our years the hours that we  have needlessly passed in sleep; the working-hours each day,  during which the surface of the mind's sluggish pool has not  been stirred or ruffled by a single thought; the days that we  have gladly got rid of, to attain some real or fancied object  that lay beyond, in the way between us and which stood  irksomely the intervening days; the hours worse than wasted  in follies and dissipation, or misspent in useless and  unprofitable studies; and we acknowledge, with a sigh, that  we could have learned and done, in half a score of years well  spent, more than we have done in all our forty years of  manhood.

To learn and to do!—this is the soul's work here below. The  soul grows as truly as an oak grows. As the tree takes the  carbon of the air, the dew, the rain, and the light, and the food  that the earth supplies to its roots, and by its mysterious  chemistry trans-mutes them into sap and fibre, into wood and  leaf, and flower and fruit, and color and perfume, so the soul  imbibes knowledge and by a divine alchemy changes what it  learns into its own substance, and grows from within  outwardly with an inherent force and power like those that lie  hidden in the grain of wheat.

The soul hath its senses, like the body, that may be cultivated,  p. 116  enlarged, refined, as itself grows in stature and proportion;  and he who cannot appreciate a fine painting or statue, a noble  poem, a sweet harmony, a heroic thought, or a disinterested  action, or to whom the wisdom of philosophy is but  foolishness and babble, and the loftiest truths of less  importance than the price of stocks or cotton, or the elevation  of baseness to office, merely lives on the level of  commonplace, and fitly prides himself upon that inferiority of  the soul's senses, which is the inferiority and imperfect  development of the soul itself.

To sleep little, and to study much; to say little, and to hear and  think much; to learn, that we may be able to do, and then to  do, earnestly and vigorously, whatever may be required of us  by duty, and by the good of our fellows, our country, and  mankind,—these are the duties of every Mason who desires to  imitate the Master Khurarn.

The duty of a Mason as an honest man is plain and easy. It  requires of us honesty in contracts, sincerity in affirming,  simplicity in bargaining, and faithfulness in performing. Lie  not at all, neither in a little thing nor in a great, neither in the  substance nor in the circumstance, neither in word nor deed:  that is, pretend not what is false; cover not what is true; and  let the measure of your affirmation or denial be the  understanding of your con-tractor; for he who deceives the  buyer or the seller by speaking what is true, in a sense not  intended or understood by the other, is a liar and a thief. A 
Perfect Master must avoid that which deceives, equally with  that which is false.

Let your prices be according to that measure of good and evil  which is established in the fame and common accounts of the  wisest and most merciful men, skilled in that manufacture or  commodity; and the gain such, which, without scandal, is  allowed to persons in all the same circumstances.

In intercourse with others, do not do all which thou mayest  lawfully do; but keep something within thy power; and,  because there is a latitude of gain in buying and selling, take  not thou the utmost penny that is lawful, or which thou  thinkest so; for although it be lawful, yet it is not safe; and he  who gains all that he can gain lawfully, this year, will  possibly be tempted, next year, to gain something unlawfully.

Let no man, for his own poverty, become more oppressing  and cruel in his bargain; but quietly, modestly, diligently, and  patiently  p. 117  recommend his estate to God, and follow his interest, and  leave the success to Him.

Detain not the wages of the hireling; for every degree of  detention of it beyond the time, is injustice and  uncharitableness, and grinds his face till tears and blood come  out; but pay him exactly according to covenant, or according  to his needs.

Religiously keep all promises and covenants, though made to  your disadvantage, though afterward you perceive you might  have done better; and let not any precedent act of yours be  altered by any after-accident. Let nothing make you break  your promise, unless it be unlawful or impossible; that is,  either out of your nature or out of your civil power, yourself  being under the power of another; or that it be intolerably  inconvenient to yourself, and of no advantage to another; or  that you have leave expressed or reasonably presumed.

Let no man take wages or fees for a work that he cannot do,  or cannot with probability undertake; or in some sense  profitably, and with ease, or with advantage manage. Let no  man appropriate to his own use, what God, by a special  mercy, or the Republic, hath made common; for that is against  both Justice and Charity.

That any man should be the worse for us, and for our direct  act, and by our intention, is against the rule of equity, of  justice, and of charity. We then do not that to others, which  we would have done to ourselves; for we grow richer upon  the ruins of their fortune.

It is not honest to receive anything from another without  returning him an equivalent therefor. The gamester who wins  the money of another is dishonest. There should be no such  thing as bets and gaming among Masons: for no honest man  should desire that for nothing which belongs to another. The  merchant who sells an inferior article for a sound price, the  speculator who makes the distresses and needs of others fill  his exchequer are neither fair nor honest, but base, ignoble,  unfit for immortality.

It should be the earnest desire of every Perfect Master so to  live and deal and act, that when it comes to him to die, he may  be able to say, and his conscience to adjudge, that no man on  earth is poorer, because he is richer; that what he hath he has  honestly earned, and no man can go before God, and claim  that by the rules of equity administered in His great chancery,  this house in which we die, this land we devise to our heirs,  this money that  p. 118  enriches those who survive to bear our name, is his and not  ours, and we in that forum are only his trustees. For it is most  certain that God is just, and will sternly enforce every such  trust; and that to all whom we despoil, to all whom we  defraud, to all from whom we take or win anything whatever,  without fair consideration and equivalent, He will decree a  full and adequate compensation.

Be careful, then, that thou receive no wages, here or  elsewhere, that are not thy due! For if thou dost, thou wrongst  some one, by taking that which in God's chancery belongs to  him; and whether that which thou takest thus be wealth, or  rank, or influence, or reputation or affection, thou wilt surely  be held to make full satisfaction.

INTIMATE SECRETARY.

[Confidential Secretary.]

You are especially taught in this Degree to be zealous and  faithful; to be disinterested and benevolent; and to act the  peace-maker, in case of dissensions, disputes, and quarrels  among the brethren.

Duty is the moral magnetism which controls and guides the  true Mason's course over the tumultuous seas of life. Whether  the stars of honor, reputation, and reward do or do not shine,  in the light of day or in the darkness of the night of trouble  and adversity, in calm or storm, that unerring magnet still  shows him the true course to steer, and indicates with 
certainty where-away lies the port which not to reach involves  shipwreck and dishonor. He follows its silent bidding, as the  mariner, when land is for many days not in sight, and the  ocean without path or landmark spreads out all around him,  follows the bidding of the needle, never doubting that it points  truly to the north. To perform that duty, whether the  performance be rewarded or unrewarded, is his sole care. And  it doth not matter, though of this performance there may be no  witnesses, and though what he does will be forever unknown  to all mankind.

A little consideration will teach us that Fame has other limits  than mountains and oceans; and that he who places happiness  in the frequent repetition of his name, may spend his life in  propagating it, without any danger of weeping for new  worlds, or necessity of passing the Atlantic sea.

If, therefore, he who imagines the world to be fdled with his  actions  p. 120  and praises, shall subduct from the number of his encomiasts  all those who are placed below the flight of fame, and who  hear in the valley of life no voice but that of necessity; all  those who imagine themselves too important to regard him,  and consider the mention of his name as a usurpation of their  time; all who are too much or too little pleased with  themselves to attend to anything external; all who are  attracted by pleasure, or chained down by pain to unvaried  ideas; all who are withheld from attending his triumph by  different pursuits; and all who slumber in universal  negligence; he will find his renown straitened by nearer  bounds than the rocks of Caucasus; and perceive that no man  can be venerable or formidable, but to a small part of his  fellow-creatures. And therefore, that we may not languish in  our endeavors after excellence, it is necessary that, as 
Africanus counsels his descendants, we raise our eyes to  higher prospects, and contemplate our future and eternal state,  without giving up our hearts to the praise of crowds, or fixing  our hopes on such rewards as human power can bestow.

We are not bom for ourselves alone; and our country claims  her share, and our friends their share of us. As all that the  earth produces is created for the use of man, so men are  created for the sake of men, that they may mutually do good  to one another. In this we ought to take nature for our guide,  and throw into the public stock the offices of general utility,  by a reciprocation of duties; sometimes by receiving,  sometimes by giving, and sometimes to cement human  society by arts, by industry, and by our resources.

Suffer others to be praised in thy presence, and entertain their  good and glory with delight; but at no hand disparage them, or  lessen the report, or make an objection; and think not the  advancement of thy brother is a lessening of thy worth. 
Upbraid no man's weakness to him to discomfit him, neither  report it to disparage him, neither delight to remember it to  lessen him, or to set thyself above him; nor ever praise thyself  or dispraise any man else, unless some sufficient worthy end  do hallow it.

Remember that we usually disparage others upon slight  grounds and little instances; and if a man be highly  commended, we think him sufficiently lessened, if we can but  charge one sin of folly or inferiority in his account. We should  either be more severe to ourselves, or less so to others, and  consider that whatsoever good any one can think or say of us,  we can tell him of many unworthy and  p. 121  foolish and perhaps worse actions of ours, any one of which,  done by another, would be enough, with us, to destroy his  reputation.

If we think the people wise and sagacious, and just and  appreciative, when they praise and make idols of us, let us not  call them unlearned and ignorant, and ill and stupid judges,  when our neighbor is cried up by public fame and popular  noises.

Every man hath in his own life sins enough, in his own mind  trouble enough, in his own fortunes evil enough, and in  performance of his offices failings more than enough, to  entertain his own inquiry; so that curiosity after the affairs of  others cannot be without envy and an ill mind. The generous  man will be solicitous and inquisitive into the beauty and  order of a well-governed family, and after the virtues of an  excellent person; but anything for which men keep locks and  bars, or that blushes to see the light, or that is either shameful  in manner or private in nature, this thing will not be his care  and business.

It should be objection sufficient to exclude any man from the  society of Masons, that he is not disinterested and generous,  both in his acts, and in his opinions of men, and his  constructions of their conduct. He who is selfish and grasping,  or censorious and ungenerous, will not long remain within the  strict limits of honesty and truth, but will shortly commit  injustice. He who loves himself too much must needs love  others too little; and he who habitually gives harsh judgment  will not long delay to give unjust judgment.

The generous man is not careful to return no more than he  receives; but prefers that the balances upon the ledgers of  benefits shall be in his favor. He who hath received pay in full  for all the benefits and favors that he has conferred, is like a  spendthrift who has consumed his whole estate, and laments  over an empty exchequer. He who requites my favors with  ingratitude adds to, instead of diminishing, my wealth; and he  who cannot return a favor is equally poor, whether his  inability arises from poverty of spirit, sordidness of soul, or  pecuniary indigence.

If he is wealthy who hath large sums invested, and the mass  of whose fortune consists in obligations that bind other men  to pay him money, he is still more so to whom many owe  large returns of kindnesses and favors. Beyond a moderate  sum each year, the wealthy man merely invests his means:  and that which he never  p. 122  uses is still like favors unretumed and kindnesses  unreciprocated, an actual and real portion of his fortune.

Generosity and a liberal spirit make men to be humane and  genial, open-hearted, frank, and sincere, earnest to do good,  easy and contented, and well-wishers of mankind. They  protect the feeble against the strong, and the defenceless  against rapacity and craft. They succor and comfort the poor,  and are the guardians, under God, of his innocent and helpless  wards. They value friends more than riches or fame, and  gratitude more than money or power. They are noble by God's  patent, and their escutcheons and quarterings are to be found  in heaven's great book of heraldry. Nor can any man any more  be a Mason than he can be a gentle-man, unless he is  generous, liberal, and disinterested. To be liberal, but only of  that which is our own; to be generous, but only when we have  first been just; to give, when to give deprives us of a luxury or  a comfort, this is Masonry indeed.

He who is worldly, covetous, or sensual must change before  he can be a good Mason. If we are governed by inclination  and not by duty; if we are unkind, severe, censorious, or  injurious, in the relations or intercourse of life; if we are  unfaithful parents or undutiful children; if we are harsh  masters or faithless servants; if we are treacherous friends or  bad neighbors or bitter competitors or corrupt unprincipled  politicians or overreaching dealers in business, we are  wandering at a great distance from the true Masonic light.

Masons must be kind and affectionate one to another. 
Frequenting the same temples, kneeling at the same altars,  they should feel that respect and that kindness for each other,  which their common relation and common approach to one 
God should inspire. There needs to be much more of the spirit  of the ancient fellow-ship among us; more tenderness for each  other's faults, more forgiveness, more solicitude for each  other's improvement and good fortune; somewhat of brotherly  feeling, that it be not shame to use the word "brother."

Nothing should be allowed to interfere with that kindness and  affection: neither the spirit of business, absorbing, eager, and  overreaching, ungenerous and hard in its dealings, keen and  bitter in its competitions, low and sordid in its purposes; nor  that of ambition, selfish, mercenary, restless, circumventing,  living only in the opinion of others, envious of the good  fortune of others,  p. 123  miserably vain of its own success, unjust, unscrupulous, and  slanderous.

He that does me a favor, hath bound me to make him a return  of thankfulness. The obligation comes not by covenant, nor  by his own express intention; but by the nature of the thing;  and is a duty springing up within the spirit of the obliged  person, to whom it is more natural to love his friend, and to  do good for good, than to return evil for evil; because a man  may forgive an injury, but he must never forget, a good turn. 
He that refuses to do good to them whom he is bound to love,  or to love that which did him good, is unnatural and  monstrous in his affections, and thinks all the world born to  minister to him; with a greediness worse than that of the sea,  which, although it receives all rivers into itself, yet it  furnishes the clouds and springs with a return of all they  need . Our duty to those who are our benefactors is, to esteem  and love their persons, to make them proportionable returns of  service, or duty, or profit, according as we can, or as they  need, or as opportunity presents itself; and according to the  greatness of their kindnesses.

The generous man cannot but regret to see dissensions and  disputes among his brethren. Only the base and ungenerous  delight in discord. It is the poorest occupation of humanity to  labor to make men think worse of each other, as the press, and  too commonly the pulpit, changing places with the hustings  and the tribune, do. The duty of the Mason is to endeavor to  make man think better of his neighbor; to quiet, instead of  aggravating difficulties; to bring together those who are  severed or estranged; to keep friends from becoming foes, and  to persuade foes to become friends. To do this, he must needs  control his own passions, and be not rash and hasty, nor swift  to take offence, nor easy to be angered.

For anger is a professed enemy to counsel. It is a direct storm,  in which no man can be heard to speak or call from without;  for if you counsel gently, you are disregarded; if you urge it  and be vehement, you provoke it more. It is neither manly nor  ingenuous. It makes marriage to be a necessary and  unavoidable trouble; friendships and societies and  familiarities, to be intolerable. It multiplies the evils of  drunkenness, and makes the levities of wine to run into  madness. It makes innocent jesting to be the beginning of  tragedies. It terns friendship into hatred; it makes a  p. 124  man lose himself, and his reason and his argument, in  disputation. It turns the desires of knowledge into an itch of  wrangling. It adds insolency to power. It turns justice into  cruelty, and judgment into oppression. It changes discipline  into tediousness and hatred of liberal institution. It makes a  prosperous man to be envied, and the unfortunate to be  unpitied.

See, therefore, that first controlling your own temper, and  governing your own passions, you fit yourself to keep peace  and harmony among other men, and especially the brethren. 
Above all remember that Masonry is the realm of peace, and  that" among Masons there must be no dissension, but only  that noble emulation, which can best work and best agree." 
Wherever there is strife and hatred among the brethren, there  is no Masonry; for Masonry is Peace, and Brotherly Love, and 
Concord.

Masonry is the great Peace Society of the world. Wherever it  exists, it struggles to prevent international difficulties and  disputes; and to bind Republics, Kingdoms, and Empires  together in one great band of peace and amity. It would not so  often struggle in vain, if Masons knew their power and valued  their oaths.

Who can sum up the horrors and woes accumulated in a  single war? Masonry is not dazzled with all its pomp and  circumstance, all its glitter and glory. War conies with its  bloody hand into our very dwellings. It takes from ten  thousand homes those who lived there in peace and comfort,  held by the tender ties of family and kindred. It drags them  away, to die untended, of fever or exposure, in infectious  climes; or to be hacked, torn, and mangled in the fierce fight;  to fall on the gory field, to rise no more, or to be borne away,  in awful agony, to noisome and horrid hospitals. The groans  of the battle-field are echoed in sighs of bereavement from  thousands of desolated hearths. There is a skeleton in every  house, a vacant chair at every table. Returning, the soldier  brings worse sorrow to his home, by the infection which he  has caught, of camp-vices. The country is demoralized. The  national mind is brought down, from the noble interchange of  kind offices with another people, to wrath and revenge, and  base pride, and the habit of measuring brute strength against  brute strength, in battle. Treasures are expended, that would  suffice to build ten thousand churches, hospitals, and  universities, or rib and tie together a continent with rails of  iron. If that treasure were sunk in the sea, it  p. 125  would be calamity enough; but it is put to worse use; for it is  expended in cutting into the veins and arteries of human life,  until the earth is deluged with a sea of blood.

Such are the lessons of this Degree. You have vowed to make  them the rule, the law, and the guide of your life and conduct. 
If you do so, you will be entitled, because fitted, to advance in 
Masonry. If you do not, you have already gone too far.

PROVOST AND JUDGE.

THE lesson which this Degree inculcates is JUSTICE, in decision and judgment,  and in our intercourse and dealing with other men.

In a country where trial by jury is known, every intelligent man is liable to be called  on to act as a judge, either of fact alone, or of fact and law mingled; and to assume  the heavy responsibilities which belong to that character.

Those who are invested with the power of judgment should judge the causes of all  persons uprightly and impartially, without any personal consideration of the power  of the mighty, or the bribe of the rich, or the needs of the poor. That is the cardinal  rule, which no one will dispute; though many fail to observe it. But they must do  more. They must divest themselves of prejudice and preconception. They must hear  patiently, remember accurately, and weigh carefully the facts and the arguments  offered before them. They must not leap hastily to conclusions, nor form opinions  before they have heard all. They must not presume crime or fraud. They must  neither be ruled by stubborn pride of opinion, nor be too facile and yielding to the  views and arguments of others. In deducing the motive from the proven act, they  must not assign to the act either the best or the worst motives, but those which they  would think it just and fair for the world to assign to it, if they themselves had done  if; nor must they endeavor to make many little circumstances, that weigh nothing  separately, weigh much together, to prove their own acuteness and sagacity. These  are sound rules for every juror, also, to observe.

In our intercourse with others, there are two kinds of injustice: the first, of those  who offer an injury; the second, of those who have it in their power to avert an  injury from those to whom it is offered, and yet do it not. So active injustice may be  done in two ways—by force and by fraud,—of which force is lion-like, and fraud  fox-like,—both utterly repugnant to social duty, but fraud the more detestable.

Every wrong done by one man to another, whether it affect his person, his property,  his happiness, or his reputation, is an offense against the law of justice. The field of  this Degree is therefore a wide and vast one; and Masonry seeks for the most  impressive mode of enforcing the law of justice, and the most effectual means of  preventing wrong and injustice.

To this end it teaches this great and momentous truth: that wrong and injustice once  done cannot be undone; but are eternal in their consequences; once committed, are  numbered with the irrevocable Past; that the wrong that is done contains its own  retributive penalty as surely and as naturally as the acom contains the oak. Its  consequences are its punishment; it needs no other, and can have no heavier; they  are involved in its commission, and cannot be separated from it. A wrong done to  another is an injury done to our own Nature, an offence against our own souls, a  disfiguring of the image of the Beautiful and Good. Punishment is not the execution  of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect. It is ordained to follow guilt, not by  the decree of God as a judge, but by a law enacted by Him as the Creator and 
Legislator of the Universe. It is not an arbitrary and artificial annexation, but an  ordinary and logical consequence; and therefore must be borne by the wrong-doer,  and through him may flow on to others. It is the decision of the infinite justice of 
God, in the form of law.

There can be no interference with, or remittance of, or protection from, the natural  effects of our wrongful acts. God will not interpose between the cause and its  consequence; and in that sense there can be no forgiveness of sins. The act which  has debased our soul may be repented of, may be turned from; but the injury is  done. The debasement may be redeemed by after-efforts, the stain obliterated by  bitterer struggles and severer sufferings; but the efforts and the endurance which  might have raised the soul to the loftiest heights are now exhausted in merely  regaining what  p. 128  it has lost. There must always be a wide difference between him who only ceases to  do evil, and him who has always done well.

He will certainly be a far more scrupulous watcher over his conduct, and far more  careful of his deeds, who believes that those deeds will inevitably bear their natural  consequences, exempt from after intervention, than he who believes that penitence  and par-don will at any time unlink the chain of sequences. Surely we shall do less  wrong and injustice, if the conviction is fixed and embedded in our souls that  everything done is done irrevocably, that even the Omnipotence of God cannot  uncommit a deed, cannot make that undone which has been done; that every act of  ours must bear its allotted fruit, according to the everlasting laws,—must remain  forever ineffaceably inscribed on the tablets of Universal Nature.

If you have wronged another, you may grieve, repent, and resolutely determine  against any such weakness in future. You may, so far as it is possible, make  reparation. It is well. The injured party may forgive you, according to the meaning  of human language; but the deed is done; and all the powers of Nature, were they to  conspire in your behalf, could not make it undone; the consequences to the body,  the consequences to the soul, though no man may perceive them, are there , are  written in the annals of the Past, and must reverbrate throughout all time.

Repentance for a wrong done, bears, like every other act, its own fruit, the fruit of  purifying the heart and amending the Future, but not of effacing the Past. The  commission of the wrong is an irrevocable act; but it does not incapacitate the soul  to do right for the future. Its consequences cannot be expunged; but its course need  not be pursued. Wrong and evil perpetrated, though ineffaceable, call for no  despair, but for efforts more energetic than before. Repentance is still as valid as  ever; but it is valid to secure the Future, not to obliterate the Past.

Even the pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to  exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Their quickly-attenuated force soon  becomes inaudible to human ears. But the waves of air thus raised perambulate the  surface of earth and ocean, and in less than twenty hours, every atom of the  atmosphere takes up the altered movement due to that infinitesimal portion of  primitive motion which has been conveyed to it  p. 129  through countless channels, and which must continue to influence its path  throughout its future existence. The air is one vast library, on whose pages is  forever written all that man has ever said or even whispered. There, in their  mutable, but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest signs  of mortality, stand forever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled;  perpetuating, in the movements of each particle, all in unison, the testimony of  man's changeful will. God reads that book, though we cannot.

So earth, air, and ocean are the eternal witnesses of the acts that we have done. No  motion impressed by natural causes or by human agency is ever obliterated. The  track of every keel which has ever disturbed the surface of the ocean remains  forever registered in the future movements of all succeeding particles which may  occupy its place. Every criminal is by the laws of the Almighty irrevocably chained  to the testimony of his crime; for every atom of his mortal frame, through whatever  changes its particles may migrate, will still retain, adhering to it through every  combination, some movement derived from that very muscular effort by which the  crime itself was perpetrated.

What if our faculties should be so enhanced in a future life as to enable us to  perceive and trace the ineffaceable consequences of our idle words and evil deeds,  and render our remorse and grief as eternal as those consequences themselves? No  more fearful punishment to a superior intelligence can be conceived, than to see  still in action, with the consciousness that it must continue in action forever, a cause  of wrong put in motion by itself ages before.

Masonry, by its teachings, endeavors to restrain men from the commission of  injustice and acts of wrong and outrage. Though it does not endeavor to usurp the  place of religion, still its code of morals proceeds upon other principles than the  municipal law; and it condemns and punishes offences which neither that law  punishes nor public opinion condemns. In the Masonic law, to cheat and overreach  in trade, at the bar, in politics, are deemed no more venial than theft; nor a  deliberate lie than perjury; nor slander than robbery; nor seduction than murder.

Especially it condemns those wrongs of which the doer induces another to partake. 
He may repent; he may, after agonizing struggles, regain the path of virtue; his  spirit may reachieve its  p. 130  purity through much anguish, after many strifes; but the weaker fellow-creature  whom he led astray, whom he made a sharer in his guilt, but whom he cannot make  a sharer in his repentance and amendment, whose downward course (the first step  of which he taught) he cannot check, but is compelled to witness,—what forgiveness  of sins can avail him there? There is his perpetual, his inevitable punishment, which  no repentance can alleviate, and no mercy can remit.

Let us be just, also, in judging of other men's motives. We know but little of the real  merits or demerits of any fellow-creature. We can rarely say with certainty that this  man is more guilty than that, or even that this man is very good or very wicked. 
Often the basest men leave behind them excellent reputations. There is scarcely one  of us who has not, at some time in his life, been on the edge of the commission of a  crime. Every one of us can look back, and shuddering see the time when our feet  stood upon the slippery crags that overhung the abyss of guilt; and when, if  temptation had been a little more urgent, or a little longer continued, if penury had  pressed us a little harder, or a little more wine had further disturbed our intellect,  dethroned our judgment, and aroused our passions, our feet would have slipped,  and we should have fallen, never to rise again.

We may be able to say—' "This man has lied, has pilfered, has forged, has embezzled  moneys intrusted to him; and that man has gone through life with clean hands." But  we cannot say that the former has not struggled long, though unsuccessfully,  against temptations under which the second would have succumbed without an  effort. We can say which has the cleanest hands before man; but not which has the  cleanest soul before God. We may be able to say, this man has committed adultery,  and that man has been ever chaste; but we cannot tell but that the innocence of one  may have been due to the coldness of his heart, to the absence of a motive, to the  presence of a fear, to the slight degree of the temptation; nor but that the fall of the  other may have been preceded by the most vehement self-contest, caused by the  most over-mastering frenzy, and atoned for by the most hallowing repentance. 
Generosity as well as niggardliness may be a mere yielding to native temperament;  and in the eye of Heaven, a long life of beneficence in one man may have cost less  effort, and may indicate less virtue and less sacrifice of interest, than a few rare  hidden acts of kindness wrung by duty out of the reluctant and unsympathizing  nature of the other. There may be more real merit, more self-sacrificing effort, more  of the noblest elements of moral grandeur, in a life of failure, sin, and shame, than  in a career, to our eyes, of stainless integrity.

When we condemn or pity the fallen, how do we know that, tempted like him, we  should not have fallen like him, as soon, and perhaps with less resistance? How can  we know what we should do if we were out of employment, famine crouching,  gaunt, and hungry, on our fireless hearth, and our children wailing for bread? We  fall not because we are not enough tempted}. He that hath fallen may be at heart as  honest as we. How do we know that our daughter, sister, wife, could resist the  abandonment, the desolation, the distress, the temptation, that sacrificed the virtue  of their poor abandoned sister of shame? Perhaps they also have not fallen, because  they have not been sorely tempted! Wisely are we directed to pray that we may not  be exposed to temptation.

Human justice must be ever uncertain. How many judicial murders have been  committed through ignorance of the phenomena of insanity! How many men hung  for murder who were no more murderers at heart than the jury that tried and the  judge that sentenced them! It may well be doubted whether the ad-ministration of  human laws, in every country, is not one gigantic mass of injustice and wrong. God  seeth not as man seeth; and the most abandoned criminal, black as he is before the  world, may yet have continued to keep some little light burning in a comer of his  soul, which would long since have gone out in that of those who walk proudly in  the sunshine of immaculate fame, if they had been tried and tempted like the poor  outcast.

We do not know even the outside life of men. We are not competent to pronounce  even on their deeds. We do not know half the acts of wickedness or virtue, even of  our most immediate fellows. We cannot say, with certainty, even of our nearest  friend, that he has not committed a particular sin, and broken a particular  commandment. Let each man ask his own heart! Of how many of our best and of  our worst acts and qualities are our most intimate associates utterly unconscious! 
How many virtues does not the world give us credit for, that we do not possess; or  vices condemn us for, of which we are not the slaves! It is but a small portion of  our evil deeds and thoughts that ever comes to light;  p. 132  and of our few redeeming goodnesses, the largest portion is known to God alone.

We shall, therefore, be just in judging of other men, only when we are charitable;  and we should assume the prerogative of judging others only when the duty is  forced upon us; since we are so almost certain to err, and the consequences of error  are so serious. No man need covet the office of judge; for in assuming it he assumes  the gravest and most oppressive responsibility. Yet you have assumed it; we all  assume it; for man is ever ready to judge, and ever ready to condemn his neighbor,  while upon the same state of case he acquits himself. See, therefore, that you  exercise your office cautiously and charitably, lest, in passing judgment upon the  criminal, you commit a greater wrong than that for which you condemn him, and  the consequences of which must be eternal.

The faults and crimes and follies of other men are not unimportant to us; but form a  part of our moral discipline. War and bloodshed at a distance, and frauds which do  not affect our pecuniary interest, yet touch us in our feelings, and concern our moral  welfare. They have much to do with all thoughtful hearts. The public eye may look  unconcernedly on the miserable victim of vice, and that shattered wreck of a man  may move the multitude to laughter or to scorn. But to the Mason, it is the form of  sacred humanity that is before him; it is an erring fellow-being; a desolate, forlorn,  forsaken soul; and his thoughts, enfolding the poor wretch, will be far deeper than  those of indifference, ridicule, or contempt. All human offences, the whole system  of dishonesty, evasion, circumventing, forbidden indulgence, and intriguing  ambition, in which men are struggling with each other, will be looked upon by a  thoughtful Mason, not merely as a scene of mean toils and strifes, but as the solemn  conflicts of immortal minds, for ends vast and momentous as their own being. It is  a sad and unworthy strife, and may well be viewed with indignation; but that  indignation must melt into pity. For the stakes for which these gamesters play are  not those which they imagine, not those which are in sight. For example, this man  plays for a petty office, and gains it; but the real stake he gains is sycophancy,  uncharitableness, slander, and deceit.

Good men are too proud of their goodness. They are respectable; dishonor comes  not near them; their countenance has weight and influence; their robes are  unstained; the poisonous breath of  p. 133  calumny has never been breathed upon their fair name. How easy it is for them to  look down with scorn upon the poor degraded offender; to pass him by with a lofty  step; to draw up the folds of their garment around them, that they may not be soiled  by his touch! Yet the Great Master of Virtue did not so; but descended to familiar  intercourse with publicans and sinners, with the Samaritan woman, with the  outcasts and the Pariahs of the Hebrew world.

Many men think themselves better, in proportion as they can detect sin in others! 
When they go over the catalogue of their neighbor's unhappy derelictions of temper  or conduct, they often, amidst much apparent concern, feel a secret exultation, that  destroys all their own pretensions to wisdom and moderation, and even to virtue. 
Many even take actual pleasure in the sins of others; and this is the case with every  one whose thoughts are often employed in agreeable comparisons of his own  virtues with his neighbors' faults.

The power of gentleness is too little seen in the world; the subduing influences of  pity, the might of love, the control of mildness over passion, the commanding  majesty of that perfect character which mingles grave displeasure with grief and  pity for the offender. So it is that a Mason should treat his brethren who go astray. 
Not with bitterness; nor yet with good-natured easiness, nor with worldly  indifference, nor with the philosophic coldness, nor with a laxity of conscience, that  accounts everything well, that passes under the seal of public opinion; but with  charity, with pitying loving-kindness.

The human heart will not bow willingly to what is infirm and wrong in human  nature. If it yields to us, it must yield to what is divine in us. The wickedness of my  neighbor cannot submit to my wickedness; his sensuality, for instance, to my anger  against his vices. My faults are not the instruments that are to arrest his faults. And  therefore impatient reformers, and denouncing preachers, and hasty reprovers, and  angry parents, and irritable relatives generally fail, in their several departments, to  reclaim the erring.

A moral offence is sickness, pain, loss, dishonor, in the immortal part of man. It is  guilt, and misery added to guilt. It is itself calamity; and brings upon itself, in  addition, the calamity of God's disapproval, the abhorrence of all virtuous men, and  the soul's own  abhorrence. Deal faithfully, but patiently and tenderly, with this evil! It is no matter  for petty provocation, nor for personal strife, nor for selfish irritation.

Speak kindly to your erring brother! God pities him: Christ has died for him: 
Providence waits for him: Heaven's mercy yearns toward him; and Heaven's spirits  are ready to welcome him back with joy. Let your voice be in unison with all those  powers that God is using for his recovery!

If one defrauds you, and exults at it, he is the most to be pitied of human beings. He  has done himself a far deeper injury than he has done you. It is he, and not you,  whom God regards with mingled displeasure and compassion; and His judgment  should be your law. Among all the benedictions of the Holy Mount there is not one  for this man; but for the merciful, the peace-makers, and the persecuted they are  poured out freely.

We are all men of like passions, propensities, and exposures. There are elements in  us all, which might have been perverted, through the successive processes of moral  deterioration, to the worst of crimes. The wretch whom the execration of the  thronging crowd pursues to the scaffold, is not worse than any one of that multitude  might have become under similar circumstances. He is to be condemned indeed, but  also deeply to be pitied.

It does not become the frail and sinful to be vindictive toward even the worst  criminals. We owe much to the good Providence of God, ordaining for us a lot  more favorable to virtue. We all had that within us, that might have been pushed to  the same excess: Perhaps we should have fallen as he did, with less temptation. 
Perhaps we have done acts, that, in proportion to the temptation or provocation,  were less excusable than his great crime. Silent pity and sorrow for the victim  should mingle with our detestation of the guilt. Even the pirate who murders in cold  blood on the high seas, is such a man as you or I might have been. Orphanage in  childhood, or base and dissolute and abandoned parents; an unfriended youth; evil  companions; ignorance and want of moral cultivation; the temptations of sinful  pleasure or grinding poverty; familiarity with vice; a scorned and blighted name;  seared and crushed affections; desperate fortunes; these are steps that might have  led any one among us to unfurl upon the high seas the bloody flag of universal  defiance; to wage war with our kind; to live the life and die the death of the reckless  and remorseless freebooter.  p. 135

[paragraph continues] Many affecting relationships of humanity plead with us to pity him. 
His head once rested on a mother's bosom. He was once the object of sisterly love  and domestic endearment. Perhaps his hand, since often red with blood, once  clasped another little loving hand at the altar. Pity him then; his blighted hopes and  his crushed heart! It is proper that frail and erring creatures like us should do so;  should feel the crime, but feel it as weak, tempted, and rescued creatures should. It  may be that when God weighs men's crimes, He will take into consideration the  temptations and the adverse circumstances that led to them, and the opportunities  for moral culture of the offender; and it may be that our own offences will weigh  heavier than we think, and the murderer's lighter than according to man's judgment.

On all accounts, therefore, let the true Mason never forget the solemn injunction,  necessary to be observed at almost every moment of a busy life: "JUDGE NOT, 
LEST YE YOURSELVES BE JUDGED: FOR WHATSOEVER JUDGMENT YE 
MEASURE UNTO OTHERS, THE SAME SHALL IN TURN BE MEASURED 
UNTO YOU." Such is the lesson taught the Provost and Judge.

INTENDANT OF THE BUILDING.

IN this Degree you have been taught the important lesson, that none are  entitled to advance in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, who have not  by study and application made themselves familiar with Masonic learning  and jurisprudence. The Degrees of this Rite are not for those who are content  with the mere work and ceremonies, and do not seek to explore the mines of  wisdom that lie buried beneath the surface. You still advance toward the 
Light, toward that star, blazing in the distance, which is an emblem of the 
Divine Truth, given by God to the first men, and preserved amid all the  vicissitudes of ages in the traditions and teachings of Masonry. How far you  will advance, depends upon yourself alone. Here, as everywhere in the world. 
Darkness struggles with Light, and clouds and shadows intervene between  you and the Truth.

When you shall have become imbued with the morality of Masonry, with  which you yet are, and for some time will be exclusively occupied,-when  you shall have learned to practice all the virtues which it inculcates; when  they become familiar to you as your Household Gods; then will you be  prepared to receive its lofty philosophical instruction, and to scale the heights  upon whose summit Light and Truth sit enthroned. Step by step men must  advance toward Perfection; and each Masonic Degree is meant to be one of  those steps. Each is a development of a particular duty; and in the present you  are taught charity and benevolence;  p. 137  to be to your brethren an example of virtue; to correct your own faults; and to  endeavor to correct those of your brethren.

Here, as in all the Degrees, you meet with the emblems and the names of 
Deity, the true knowledge of whose character and attributes it has ever been a  chief object of Masonry to perpetuate. To appreciate His infinite greatness  and goodness, to rely implicitly upon His Providence, to revere and venerate 
Him as the Supreme Architect, Creator, and Legislator of the universe, is the  first of Masonic duties.

The Battery of this Degree, and the five circuits which you made around the 
Lodge, allude to the five points of fellowship, and are intended to recall them  vividly to your mind. To go upon a brother's errand or to his relief, even  barefoot and upon flinty ground; to remember him in your supplications to  the Deity; to clasp him to your heart, and protect him against malice and evil¬  speaking; to uphold him when about to stumble and fall; and to give him  prudent, honest, and friendly counsel, are duties plainly written upon the  pages of God's great code of law, and first among the ordinances of Masonry.

The first sign of the Degree is expressive of the diffidence and humility with  which we inquire into the nature and attributes of the Deity; the second, of the  profound awe and reverence with which we contemplate His glories; and the  third, of the sorrow with which we reflect upon our insufficient observance of  our duties, and our imperfect compliance with His statutes.

The distinguishing property of man is to search for and follow after truth. 
Therefore, when relaxed from our necessary cares and concerns, we then  covet to see, to hear, and to leam somewhat; and we esteem knowledge of  things, either obscure or wonderful, to be the indispensable means of living  happily. Truth, Simplicity, and Candor are most agreeable to the nature of  mankind. Whatever is virtuous consists either in Sagacity, and the perception  of Truth; or in the preservation of Human Society, by giving to every man his  due, and observing the faith of contracts; or in the greatness and finnness of  an elevated and unsubdued mind; or in observing order and regularity in all  our words and in all our actions; in which consist Moderation and

Temperance.

Masonry has in all times religiously preserved that enlightened faith from  which flow sublime Devotedness, the sentiment of Fraternity fruitful of good  works, the spirit of indulgence and peace,  p. 138  of sweet hopes and effectual consolations; and inflexibility in the  accomplishment of the most painful and arduous duties. It has always  propagated it with ardor and perseverance; and therefore it labors at the  present day more zealously than ever. Scarcely a Masonic discourse is  pronounced, that does not demonstrate the necessity and advantages of this  faith, and especially recall the two constitutive principles of religion, that  make all religion,—love of God, and love of neighbor. Masons carry these  principles into the bosoms of their families and of society. While the 
Sectarians of former times enfeebled the religious spirit, Masonry, forming  one great People over the whole globe, and march under the great banner of 
Charity and Benevolence, preserves feeling, strengthens it, extends it in its  purity and simplicity, as it has always existed in the depths of the human  heart, as it existed even under the dominion of the most ancient forms of  worship, but where gross and debasing superstitions forbade its recognition.

A Masonic Lodge should resemble a bee-hive, in which all the members  work together with ardor for the common good. Masonry is not made for cold  souls and narrow minds, that do not comprehend its lofty mission and  sublime apostolate. Here the anathema against lukewarm souls applies. To  comfort misfortune, to popularize knowledge, to teach whatever is true and  pure in religion and philosophy, to accustom men to respect order and the  proprieties of life, to point out the way to genuine happiness, to prepare for  that fortunate period, when all the factions of the Human Family, united by  the bonds of Toleration and Fraternity, shall be but one household,—these are  labors that may well excite zeal and even enthusiasm.

We do not now enlarge upon or elaborate these ideas. We but utter them to  you briefly, as hints, upon which you may at your leisure reflect. Hereafter, if  you continue to advance, they will be unfolded, explained, and developed.

Masonry utters no impracticable and extravagant precepts, certain, because  they are so, to be disregarded. It asks of its initiates nothing that it is not  possible and even easy for them to perform. Its teachings are eminently  practical; and its statutes can be obeyed by every just, upright, and honest  man, no matter what his faith or creed. Its object is to attain the greatest  practical good, without seeking to make men perfect. It does not meddle with  the domain of religion, nor inquire into the mysteries of regeneration.  p. 139

[paragraph continues] It teaches those truths that are written by the finger of God  upon the heart of man, those views of duty which have been wrought out by  the meditations of the studious, confirmed by the allegiance of the good and  wise, and stamped as sterling by the response they find in every uncorrupted  mind. It does not dogmatize, nor vainly imagine dogmatic certainty to be  attainable.

Masonry does not occupy itself with ciying down this world, with its  splendid beauty, its thrilling interests, its glorious works, its noble and holy  affections; nor exhort us to detach our hearts from this earthly life, as empty,  fleeting, and unworthy, and fix them upon Heaven, as the only sphere  deserving the love of the loving or the meditation of the wise. It teaches that  man has high duties to perform, and a high destiny to fulfill, on this earth;  that this world is not merely the portal to another; and that this life, though  not our only one, is an integral one, and the particular one with which we are  here meant to be concerned; that the Present is our scene of action, and the 
Future for speculation and for trust; that man was sent upon the earth to live  in it, to enjoy it, to study it, to love it, to embellish it, to make the most of it.

It is his country, on which he should lavish his affections and his efforts. It is  here his influences are to operate. It is his house, and not a tent; his home,  and not merely a school. He is sent into this world, not to be constantly  hankering after, dreaming of, preparing for another; but to do his duty and  fulfill his destiny on this earth; to do all that lies in his power to improve it, to  render it a scene of elevated happiness to himself, to those around him, to  those who are to come after him. His life here is part of his immortality; and  this world, also, is among the stars.

And thus, Masonry teaches us, will man best prepare for that Future which he  hopes for. The Unseen cannot hold a higher place in our affections than the 
Seen and the Familiar. The law of our being is Love of Life, and its interests  and adornments; love of the world in which our lot is cast, engrossment with  the interests and affections of earth. Not a low or sensual love; not love of  wealth, of fame, of ease, of power, of splendor. Not low worldliness; but the  love of Earth as the garden on which the Creator has lavished such miracles  of beauty; as the habitation of humanity, the arena of its conflicts, the scene  of its illimitable progress, the dwelling-place of the wise, the good, the active,  the loving, and the dear; the place of opportunity for the development  p. 140  by means of sin and suffering and sorrow, of the noblest passions, the loftiest  virtues, and the tenderest sympathies.

They take very unprofitable pains, who endeavor to persuade men that they  are obliged wholly to despise this world, and all that is in it, even whilst they  themselves live here. God hath not taken all that pains in forming and  framing and furnishing and adorning the world, that they who were made by 
Flim to live in it should despise it. It will be enough, if they do not love it too  immoderately. It is useless to attempt to extinguish all those affections and  passions which are and always will be inseparable from human nature. As  long as he world lasts, and honor and virtue and industry have reputation in  the world, there will be ambition and emulation and appetite in the best and  most accomplished men in it; and if there were not, more barbarity and vice  and wickedness would cover every nation of the world, than it now suffers  under.

Those only who feel a deep interest in, and affection for, this world, will  work resolutely for its amelioration. Those who under-value this life,  naturally become querulous and discontented, and lose their interest in the  welfare of their fellows. To serve them, and so to do our duty as Masons, we  must feel that the object is worth the exertion; and be content with this world  in which God has placed us, until He permits us to remove to a better one. He  is here with us, and does not deem this an unworthy world.

It is a serious thing to defame and belie a whole world; to speak of it as the  abode of a poor, toiling, drudging, ignorant, contemptible race. You would  not so discredit your family, your friendly circle, your village, your city, your  country. The world is not a wretched and a worthless one; nor is it a  misfortune, but a thing to be thankful for, to be a man. If life is worthless, so  also is immortality.

In society itself, in that living mechanism of human relation-ships that  spreads itself over the world, there is a finer essence within, that as truly  moves it, as any power, heavy or expansive, moves the sounding manufactory  or the swift-flying car. The man-machine hurries to and fro upon the earth,  stretches out its hands on every side, to toil, to barter, to unnumbered labors  and enterprises; and almost always the motive, that which moves it, is  something that takes hold of the comforts, affections, and hopes of social  existence. True, the mechanism often works with difficulty,  p. 141  drags heavily, grates and screams with harsh collision. True, the essence of  finer motive, becoming intermixed with baser and coarser ingredients, often  clogs, obstructs, jars, and deranges the free and noble action of social life. But  he is neither grateful nor wise, who looks cynically on all this, and loses the  fine sense of social good in its perversions. That I can be a friend, that I can  have a friend, though it were but one in the world; that fact, that wondrous  good fortune, we may set against all the sufferings of our social nature. That  there is such a place on earth as a home, that resort and sanctuary of in-walled  and shielded joy, we may set against all the surrounding desolations of life. 
That one can be a true, social man, can speak his true thoughts, amidst all the  janglings of controversy and the warring of opinions; that fact from within,  outweighs all facts from without.

In the visible aspect and action of society, often repulsive and annoying, we  are apt to lose the due sense of its invisible blessings. As in Nature it is not  the coarse and palpable, not soils and rains, nor even fields and flowers, that  are so beautiful, as the invisible spirit of wisdom and beauty that pervades it;  so in society, it is the invisible, and therefore unobserved, that is most  beautiful.

What nerves the arm of toil? If man minded himself alone, he would fling  down the spade and axe, and rush to the desert; or roam through the world as  a wilderness, and make that world a desert. His home, which he sees not,  perhaps, but once or twice in a day, is the invisible bond of the world. It is the  good, strong, and noble faith that men have in each other, which gives the  loftiest character to business, trade, and commerce. Fraud occurs in the rush  of business; but it is the exception. Honesty is the rule; and all the frauds in  the world cannot tear the great bond of human confidence. If they could,  commerce would furl its sails on every sea, and all the cities of the world  would crumble into ruins. The bare character of a man on the other side of the  world, whom you never saw, whom you never will see, you hold good for a  bond of thousands. The most striking feature of the political state is not  governments, nor constitutions, nor laws, nor enactments, nor the judicial  power, nor the police; but the universal will of the people to be governed by  the common weal. Take off that restraint, and no government on earth could  stand for an hour.

Of the many teachings of Masonry, one of the most valuable is,  p. 142  that we should not depreciate this life. It does not hold, that when we reflect  on the destiny that awaits man on earth, we ought to bedew his cradle with  our tears; but, like the Hebrews, it hails the birth of a child with joy, and  holds that his birthday should be a festival.

It has no sympathy with those who profess to have proved this life, and found  it little worth; who have deliberately made up their minds that it is far more  miserable than happy; because its employments are tedious, and their  schemes often baffled, their friendships broken, or their friends dead, its  pleasures palled, and its honors faded, and its paths beaten, familiar, and dull.

Masonry deems it no mark of great piety toward God to disparage, if not  despise, the state that He has ordained for us. It does not absurdly set up the  claims of another world, not in comparison merely, but in competition, with  the claims of this. It looks upon both as parts of one system. It holds that a  man may make the best of this world and of another at the same time. It does  not teach its initiates to think better of other works and dispensations of God,  by thinking meanly of these. It does not look upon life as so much time lost;  nor regard its employments as trifles unworthy of immortal beings; nor tell its  followers to fold their arms, as if in disdain of their state and species; but it  looks soberly and cheerfully upon the world, as a theatre of worthy action, of  exalted usefulness, and of rational and innocent enjoyment.

It holds that, with all its evils, life is a blessing. To deny that is to destroy the  basis of all religion, natural and revealed. The very foundation of all religion  is laid on the firm belief that God is good; and if this life is an evil and a  curse, no such belief can be rationally entertained. To level our satire at  humanity and human existence, as mean and contemptible; to look on this  world as the habitation of a miserable race, fit only for mockery and scorn; to  consider this earth as a dungeon or a prison, which has no blessing to offer  but escape from it, is to extinguish the primal light of faith and hope and  happiness, to destroy the basis of religion, and Truth's foundation in the  goodness of God. If it indeed be so. then it matters not what else is true or not  true; speculation is vain and faith is vain; and all that belongs to man's highest  being is buried in the ruins of misanthropy, melancholy, and despair.

Our love of life; the tenacity with which, in sorrow and suffering, we cling to  it; our attachment to our home, to the spot that gave us birth, to any place,  however rude, unsightly, or barren, on which the history of our years has  been written, all show how dear are the ties of kindred and society. Misery  makes a greater impression upon us than happiness; because the former is not  the habit of our minds. It is a strange, unusual guest, and we are more  conscious of its presence. Happiness lives with us, and we forget it. It does  not excite us, nor disturb the order and course of our thoughts. A great agony  is an epoch in our life. We re-member our afflictions, as we do the storm and  earthquake, because they are out of the common course of things. They are  like disastrous events, recorded because extraordinary; and with whole and  unnoticed periods of prosperity between. We mark and signalize the times of  calamity; but many happy days and unnoted periods of enjoyment pass, that  are unrecorded either in the book of memory, or in the scanty annals of our  thanksgiving. We are little disposed and less able to call up from the dim  remembrances of our past years, the peaceful moments, the easy sensations,  the bright thoughts, the quiet reveries, the throngs of kind affections in which  life flowed on, bearing us almost unconsciously upon its bosom, because it  bore us calmly and gently.

Life is not only good; but it has been glorious in the experience of millions. 
The glory of all human virtue clothes it. The splendors of devotedness,  beneficence, and heroism are upon it; the crown of a thousand martyrdoms is  upon its brow. The brightness of the soul shines through this visible and  sometimes darkened life; through all its surrounding cares and labors. The  humblest life may feel its connection with its Infinite Source. There is  something mighty in the frail inner man; something of immortality in this  momentary and transient being. The mind stretches away, on every side, into  infinity. Its thoughts flash abroad, far into the boundless, the immeasurable,  the infinite; far into the great, dark, teeming future; and become powers and  influences in other ages. To know its wonderful Author, to bring down  wisdom from the Eternal Stars, to bear upward its homage, gratitude, and  love, to the Ruler of all worlds, to be immortal in our influences projected far  into the slow-approaching Future, makes life most worthy and most glorious.

Life is the wonderful creation of God. It is light, sprung from  p. 144  void darkness; power, waked from inertness and impotence; being created  from nothing; and the contrast may well enkindle wonder and delight, it is a  rill from the infinite, overflowing goodness; and from the moment when it  first gushes up into the light, to that when it mingles with the ocean of 
Eternity, that Goodness attends it and ministers to it. It is a great and glorious  gift. There is gladness in its infant voices; joy in the buoyant step of its youth;  deep satisfaction in its strong maturity; and peace in its quiet age. There is  good for the good; virtue for the faithful; and victory for the valiant. There is,  even in this humble life, an infinity for those whose desires are boundless. 
There are blessings upon its birth; there is hope in its death; and eternity in its  prospect. Thus earth, which binds many in chains, is to the Mason both the  starting-place and goal of immortality. Many it buries in the rubbish of dull  cares and wearying vanities; but to the Mason it is the lofty mount of  meditation, where Heaven, and Infinity and Eternity are spread before him  and around him. To the lofty-minded, the pure, and the virtuous, this life is  the beginning of Heaven, and a part of immortality.

God hath appointed one remedy for all the evils in the world; and that is a  contented spirit. We may be reconciled to poverty and a low fortune, if we  suffer contentedness and equanimity to make the proportions. No man is poor  who doth not think himself so; but if, in a full fortune, with impatience he  desires more, he proclaims his wants and his beggarly condition. This virtue  of contentedness was the sum of all the old moral philosophy, and is of most  universal use in the whole course of our lives, and the only instrument to ease  the burdens of the world and the enmities of sad chances. It is the great  reasonableness of complying with the Divine Providence, which governs all  the world, and hath so ordered us in the administration of His great family. It  is fit that God should dispense His gifts as He pleases; and if we murmur  here, we may, at the next melancholy, be troubled that He did not make us to  be angels or stars.

We ourselves make our fortunes good or bad; and when God lets loose a 
Tyrant upon us, or a sickness, or scorn, or a lessened fortune, if we fear to  die, or know not how to be patient, or are proud, or covetous, then the  calamity sits heavy on us. But if we know how to manage a noble principle,  and fear not death so much as a dishonest action, and think impatience a  worse evil than a  p. 145  fever, and pride to be the greatest disgrace as well as the greatest folly, and  poverty far preferable to the torments of avarice, we may still bear an even  mind and smile at the reverses of fortune and the ill-nature of Fate.

If thou hast lost thy land, do not also lose thy constancy; and if thou must die  sooner than others, or than thou didst expect, yet do not die impatiently. For  no chance is evil to him who is content, and to a man nothing is miserable  unless it be unreasonable. No man can make another man to be his slave,  unless that other hath first enslaved himself to life and death, to pleasure or  pain, to hope or fear; command these passions, and you are freer than the 
Parthian Kings.

When an enemy reproaches us, let us look on him as an impartial relator of  our faults; for he will tell us truer than our fondest friend will, and we may  forgive his anger, whilst we make use of the plainness of his declamation.

The ox, when he is weary, treads truest; and if there be nothing else in abuse,  but that it makes us to walk warily, and tread sure for fear of our enemies,  that is better than to be flattered into pride and carelessness.

If thou fallest from thy employment in public, take sanctuary in an honest  retirement, being indifferent to thy gain abroad, or thy safety at home. When  the north wind blows hard, and it rains sadly, we do not sit down in it and  cry; but defend ourselves against it with a warm garment, or a good fire and a  dry roof. So when the storm of a sad mischance beats upon our spirits, we  may turn it into something that is good, if we resolve to make it so; and with  equanimity and patience may shelter ourselves from its inclement pitiless  pelting. If it develop our patience, and give occasion for heroic endurance, it  hath done us good enough to recompense us sufficiently for all the temporal  affliction; for so a wise man shall overrule his stars; and have a greater  influence upon his own content, than all the constellations and planets of the  firmament.

Compare not thy condition with the few above thee, but to secure thy content,  look upon those thousands with whom thou wouldst not, for any interest,  change thy fortune and condition. A soldier must not think himself  unprosperous, if he be not successful as Alexander or Wellington; nor any  man deem himself unfortunate that he hath not the wealth of Rothschild; but  rather let the fonner rejoice that he is not lessened like the many generals  p. 146  who went down horse and man before Napoleon, and the latter that he is not  the beggar who, bareheaded in the bleak winter wind holds out his tattered  hat for charity. There may be many who are richer and more fortunate; but  many thousands who are very miserable, compared to thee.

After the worst assaults of Fortune, there, will be something left to us,—a  merry countenance, a cheerful spirit, and a good conscience, the Providence  of God, our hopes of Heaven, our charity for those who have injured us;  perhaps a loving wife, and many friends to pity, and some to relieve us; and  light and air, and all the beauties of Nature; we can read, discourse, and  meditate; and having still these blessings, we should be much in love with  sorrow and peevishness to lose them all, and prefer to sit down on our little  handful of thorns.

Enjoy the blessings of this day, if God sends them, and the evils of it bear  patiently and calmly; for this clay only is ours: we are dead to yesterday, and  we are not yet bom to the morrow. When our fortunes are violently changed,  our spirits are unchanged, if they always stood in the suburbs and expectation  of sorrows and reverses. The blessings of immunity, safeguard, liberty, and  integrity deserve the thanksgiving of a whole life. We are quit from a  thousand calamities, every one of which, if it were upon us, would make us  insensible of our present sorrow, and glad to receive it in exchange for that  other greater affliction.

Measure your desires by your fortune and condition, not your fortunes by  your desires: be governed by your needs, not by your fancy; by nature, not by  evil customs and ambitious principles. It is no evil to be poor, but to be  vicious and impatient. Is that beast better, that hath two or three mountains to  graze on, than the little bee that feeds on dew or manna, and lives upon what  falls every morning from the store-houses of Heaven, clouds and Providence?

There are some instances of fortune and a fair condition that cannot stand  with some others; but if you desire this, you must lose that, and unless you be  content with one, you lose the comfort of both. If you covet learning, you  must have leisure and a retired life; if honors of State and political  distinctions, you must "Be ever abroad in public, and get experience, and do  all men's business, and keep all company, and have no leisure at all. If you  will be rich, you must be frugal; if you will be popular, you must  p. 147  be bountiful; if a philosopher, you must despise riches. If you would be  famous as Epaminondas, accept also his poverty, for it added lustre to his  person, and envy to his fortune, and his virtue without it could not have been  so excellent. If you would have the reputation of a martyr, you must needs  accept his persecution; if of a benefactor of the world, the world's injustice; if  truly great, you must expect to see the mob prefer lesser men to yourself.

God esteems it one of His glories, that He brings good out of evil; and  therefore it were but reason we should trust Him to govern His own world as 
He pleases; and that we should patiently wait until the change cometh, or the  reason is discovered.

A Mason's contentedness must by no means be a mere contented selfishness,  like his who, comfortable himself, is indifferent to the discomfort of others. 
There will always be in this world wrongs to forgive, suffering to alleviate,  sorrow asking for sympathy, necessities and destitution to relieve, and ample  occasion for the exercise of active charity and beneficence. And he who sits  unconcerned amidst it all, perhaps enjoying his own comforts and luxuries  the more, by contrasting them with the hungry and ragged destitution and  shivering misery of his fellows, is not contented, but selfish and unfeeling.

It is the saddest of all sights upon this earth, that of a man lazy and luxurious,  or hard and penurious, to whom want appeals in vain, and suffering cries in  an unknown tongue. The man whose hasty anger hurries him into violence  and crime is not half so unworthy to live. He is the faithless steward, that  embezzles what God has given him in trust for the impoverished and  suffering among his brethren. The true Mason must be and must have a right  to be content with himself; and he can be so only when he lives not for  himself alone, but for others also, who need his assistance and have a claim  upon his sympathy.

"Charity is the great channel," it has been well said, "through which God  passes all His mercy upon mankind. For we receive absolution of our sins in  proportion to our forgiving our brother. This is the rule of our hopes and the  measure of our desire in this world; and on the day of death and judgment,  the great sentence upon mankind shall be transacted according to our alms,  which is the other part of charity. God himself is love; and every degree of  charity that dwells in us is the participation of the Divine nature."  p. 148

These principles Masonry reduces to practice. By them it expects you to be  hereafter guided and governed. It especially inculcates them upon him who  employs the labor of others, forbidding him to discharge them, when to want  employment is to starve; or to contract for the labor of man or woman at so  low a price that by over-exertion they must sell him their blood and life at the  same time with the labor of their hands.

These Degrees are also intended to teach more than morals. The symbols and  ceremonies of Masonry have more than one meaning. They rather conceal  than disclose the Truth. They hint it only, at least; and their varied meanings  are only to be discovered by reflection and study. Truth is not only  symbolized by Light, but as the ray of light is separable into rays of different  colors, so is truth separable into kinds. It is the province of Masonry to teach  all truths—not moral truth alone, but political and philosophical, and even  religious truth, so far as concerns the great and essential principles of each. 
The sphynx was a symbol. To whom has it disclosed its inmost meaning? 
Who knows the symbolic meaning of the pyramids?

You will hereafter learn who are the chief foes of human liberty symbolized  by the assassins of the Master Khurum; and in their fate you may see  foreshadowed that which we earnestly hope will hereafter overtake those  enemies of humanity, against whom Masonry has struggled so long.

IX.

ELECT OF THE NINE. [Elu of the Nine.]

ORIGINALLY created to reward fidelity, obedience, and  devotion, this Degree was consecrated to bravery,  devotedness, and patriot-ism; and your obligation has made  known to you the duties which you have assumed. They are  summed up in the simple mandate, "Protect the oppressed  against the oppressor; and devote yourself to the honor and  interests of your Country."

Masonry is not "speculative," nor theoretical, but  experimental; not sentimental, but practical. It requires self-  renunciation and self-control. It wears a stem face toward  men's vices, and interferes with many of our pursuits and our  fancied pleasures. It penetrates beyond the region of vague  sentiment; beyond the regions where moralizers and  philosophers have woven their fine theories and elaborated  their beautiful maxims, to the very depths of the heart,  rebuking our littlenesses and meannesses, arraigning our  prejudices and passions, and warring against the armies of our  vices.

It wars against the passions that spring out of the bosom of a  world of fine sentiments, a world of admirable sayings and  foul practices, of good maxims and bad deeds; whose darker  passions are not only restrained by custom and ceremony, but  hidden even from itself by a veil of beautiful sentiments. This  terrible solecism has existed in all ages. Romish  sentimentalism has often covered infidelity and vice; 
Protestant straightness often lauds spirituality and faith, and  neglects homely tiuth, candor, and generosity; and ultra-  liberal Rationalistic refinement sometimes soars  p. 150  to heaven in its dreams, and wallows in the mire of earth in its  deeds.

There may be a world of Masonic sentiment; and yet a world  of little or no Masonry. In many minds there is a vague and  general sentiment of Masonic charity, generosity, and  disinterestedness, but no practical, active virtue, nor habitual  kindness, self-sacrifice, or liberality. Masonry plays about  them like the cold though brilliant lights that flush and eddy  over Northern skies. There are occasional flashes of generous  and manly feeling, transitory splendors, and momentary  gleams of just and noble thought, and transient coruscations,  that light the Heaven of their imagination; but there is no vital  warmth in the heart; and it remains as cold and sterile as the 
Arctic or Antarctic regions. They do nothing; they gain no  victories over themselves; they make no progress; they are  still in the Northeast comer of the Lodge, as when they first  stood there as Apprentices; and they do not cultivate 
Masonry, with a cultivation, determined, resolute, and regular,  like their cultivation of their estate, profession, or knowledge. 
Their Masonry takes its chance in general and inefficient  sentiment, mournfully barren of results; in words and  formulas and fine professions.

Most men have sentiments, but not principles. The former are  temporary sensations, the latter permanent and controlling  impressions of goodness and virtue. The former are general  and involuntary, and do not rise to the character of virtue. 
Every one feels them. They flash up spontaneously in every  heart. The latter are mles of action, and shape and control our  conduct; and it is these that Masonry insists upon.

We approve the right; but pursue the wrong. It is the old story  of human deficiency. No one abets or praises injustice, fraud,  oppression, covetousness, revenge, envy, or slander; and yet  how many who condemn these things, are themselves guilty  of them. It is no rare thing for him whose indignation is  kindled at a tale of wicked injustice, cruel oppression, base  slander, or misery inflicted by unbridled indulgence; whose  anger flames in behalf of the injured and mined victims of  wrong; to be in some relation unjust, or oppressive, or  envious, or self-indulgent, or a careless talker of others. How  wonderfully indignant the penurious man often is, at the  avarice or want of public spirit of another!

A great Preacher well said, "Therefore thou art inexcusable. O  p. 151

[paragraph continues] Man, whosoever thou art, that judgest; for  wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself: for  thou that judgest, doest the same things." It is amazing to see  how men can talk of virtue and honor, whose life denies both. 
It is curious to see with what a marvellous facility many bad  men quote Scripture. It seems to comfort their evil  consciences, to use good words; and to gloze over bad deeds  with holy texts, wrested to their purpose. Often, the more a  man talks about Charity and Toleration, the less he has of  either; the more he talks about Virtue, the smaller stock he has  of it. The mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart; but  often the very reverse of what the man practises. And the  vicious and sensual often express, and in a sense feel, strong  disgust at vice and sensuality. Hypocrisy is not so common as  is imagined.

Here, in the Lodge, virtue and vice are matters of reflection  and feeling only. There is little opportunity here, for the  practice of either; and Masons yield to the argument here,  with facility and readiness; because nothing is to follow. It is  easy, and safe, here, to feel upon these matters. But to¬  morrow, when they breathe the atmosphere of worldly gains  and competitions, and the passions are again stirred at the  opportunities of unlawful pleasure, all their fine emotions  about virtue, all their generous abhorrence of selfishness and  sensuality, melt away like a morning cloud.

For the time, their emotions and sentiments are sincere and  real. Men may be really, in a certain way, interested in 
Masonry, while fatally deficient in virtue. It is not always  hypocrisy. Men pray most fervently and sincerely, and yet are  constantly guilty of acts so bad and base, so ungenerous and  unrighteous, that the crimes that crowd the dockets of our  courts are scarcely worse.

A man may be a good sort of man in general, and yet a very  bad man in particular: good in the Lodge and bad in the  world; good in public, and bad in his family; good at home,  and bad on a journey or in a strange city. Many a man  earnestly desires to be a good Mason. He says so, and is  sincere. But if you require him to resist a certain passion, to  sacrifice a certain indulgence, to control his appetite at a  particular feast, or to keep his temper in a dispute, you will  find that he does not wish to be a good Mason, in that  particular case ; or, wishing, is not able to resist his worse  impulses.

The duties of life are more than life. The law imposeth it upon  p. 152  every citizen, that he prefer the urgent service of his country  before the safety of his life. If a man be commanded, saith a  great writer, to bring ordnance or munition to relieve any of  the King's towns that are distressed, then he cannot for any  danger of tempest justify the throwing of them overboard; for  there it holdeth which was spoken by the Roman, when the  same necessity of weather was alleged to hold him from  embarking: "Necesse est ut earn, non lit vivanr." it needs that I  go: it is not necessary I should live.

How ungratefully he slinks away, who dies, and does nothing  to reflect a glory to Heaven! How barren a tree he is, who  lives, and spreads, and cumbers the ground, yet leaves not one  seed, not one good work to generate another after him! All  cannot leave alike; yet all may leave something, answering  their proportions and their kinds. Those are dead and withered  grains of com, out of which there will not one ear spring. He  will hardly find the way to Heaven, who desires to go thither  alone.

Industry is never wholly unfruitful. If it bring not joy with the  incoming profit, it will yet banish mischief from thy busied  gates. There is a kind of good angel waiting upon Diligence  that ever carries a laurel in his hand to crown her. How  unworthy was that man of the world who never did aught, but  only lived and died! That we have liberty to do anything, we  should account it a gift from the favoring Heavens; that we  have minds sometimes inclining us to use that liberty well, is  a great bounty of the Deity.

Masonry is action, and not inertness. It requires its Initiates to 
WORK, actively and earnestly, for the benefit of their  brethren, their country, and mankind. It is the patron of the  oppressed, as it is the comforter and consoler of the  unfortunate and wretched. It seems to it a worthier honor to be  the instrument of advancement and reform, than to enjoy all  that rank and office and lofty titles can bestow. It is the  advocate of the common people in those things which concern  the best interests of mankind. It hates insolent power and  impudent usurpation. It pities the poor, the sorrowing, the  disconsolate; it endeavors to raise and improve the ignorant,  the sunken, and the degraded.

Its fidelity to its mission will be accurately evidenced, by the  extent of the efforts it employs, and the means it sets on foot,  to improve the people at large and to better their condition;  chiefest  p. 153  of which, within its reach, is to aid in the education of the  children of the poor. An intelligent people, informed of its  rights, will soon come to know its power, and cannot long be  oppressed; but if there be not a sound and virtuous populace,  the elaborate ornaments at the top of the pyramid of society  will be a wretched compensation for the want of solidity at  the base. It is never safe for a nation to repose on the lap of  ignorance: and if there ever was a time when public  tranquillity was insured by the absence of knowledge, that  season is past. Unthinking stupidity cannot sleep, without  being appalled by phantoms and shaken by terrors. The  improvement of the mass of the people is the grand security  for popular liberty; in the neglect of which, the politeness,  refinement, and knowledge accumulated in the higher orders  and wealthier classes will some day perish like dry grass in  the hot fire of popular fury.

It is not the mission of Masonry to engage in plots and  conspiracies against the civil government. It is not the  fanatical propagandist of any creed or theory; nor does it  proclaim itself the enemy of kings. It is the apostle of liberty,  equality, and fraternity; but it is no more the high-priest of  republicanism than of constitutional monarchy. It contracts no  entangling alliances with any sect of theorists, dreamers, or  philosophers. It does not know those as its Initiates who assail  the civil order and all lawful authority, at the same time that  they propose to deprive the dying of the consolations of  religion. It sits apart from all sects and creeds, in its own calm  and simple dignity, the same under every government. It is  still that which it was in the cradle of the human race, when  no human foot had trodden the soil of Assyria and Egypt, and  no colonies had crossed the Himalayas into Southern India, 
Media, or Etruria.

It gives no countenance to anarchy and licentiousness; and no  illusion of glory, or extravagant emulation of the ancients  inflames it with an unnatural thirst for ideal and Utopian  liberty. It teaches that in rectitude of life and sobriety of habits  is the only sure guarantee for the continuance of political  freedom; and it is chiefly the soldier of the sanctity of the  laws and the rights of conscience.

It recognizes it as a truth, that necessity, as well as abstract  right and ideal justice, must have its part in the making of  laws, the administration of affairs, and the regulation of  relations in  p. 154  society. It sees, indeed, that necessity rules in all the affairs of  man. It knows that where any man, or any number or race of  men, are so imbecile of intellect, so degraded, so incapable of  self-control, so inferior in the scale of humanity, as to be unfit  to be intrusted with the highest prerogatives of citizenship, the  great law of necessity; for the peace and safety of the  community and country, requires them to remain under the  control of those of larger intellect and superior wisdom. It  trusts and believes that God will, in his own good time, work  out his own great and wise purposes; and it is willing to wait,  where it does not see its own way clear to some certain good.

It hopes and longs for the day when all the races of men, even  the lowest, will be elevated, and become fitted for political  freedom; when, like all other evils that afflict the earth,  pauperism, and bondage or abject dependence, shall cease and  disappear. But it does not preach revolution to those who are  fond of kings, nor rebellion that can end only in disaster and  defeat, or in substituting one tyrant for another, or a multitude  of despots for one.

Wherever a people is fit to be free and to govern itself, and  generously strives to be so, there go all its sympathies. It  detests the tyrant, the lawless oppressor, the military usurper,  and him who abuses a lawful power. It frowns upon cruelty,  and a wanton disregard of the rights of humanity. It abhors the  selfish employer, and exerts its influence to lighten the  burdens which want and dependence impose upon the  workman, and to foster that humanity and kindness which  man owes to even the poorest and most unfortunate brother.

It can never be employed, in any country under Heaven, to  teach a toleration for cruelty, to weaken moral hatred for guilt,  or to deprave and brutalize the human mind. The dread of  punishment will never make a Mason an accomplice in so  corrupting his countrymen, and a teacher of depravity and  barbarity. If anywhere, as has heretofore happened, a tyrant  should send a satirist on his tyranny to be convicted and  punished as a libeller, in a court of justice, a Mason, if a juror  in such a case, though in sight of the scaffold streaming with  the blood of the innocent, and within hearing of the clash of  the bayonets meant to overawe the court, would rescue the  intrepid satirist from the tyrant's fangs, and send his officers  out from the court with defeat and disgrace.  p. 155

Even if all law and liberty were trampled under the feet of 
Jacobinical demagogues or a military banditti, and great  crimes were peipetrated with a high hand against all who  were deservedly the objects of public veneration; if the  people, overthrowing law, roared like a sea around the courts  of justice, and demanded the blood of those who, during the  temporary fit of insanity and drunken delirium, had chanced  to become odious to it, for true words manfully spoken, or  unpopular acts bravely done, the Masonic juror, unawed alike  by the single or the many-headed tyrant, would consult the  dictates of duty alone, and stand with a noble firmness  between the human tigers and their coveted prey.

The Mason would much rather pass his life hidden in the  recesses of the deepest obscurity, feeding his mind even with  the visions and imaginations of good deeds and noble actions,  than to be placed on the most splendid throne of the universe,  tantalized with a denial of the practice of all which can make  the greatest situation any other than the greatest curse. And if  he has been enabled to lend the slightest step to any great and  laudable de-signs; if he has had any share in any measure  giving quiet to private property and to private conscience,  making lighter the yoke of poverty and dependence, or  relieving deserving men from oppression; if he has aided in  securing to his countrymen that best possession, peace; if lie  has joined in reconciling the different sections of his own  country to each other, and the people to the government of  their own creating; and in teaching the citizen to look for his  protection to the laws of his country, and for his comfort to  the good-will of his countrymen; if he has thus taken his part  with the best of mete in the best of their actions, he may well  shut the book, even if he might wish to read a page or two  more. It is enough for his measure. He has not lived in vain.

Masonry teaches that all power is delegated for the good, and  not for the injury of the People; and that, when it is perverted  from the original purpose, the compact is broken, and the  right ought to be resumed; that resistance to power usurped is  not merely a duty which man owes to himself and to his  neighbor, but a duty which he owes to his God, in asserting  and maintaining the rank which He gave him in the creation. 
This principle neither the rudeness of ignorance can stifle nor  the enervation of refinement extinguish. It makes it base for a  man to suffer when he  p. 156  ought to act; and, tending to preserve to him the original  destinations of Providence, spurns at the arrogant assumptions  of Tyrants and vindicates the independent quality of the race  of which we are a part.

The wise and well-informed Mason will not fail to be the  votary of Liberty and Justice. He will be ready to exert  himself in their defence, wherever they exist. It cannot be a  matter of indifference to him when his own liberty and that of  other men, with whose merits and capacities he is acquainted,  are involved in the event of the struggle to be made; but his  attachment will be to the cause, as the cause of man; and not  merely to the country. Wherever there is a people that  understands the value of political justice, and is prepared to  assert it, that is his country; wherever he can most contribute  to the diffusion of these principles and the real happiness of  mankind, that is his country. Nor does he de-sire for any  country any other benefit than justice.

The true Mason identifies the honor of his country with his  own. Nothing more conduces to the beauty and glory of one's  country than the preservation against all enemies of its civil  and religious liberty. The world will never willingly let die  the names of those patriots who in her different ages have  received upon their own breasts the blows aimed by insolent  enemies at the bosom of their country.

But also it conduces, and in no small measure, to the beauty  and glory of one's country, that justice should always be  administered there to all alike, and neither denied, sold, nor  delayed to any one; that the interest of the poor should be  looked to, and none starve or be houseless, or clamor in vain  for work; that the child and the feeble woman should not be  overworked, or even the apprentice or slave be stinted of food  or overtasked or mercilessly scourged; and that God's great  laws of mercy, humanity, and compassion should be  everywhere enforced, not only by the statutes, but also by the  power of public opinion. And he who labors, often against  reproach and obloquy, and oftener against indifference and  apathy, to bring about that fortunate condition of things when  that great code of divine law shall be everywhere and  punctually obeyed, is no less a patriot than he who bares his  bosom to the hostile steel in the ranks of his country's  soldiery.

For fortitude is not only seen resplendent on the field of battle  and amid the clash of arms, but he displays its energy under  p. 157  every difficulty and against every assailant. He who wars  against cruelty, oppression, and hoary abuses, fights for his  country's honor, which these things soil; and her honor is as  important as her existence. Often, indeed, the warfare against  those abuses which disgrace one's country is quite as  hazardous and more discouraging than that against her  enemies in the field; and merits equal, if not greater reward.

For those Greeks and Romans who are the objects of our  admiration employed hardly any other virtue in the extirpation  of tyrants, than that love of liberty, which made them prompt  in seizing the sword, and gave them strength to use it. With  facility they accomplish the undertaking, amid the general  shout of praise and joy; nor did they engage in the attempt so  much as an enterprise of perilous and doubtful issue, as a  contest the most glorious in which virtue could be signalized;  which infallibly led to present recompense; which bound their  brows with wreaths of laurel, and consigned their memories to  immortal fame.

But he who assails hoary abuses, regarded perhaps with a  superstitious reverence, and around which old laws stand as  ramparts and bastions to defend them; who denounces acts of  cruelty and outrage on humanity which make every  perpetrator thereof his personal enemy, and perhaps make him  looked upon with suspicion by the people among whom he  lives, as the assailant of an established order of things of  which he assails only the abuses, and of laws of which he  attacks only the violations,—he can scarcely look for present  recompense, nor that his living brows will be wreathed with  laurel. And if, contending against a dark array of long-  received opinions, superstitions, obloquy, and fears, which  most men dread more than they do an army terrible with  banners, the Mason overcomes, and emerges from the contest  victorious; or if he does not conquer, but is borne down and  swept away by the mighty current of prejudice, passion, and  interest; in either case, the loftiness of spirit which he displays  merits for him more than a mediocrity of fame.

He has already lived too long who has survived the min of his  country; and he who can enjoy life after such an event  deserves not to have lived at all. Nor does he any more  deserve to live who looks contentedly upon abuses that  disgrace, and cruelties that dishonor, and scenes of misery and  destitution and brutalization that disfigure his country; or  sordid meanness and ignoble revenges  p. 158  that make her a by-word and a scoff among all generous  nations; and does not endeavor to remedy or prevent either.

Not often is a country at war; nor can every one be allowed  the privilege of offering his heart to the enemy's bullets. But  in these patriotic labors of peace, in preventing, remedying,  and reforming evils, oppressions, wrongs, cruelties, and  outrages, every Mason can unite; and every one can effect  something, and share the honor and glory of the result.

For the cardinal names in the history of the human mind are  few and easily to be counted up; but thousands and tens of  thousands spend their days in the preparations which are to  speed the predestined change, in gathering and amassing the  materials which are to kindle and give light and warmth,  when the fire from heaven shall have descended on them. 
Numberless are the sutlers and pioneers, the engineers and  artisans, who attend the march of intellect. Many move  forward in detachments, and level the way over which the  chariot is to pass, and cut down the obstacles that would  impede its progress; and these too have their reward. If they  labor diligently and faithfully in their calling, not only will  they enjoy that calm contentment which diligence in the  lowliest task never fails to win; not only will the sweat of  their brows be sweet, and the sweetener of the rest that  follows; but, when the victory is at last achieved, they will  come in for a share in the glory; even as the meanest soldier  who fought at Marathon or at King's Mountain became a  sharer in the glory of those saving days; and within his own  household circle, the approbation of which approaches the  nearest to that of an approving conscience, was looked upon  as the representative of all his brother-heroes; and could tell  such tales as made the tear glisten on the cheek of his wife,  and lit up his boy's eyes with an unwonted sparkling  eagerness. Or, if he fell in the fight, and his place by the  fireside and at the table at home was thereafter vacant, that  place was sacred; and he was often talked of there in the long  winter evenings; and his family was deemed fortunate in the  neighborhood, because it had had a hero in it, who had fallen  in defence of his country.

Remember that life's length is not measured by its hours and  days, but by that which we have done therein for our country  and kind. A useless life is short, if it last a century; but that of 
Alexander was long as the life of the oak, though he died at  p. 159  thirty-five. We may do much in a few years, and we may do  nothing in a lifetime. If we but eat and drink and sleep, and let  everything go on around us as it pleases; or if we live but to  amass wealth or gain office or wear titles, we might as well  not have lived at all; nor have we any right to expect  immortality.

Forget not, therefore, to what you have devoted yourself in  this Degree: defend weakness against strength, the friendless  against the great, the oppressed against the oppressor! Be ever  vigilant and watchful of the interests and honor of your  country! and may the Grand Architect of the Universe give  you that strength and wisdom which shall enable you well and  faithfully to perform these high duties!

X.

ILLUSTRIOUS ELECT OF THE FIFTEEN.

[Elu of the Fifteen.]

THIS Degree is devoted to the same objects as those of the Elu of Nine; and also  to the cause of Toleration and Liberality against Fanaticism and Persecution,  political and religious; and to that of Education, Instruction, and Enlightenment  against Error, Barbarism, and Ignorance. To these objects you have irrevocably  and forever devoted your hand, your heart, and your intellect; and whenever in  your presence a Chapter of this Degree is opened, you will be most solemnly  reminded of your vows here taken at the altar.

Toleration, holding that every other man has the same right to his opinion and  faith that we have to ours; and liberality, holding that as no human being can  with certainty say, in the clash and conflict of hostile faiths and creeds, what is  truth, or that he is surely in possession of it, so every one should feel that it is  quite possible that another equally honest and sincere with himself, and yet  holding the contrary opinion, may himself be in possession of the truth, and that  whatever one firmly and conscientiously believes, is truth, to him —these are the  mortal enemies of that fanaticism which persecutes for opinion's sake, and  initiates crusades against whatever it, in its imaginary holiness, deems to be  contrary to the law of God or verity of dogma. And education, instruction, and  enlightenment are the most certain means by which fanaticism and intolerance  can be rendered powerless.

No true Mason scoffs at honest convictions and an ardent zeal in the cause of  what one believes to be truth and justice. But he  does absolutely deny the right of any man to assume the prerogative of Deity,  and condemn another's faith and opinions as deserving to be punished because  heretical. Nor does he approve the course of those who endanger the peace and  quiet of great nations, and the best interest of their own race by indulging in a  chimerical and visionary philanthropy—a luxury which chiefly consists in  drawing their robes around them to avoid contact with their fellows, and  proclaiming themselves holier than they.

For he knows that such follies are often more calamitous than the ambition of  kings; and that intolerance and bigotry have been infinitely greater curses to  mankind than ignorance and error. Better any error than persecution! Better any  opinion than the thumb-screw, the rack, and the stake! And he knows also how  unspeakably absurd it is, for a creature to whom himself and everything around  him are mysteries, to torture and slay others, because they cannot think as he  does in regard to the profoundest of those mysteries, to understand which is  utterly beyond the comprehension of either the persecutor or the persecuted.

Masonry is not a religion. He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and  denaturalizes it. The Brahmin, the Jew, the Mahometan, the Catholic, the 
Protestant, each professing his peculiar religion, sanctioned by the laws, by time,  and by climate, must needs retain it, and cannot have two religions; for the social  and sacred laws adapted to the usages, manners, and prejudices of particular  countries, are the work of men.

But Masonry teaches, and has preserved in their purity, the cardinal tenets of the  old primitive faith, which underlie and are the foundation of all religions. All that  ever existed have had a basis of truth; and all have overlaid that truth with errors. 
The primitive truths taught by the Redeemer were sooner corrupted, and  intermingled and alloyed with fictions than when taught to the first of our race. 
Masonry is the universal morality which is suitable to the inhabitants of every  clime, to the man of every creed. It has taught no doctrines, except those truths  that tend directly to the well-being of man; and those who have attempted to  direct it toward useless vengeance, political ends, and Jesuitism, have merely  perverted it to purposes foreign to its pure spirit and real nature.

Mankind outgrows the sacrifices and the mythologies of the childhood of the  world. Yet it is easy for human indolence to  p. 162  linger near these helps, and refuse to pass further on. So the unadventurous 
Nomad in the Tartarian wild keeps his flock in the same close-cropped circle  where they first learned to browse, while the progressive man roves ever forth "to  fresh fields and pastures new."

The latter is the true Mason; and the best and indeed the only good Mason is he  who with the power of business does the work of life; the upright mechanic,  merchant, or fanner, the man with the power of thought, of justice, or of love, he  whose whole life is one great act of perfonnance of Masonic duty. The natural  use of the strength of a strong man or the wisdom of a wise one, is to do the work  of a strong man or a wise one. The natural work of Masonry is practical life; the  use of all the faculties in their proper spheres, and for their natural function. Love  of Truth, justice, and generosity as attributes of God, must appear in a life  marked by these qualities; that is the only effectual ordinance of Masonry. A  profession of one's convictions, joining the Order, assuming the obligations,  assisting at the ceremonies, are of the same value in science as in Masonry; the  natural form of Masonry is goodness, morality, living a true, just, affectionate,  self-faithful life, from the motive of a good man. It is loyal obedience to God's  law.

The good Mason does the good thing which comes in his way, and because it  comes in his way; from a love of duty, and not merely because a law, enacted by  man or God, commands his will to do it. He is true to his mind, his conscience,  heart, and soul, and feels small temptation to do to others what he would not  wish to receive from them. He will deny himself for the sake of his brother near  at hand. His desire attracts in the line of his duty, both being in conjunction. Not  in vain does the poor or the op-pressed look up to him. You find such men in all 
Christian sects, Protestant and Catholic, in all the great religious parties of the  civilized world, among Buddhists, Mahometans, and Jews. They are kind fathers,  generous citizens, unimpeachable in their business, beautiful in their daily lives. 
You see their Masonry in their work and in their play. It appears in all the forms  of their activity, individual, domestic, social, ecclesiastical, or political. True 
Masonry within must be morality without. It must become eminent morality,  which is philanthropy. The true Mason loves not only his kindred and his  country, but all mankind; not only  the good, but also the evil, among his brethren. He has more goodness than the  channels of his daily life will hold. It runs over the banks, to water and to feed a  thousand thirsty plants. Not content with the duty that lies along his track, he  goes out to seek it; not only willing , he has a salient longing to do good, to spread  his truth, his justice, his generosity, his Masonry over all the world. His daily life  is a profession of his Masonry, published in perpetual good-will to men. He can  not be a persecutor.

Not more naturally does the beaver build or the mocking-bird sing his own wild,  gushing melody, than the true Mason lives in this beautiful outward life. So from  the perennial spring swells forth the stream, to quicken the meadow with new  access of green, and perfect beauty bursting into bloom. Thus Masonry does the  work it was meant to do. The Mason does not sigh and weep, and make  grimaces. He lives right on. If his life is, as whose is not, marked with errors, and  with sins, he ploughs over the barren spot with his remorse, sows with new seed,  and the old desert blossoms like a rose. He is not confined to set forms of  thought, of action, or of feeling. He accepts what his mind regards as true, what  his conscience decides is right, what his heart deems generous and noble; and all  else he puts far from him. Though the ancient and the honorable of the Earth bid  him bow down to them, his stubborn knees bend only at the bidding of his manly  soul. His Masonry is his freedom before God, not his bondage unto men. His  mind acts after the universal law of the intellect, his conscience according to the  universal moral law, his affections and his soul after the universal law of each,  and so he is strong with the strength of God, in this four-fold way  communicating with Him.

The old theologies, the philosophies of religion of ancient times, will not suffice  us now. The duties of life are to be done; we are to do them, consciously  obedient to the law of God, not atheistically, loving only our selfish gain. There  are sins of trade to be corrected. Everywhere morality and philanthropy are  needed. There are errors to be made way with, and their place supplied with new  truths, radiant with the glories of Heaven. There are great wrongs and evils, in 
Church and State, in domestic, social, and public life, to be righted and  outgrown. Masonry cannot in our age forsake the broad way of life. She must  journey on in the open street, appear in the crowded square, and teach men by her  deeds, her life more eloquent than any lips.

This Degree is chiefly devoted to TOLERATION; and it inculcates in the  strongest manner that great leading idea of the Ancient Art, that a belief in the  one True God, and a moral and virtuous life, constitute the only religious  requisites needed to enable a man to be a Mason.

Masonry has ever the most vivid remembrance of the terrible and artificial  torments that were used to put down new forms of religion or extinguish the old. 
It sees with the eye of memory the ruthless extermination of all the people of all  sexes and ages, because it was their misfortune not to know the God of the 
Hebrews, or to worship Him under the wrong name, by the savage troops of 
Moses and Joshua. It sees the thumb-screws and the racks, the whip, the gallows,  and the stake, the victims of Diocletian and Alva, the miserable Covenanters, the 
Non-Conformists, Servetus burned, and the unoffending Quaker hung. It sees 
Cranmer hold his arm, now no longer erring, in the flame until the hand drops off  in the consuming heat. It sees the persecutions of Peter and Paul, the martyrdom  of Stephen, the trials of Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, and Irenasus; and then in turn  the sufferings of the wretched Pagans under the Christian Emperors, as of the 
Papists in Ireland and under Elizabeth and the bloated Henry. The Roman Virgin  naked before the hungry lions; young Margaret Graham tied to a stake at low-  water mark, and there left to drown, singing hymns to God until the savage  waters broke over her head; and all that in all ages have suffered by hunger and  nakedness, peril and prison, the rack, the stake, and the sword,—it sees them all,  and shudders at the long roll of human atrocities. And it sees also the oppression  still practised in the name of religion-men shot in a Christian jail in Christian 
Italy for reading the Christian Bible; in almost every Christian State, laws  forbidding freedom of speech on matters relating to Christianity; and the gallows  reaching its arm over the pulpit.

The fires of Moloch in Syria, the harsh mutilations in the name of Astarte,

Cybele, Jehovah; the barbarities of imperial Pagan Torturers; the still grosser  torments which Roman-Gothic Christians in Italy and Spain heaped on their  brother-men; the fiendish cruelties to which Switzerland, France, the 
Netherlands, England, Scotland, Ireland, America, have been witnesses, are none  too powerful to warn man of the unspeakable evils which follow from mistakes  and errors in the matter of religion, and especially from  p. 165  investing the God of Love with the cruel and vindictive passions of erring  humanity, and making blood to have a sweet savor in his nostrils, and groans of  agony to be delicious to his ears.

Man never had the right to usurp the unexercised prerogative of God, and  condemn and punish another for his belief. Bom in a Protestant land, we are of  that faith. If we had opened our eyes to the light under the shadows of St. Peter's  at Rome, we should have been devout Catholics; bom in the Jewish quarter of 
Aleppo, we should have contemned Christ as an imposter; in Constantinople, we  should have cried "Allah il Allah, God is great and Mahomet is his prophet!" 
Birth, place, and education give us our faith. Few believe in any religion because  they have examined the evidences of its authenticity, and made up a formal  judgment, upon weighing the testimony. Not one man in ten thousand knows  anything about the proofs of his faith. We believe what we are taught; and those  are most fanatical who know least of the evidences on which their creed is based. 
Facts and testimony are not, except in very rare instances, the ground-work of  faith. It is an imperative law of God's Economy, unyielding and inflexible as 
Himself, that man shall accept without question the belief of those among whom  he is bom and reared; the faith so made a part of his nature resists all evidence to  the contrary; and he will disbelieve even the evidence of his own senses, rather  than yield up the religious belief which has grown up in him, flesh of his flesh  and bone of his bone.

What is tmth to me is not truth to another. The same arguments and evidences  that convince one mind make no impression on another. This difference is in men  at their birth. No man is entitled positively to assert that he is right, where other  men, equally intelligent and equally well-informed, hold directly the opposite  opinion. Each thinks it impossible for the other to be sincere, and each, as to that,  is equally in error. " What is truth ?" was a profound question, the most suggestive  one ever put to man. Many beliefs of former and present times seem  incomprehensible. They startle us with a new glimpse into the human soul, that  mysterious thing, more mysterious the more we note its workings. Here is a man  superior to myself in intellect and learning; and yet he sincerely believes what  seems to me too absurd to merit confutation; and I cannot conceive, and sincerely  do not believe,  p. 166  that he is both sane and honest. And yet he is both. His reason is as perfect as  mine, and he is as honest as I.

The fancies of a lunatic are realities, to him. Our dreams are realities while they  last, and, in the Past, no more unreal than what we have acted in our waking  hours. No man can say that he hath as sure possession of the truth as of a chattel. 
When men entertain opinions diametrically opposed to each other, and each is  honest, who shall decide which hath the Truth; and how can either say with  certainty that he hath it? We know not what is the truth. That we ourselves  believe and feel absolutely certain that our own belief is true, is in reality not the  slightest proof of the fact, seem it never so certain and incapable of doubt to us. 
No man is responsible for the rightness of his faith; but only for the uprightness  of it.

Therefore no man hath or ever had a right to persecute another for his belief; for  there cannot be two antagonistic rights; and if one can persecute another, because  he himself is satisfied that the belief of that other is erroneous, the other has, for  the same reason, equally as certain a right to persecute him.

The truth comes to us tinged and colored with our prejudices and our  preconceptions, which are as old as ourselves, and strong with a divine force. It  comes to us as the image of a rod comes to us through the water, bent and  distorted. An argument sinks into and convinces the mind of one man, while  from that of another it rebounds like a ball of ivory dropped on marble. It is no  merit in a man to have a particular faith, excellent and sound and philosophic as  it may be, when he imbibed it with his mother's milk. It is no more a merit than  his prejudices and his passions.

The sincere Moslem has as much right to persecute us, as we to persecute him;  and therefore Masonry wisely requires no more than a belief in One Great All- 
Powerful Deity, the Father and Preserver of the Universe. Therefore it is she  teaches her votaries that toleration is one of the chief duties of every good 
Mason, a component part of that charity without which we are mere hollow  images of true Masons, mere sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

No evil hath so afflicted the world as intolerance of religious opinion. The human  beings it has slain in various ways, if once and together brought to life, would  make a nation of people; left to live and increase, would have doubled the  population of the civilized portion of the globe; among which civilized portion it  chiefly is that religious wars are waged. The treasure and the human labor thus  lost would have made the earth a garden, in which, but for his evil passions, man  might now be as happy as in Eden.

No man truly obeys the Masonic law who merely tolerates those whose religious  opinions are opposed to his own. Every man's opinions are his own private  property, and the rights of all men to maintain each his own are perfectly equal. 
Merely to tolerate , to bear with an opposing opinion, is to assume it to be  heretical; and assert the right to persecute, if we would; and claim our toleration  of it as a merit. The Mason's creed goes further than that. No man, it holds, has  any right in any way to interfere with the religious belief of another. It holds that  each man is absolutely sovereign as to his own belief, and that belief is a matter  absolutely foreign to all who do not entertain the same belief; and that, if there  were any right of persecution at all, it would in all cases be a mutual right;  because one party has the same right as the other to sit as judge in his own case;  and God is she only magistrate that can rightfully decide between them. To that  great Judge, Masonry refers the matter; and opening wide its portals, it invites to  enter there and live in peace and harmony, the Protestant, the Catholic, the Jew.  the Moslem; every man who will lead a truly virtuous and moral life, love his  brethren, minister to the sick and distressed, and believe in the ONE, All- 
Powerful, All-Wise, everywhere-Present GOD, Architect, Creator, and Preserver  of all things, by whose universal law of Harmony ever rolls on this universe, the  great, vast, infinite circle of successive Death and Life:~to whose INEFFABLE 
NAME let all true Masons pay profoundest homage! for whose thousand  blessings poured upon us, let us feel the sincerest gratitude, now, henceforth, and  forever!

We may well be tolerant of each other's creed; for in every faith there are  excellent moral precepts. Far in the South of Asia, Zoroaster taught this doctrine: 
"On commencing a journey, the Faithful should turn his thoughts toward 
Ormuzd, and confess him, in the purity of his heart, to be King of the World; he  should love him, do him homage, and serve him. He must be upright and  charitable, despise the pleasures of the body, and avoid pride and haughtiness,  and vice in all its forms, and especially falsehood, one of the basest sins of which  man can be guilty. He  p. 168  must forget injuries and not avenge himself. He must honor the memory of his  parents and relatives. At night, before retiring to sleep, he should rigorously  examine his conscience, and repent of the faults which weakness or ill-fortune  had caused him to commit." He was required to pray for strength to persevere in  the Good, and to obtain forgiveness for his errors. It was his duty to confess his  faults to a Magus, or to a layman renowned for his virtues, or to the Sun. Fasting  and maceration were prohibited; and, on the contrary, it was his duty suitably to  nourish the body and to maintain its vigor, that his soul might be strong to resist  the Genius of Darkness; that he might more attentively read the Divine Word,  and have more courage to perform noble deeds.

And in the North of Europe the Druids taught devotion to friends, indulgence for  reciprocal wrongs, love of deserved praise, prudence, humanity, hospitality,  respect for old age, disregard of the future, temperance, contempt of death, and a  chivalrous deference to woman. Listen to these maxims from the Hava Maal, or 
Sublime Book of Odin:

"If thou hast a friend, visit him often; the path will grow over with grass, and the  trees soon cover it, if thou dost not constantly walk upon it. He is a faithful  friend, who, having but two loaves, gives his friend one. Be never first to break  with thy friend; sorrow wrings the heart of him who has no one save himself with  whom to take counsel. There is no virtuous man who has not some vice, no bad  man who has not some virtue. Happy he who obtains the praise and good-will of  men; for all that depends on the will of another is hazardous and uncertain.

Riches flit away in the twinkling of an eye; they are the most inconstant of  friends; flocks and herds perish, parents die, friends are not immortal, thou  thyself diest; I know but one thing that cloth not die, the judgment that is passed  upon the dead. Be humane toward those whom thou meetest on the road. If the  guest that cometh to thy house is a-cold, give him fire; the man who has  journeyed over the mountains needs food and dry garments. Mock not at the  aged; for words full of sense come often from the wrinkles of age. Be moderately  wise, and not over-prudent. Let no one seek to know his destiny, if he would  sleep tranquilly. There is no malady more cruel than to be discontented with our  lot. The glutton eats his own death; and the wise man laughs at the fool's  greediness. Nothing is more injurious to the young than  p. 169  excessive drinking; the more one drinks the more he loses his reason; the bird of  forgetfulness sings before those who intoxicate themselves, and wiles away their  souls. Man devoid of sense believes he will live always if he avoids war; but, if  the lances spare him, old age will give him no quarter. Better live well than live  long. When a man lights a fire in his house, death comes before it goes out."

And thus said the Indian books: "Honor thy father and mother. Never forget the  benefits thou hast received. Learn while thou art young. Be submissive to the  laws of thy country. Seek the company of virtuous men. Speak not of God but  with respect. Live on good terms with thy fellow-citizens. Remain in thy proper  place. Speak ill of no one. Mock at the bodily infirmities of none. Pursue not  unrelentingly a conquered enemy. Strive to acquire a good reputation. Take  counsel with wise men. The more one learns, the more he acquires the faculty of  learning. Knowledge is the most permanent wealth. As well be dumb as ignorant. 
The true use of knowledge is to distinguish good from evil. Be not a subject of  shame to thy parents. What one learns in youth endures like the engraving upon a  rock. He is wise who knows himself. Let thy books be thy best friends. When  thou attainest an hundred years, cease to learn. Wisdom is solidly planted, even  on the shifting ocean. Deceive no one, not even thine enemy. Wisdom is a  treasure that everywhere commands its value. Speak mildly, even to the poor. It  is sweeter to forgive than to take vengeance. Gaming and quarrels lead to misery. 
There is no true merit without the practice of virtue. To honor our mother is the  most fitting homage we can pay the Divinity. There is no tranquil sleep without a  clear conscience. He badly understands his interest who breaks his word."

Twenty-four centuries ago these were the Chinese Ethics:

"The Philosopher [Confucius] said, 'SAN! my doctrine is simple, and easy to be  understood.' THSENG-TSEU replied, 'that is certain.' The Philosopher having  gone out, the disciples asked what their master had meant to say. THSENG- 
TSEU responded, 'The doctrine of our Master consists solely in being upright of  heart, and loving our neighbor as we love ourself"

About a century later, the Hebrew law said, "If any man hate his neighbor . . .  then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to  do unto his brother ... Better is a neighbor that is near, than a brother afar off...

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

In the same fifth century before Christ, SOCRATES the Grecian said, "Thou  shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

Three generations earlier, ZOROASTER had said to the Persians: "Offer up thy  grateful prayers to the Lord, the most just and pure Ormuzd, the supreme and  adorable Cod, who thus declared to his Prophet Zerdusht: 'Hold it not meet to do  unto others what thou wouldst not desire done unto thyself; do that unto the  people, which, when done to thyself, is not disagreeable unto thee.'"

The same doctrine had been long taught in the schools of Babylon, Alexandria,  and Jerusalem. A Pagan declared to the Pharisee HILLEL, that he was ready to  embrace the Jewish religion, if he could make known to him in a few words a  summary of the whole law of Moses. "That which thou likest not done to  thyself," said Hillel, "do it not unto thy neighbor. Therein is all the law: the rest is  nothing but the commentary upon it."

"Nothing is more natural," said CONFUCIUS, "nothing more simple, than the  principles of that morality which I endeavor, by salutary maxims, to inculcate in  you ... It is humanity; which is to say, that universal charity among all of our  species, without distinction. It is uprightness; that is, that rectitude of spirit and of  heart, which makes one seek for truth in everything, and desire it, without  deceiving one's self or others. It is, finally, sincerity or good faith; which is to  say, that frankness, that openness of heart, tempered by self-reliance, which  excludes all feints and all disguising, as much in speech as in action."

To diffuse useful information, to further intellectual refinement, sure forerunner  of moral improvement, to hasten the coming of the great day, when the dawn of  general knowledge shall chase away the lazy, lingering mists of ignorance and  error, even from the base of the great social pyramid, is indeed a high calling, in  which the most splendid talents and consummate virtue may well press onward,  eager to bear a part. From the Masonic ranks ought to go forth those whose  genius and not their ancestry ennoble them, to open to all ranks the temple of  science, and by their own example to make the humblest men emulous to climb  steps no longer inaccessible, and enter the unfolded gates burning in the sun.

The highest intellectual cultivation is perfectly compatible with  p. 171  the daily cares and toils of working-men. A keen relish for the most sublime  truths of science belongs alike to every class of mankind. And, as philosophy  was taught in the sacred groves of Athens, and under the Portico, and in the old 
Temples of Egypt and India, so in our Lodges ought Knowledge to be dispensed,  the Sciences taught, and the Lectures become like the teachings of Socrates and 
Plato, of Agassiz and Cousin.

Real knowledge never permitted either turbulence or unbelief; but its progress is  the forerunner of liberality and enlightened toleration. Whoso dreads these may  well tremble; for he may be well assured that their day is at length come, and  must put to speedy flight the evil spirits of tyranny and persecution, which  haunted the long night now gone down the sky. And it is to be hoped that the  time will soon arrive, when, as men will no longer suffer themselves to be led  blindfolded in ignorance, so will they no more yield to the vile principle of  judging and treating their fellow-creatures, not according to the intrinsic merit of  their actions, but according to the accidental and involuntary coincidence of their  opinions.

Whenever we come to treat with entire respect those who conscientiously differ  from ourselves, the only practical effect of a difference will be, to make us  enlighten the ignorance on one side or the other, from which it springs, by  instructing them, if it be theirs; ourselves, if it be our own; to the end that the  only kind of unanimity may be produced which is desirable among rational  beings,—the agreement proceeding from full conviction after the freest  discussion.

The Elu of Fifteen ought therefore to take the lead of his fellow-citizen, not in  frivolous amusements, not in the degrading pursuits of the ambitious vulgar; but  in the truly noble task of enlightening the mass of his countrymen, and of leaving  his own name encircled, not with barbaric splendor, or attached to courtly  gewgaws, but illustrated by the honors most worthy of our rational nature;  coupled with the diffusion of knowledge, and gratefully pronounced by a few, at  least, whom his wise beneficence has rescued from ignorance and vice.

We say to him, in the words of the great Roman: "Men in no respect so nearly  approach to the Deity, as when they confer benefits on men. To serve and do  good to as many as possible, there is nothing greater in your fortune than that you  should be able,  p. 172  and nothing finer in your nature, than that you should be desirous to do this."

This is the true mark for the aim of every man and Mason who either prizes the  enjoyment of pure happiness, or sets a right value upon a high and unsullied  renown. And if the benefactors of mankind, when they rest from their noble  labors, shall be permitted to enjoy hereafter, as an appropriate reward of their  virtue, the privilege of looking down upon the blessings with which their  exertions and charities, and perhaps their toils and sufferings have clothed the  scene of their former existence, it will not, in a state of exalted purity and  wisdom, be the founders of mighty dynasties, the conquerors of new empires, the 
Caesars, Alexanders, and Tamerlanes; nor the mere Kings and Counsellors, 
Presidents and Senators, who have lived for their party chiefly, and for their  country only incidentally, often sacrificing to their own aggrandizement or that  of their faction the good of their fellow-creatures;—it will not be they who will be  gratified by contemplating the monuments of their inglorious fame; but those  will enjoy that delight and march in that triumph, who can trace the remote  effects of their enlightened benevolence in the improved condition of their  species, and exult in the reflection, that the change which they at last, perhaps  after many years, survey, with eyes that age and sorrow can make dim no more,—  of Knowledge become Power,—Virtue sharing that Empire,—Superstition  dethroned, and Tyranny exiled, is, if even only in some small and very slight  degree, yet still in some degree, the fruit, precious if costly, and though late  repaid yet long enduring, of their own self-denial and strenuous exertion, of their  own mite of charity and aid to education wisely bestowed, and of the hard-ships  and hazards which they encountered here below.

Masonry requires of its Initiates and votaries nothing that is impracticable. It  does not demand that they should undertake to climb to those lofty and sublime  peaks of a theoretical and imaginary unpractical virtue, high and cold and remote  as the eternal snows that wrap the shoulders of Chimborazo, and at least as in¬  accessible as they. It asks that alone to be done which is easy to be done. It  overtasks no one's strength, and asks no one to go beyond his means and  capacities. It does not expect one whose business or profession yields him little  more than the wants of himself and his family require, and whose time is  necessarily occupied by his daily vocations, to abandon or neglect the business  p. 173  by which he and his children live, and devote himself and his means to the  diffusion of knowledge among men. It does not expect him to publish books for  the people, or to lecture, to the ruin of his private affairs, or to found academies  and colleges, build up libraries, and entitle himself to statues.

But it does require and expect every man of us to do something, within and  according to his means; and there is no Mason who cannot do some thing, if not  alone, then by combination and association.

If a Lodge cannot aid in founding a school or an academy it can still do  something. It can educate one boy or girl, at least, the child of some poor or  departed brother. And it should never be forgotten, that in the poorest unregarded  child that seems abandoned to ignorance and vice may slumber the virtues of a 
Socrates, the intellect of a Bacon or a Bossuet, the genius of a Shakespeare, the  capacity to benefit mankind of a Washington; and that in rescuing him from the  mire in which he is plunged, and giving him the means of education and  development, the Lodge that does it may be the direct and immediate means of  conferring upon the world as great a boon as that given it by John Faust the boy  of Mentz; may perpetuate the liberties of a country and change the destinies of  nations, and write a new chapter in the history of the world.

For we never know the importance of the act we do. The daughter of Pharaoh  little thought what she was doing for the human race, and the vast unimaginable  consequences that depended on her charitable act, when she drew the little child  of a Hebrew woman from among the rushes that grew along the bank of the Nile,  and determined to rear it as if it were her own.

How often has an act of charity, costing the doer little, given to the world a great  painter, a great musician, a great inventor! How often has such an act developed  the ragged boy into the benefactor of his race! On what small and apparently  unimportant circumstances have turned and hinged the fates of the world's great  conquerors. There is no law that limits the returns that shall be reaped from a  single good deed. The widow's mite may not only be as acceptable to God, but  may produce as great results as the rich man's costly offering. The poorest boy,  helped by benevolence, may come to lead armies, to control senates, to decide on  peace and war, to dictate to cabinets; and his magnificent  p. 174  thoughts and noble words may be law many years hereafter to millions of men  yet unborn.

But the opportunity to effect a great good does not often occur to any one. It is  worse than folly for one to lie idle and inert, and expect the accident to befall  him, by which his influences shall live forever. He can expect that to happen,  only in consequence of one or many or all of a long series of acts. He can expect  to benefit the world only as men attain other results; by continuance, by  persistence, by a steady and uniform habit of laboring for the enlightenment of  the world, to the extent of his means and capacity.

For it is, in all instances, by steady labor, by giving enough of application to our  work, and having enough of time for the doing of it, by regular pains-taking, and  the plying of constant assiduities, and not by any process of legerdemain, that we  secure the strength and the staple of real excellence. It was thus that 
Demosthenes, clause after clause, and sentence after sentence, elaborated to the  uttermost his immortal orations. It was thus that Newton pioneered his way, by  the steps of an ascending geometry, to the mechanism of the Heavens, and Le 
Verrier added a planet to our Solar System.

It is a most erroneous opinion that those who have left the most stupendous  monuments of intellect behind them, were not differently exercised from the rest  of the species, but only differently gifted; that they signalized themselves only by  their talent, and hardly ever by their industry; for it is in truth to the most  strenuous application of those commonplace faculties which are diffused among  all, that they are indebted for the glories which now encircle their remembrance  and their name.

We must not imagine it to be a vulgarizing of genius, that it should be lighted up  in any other way than by a direct inspiration from Heaven; nor overlook the  steadfastness of purpose, the devotion to some single but great object, the  unweariedness of labor that is given, not in convulsive and preternatural throes,  but by little and little as the strength of the mind may bear it; the accumulation of  many small efforts, instead of a few grand and gigantic, but perhaps irregular  movements, on the part of energies that are marvellous; by which former alone  the great results are brought out that write their enduring records on the face of  the earth and in the history of nations and of man.  p. 175

We must not overlook these elements, to which genius owes the best and  proudest of her achievements; nor imagine that qualities so generally possessed  as patience and pains-taking, and resolute industry, have no share in upholding a  distinction so illustrious as that of the benefactor of his kind.

We must not forget that great results are most ordinarily produced by an  aggregate of many contributions and exertions; as it is the invisible particles of  vapor, each separate and distinct from the other, that, rising from the oceans and  their bays and gulfs, from lakes and rivers, and wide morasses and overflowed  plains, float away as clouds, and distill upon the earth in dews, and fall in  showers and rain and snows upon the broad plains and rude mountains, and make  the great navigable streams that are the arteries along which flows the life-blood  of a country.

And so Masonry can do much, if each Mason be content to do his share, and if  their united efforts are directed by wise counsels to a common purpose. "It is for 
God and for Omnipotency to do mighty things in a moment; but by degrees to  grow to greatness is the course that He hath left for man."

If Masonry will but be true to her mission, and Masons to their promises and  obligations—if, re-entering vigorously upon a career of beneficence, she and they  will but pursue it earnestly and unfalteringly, remembering that our contributions  to the cause of charity and education then deserve the greatest credit when it  costs us something, the curtailing of a comfort or the relinquishment of a luxury,  to make them—if we will but give aid to what were once Masonry's great  schemes for human improvement, not fitfully and spasmodically, but regularly  and incessantly, as the vapors rise and the springs run, and as the sun rises and  the stars come up into the heavens, then we may be sure that great results will be  attained and a great work done. And then it will most surely be seen that 
Masonry is not effete or impotent, nor degenerated nor drooping to a fatal decay.  nyf-

XI.

SUBLIME ELECT OF THE TWELVE;

OR

PRINCE AMETH.

[Elu of the Twelve.]

THE duties of a Prince Ameth are, to be earnest, true, reliable,  and sincere; to protect the people against illegal impositions  and exactions; to contend for their political rights, and to see,  as far as he may or can, that those bear the burdens who reap  the benefits of the Government.

You are to be true unto all men.

You are to be frank and sincere in all things.

You are to be earnest in doing whatever it is your duty to do.

And no man must repent that he has relied upon your resolve,  your profession, or your word.

The great distinguishing characteristic of a Mason is  sympathy with his kind. He recognizes in the human race one  great family, all connected with himself by those invisible  links, and that mighty net-work of circumstance, forged and  woven by God.

Feeling that sympathy, it is his first Masonic duty to serve his  fellow-man. At his first entrance into the Order, he ceases to  be isolated, and becomes one of a great brotherhood,  assuming new duties toward every Mason that lives, as every 
Mason at the same moment assumes them toward him.

Nor are those duties on his part confined to Masons alone. He  assumes many in regard to his country, and especially toward  the great, suffering masses of the common people; for they  too are his brethren, and God hears them, inarticulate as the  moanings of their misery are. By all proper means, of  persuasion and influence,  p. 177  and otherwise, if the occasion and emergency require, he is  bound to defend them against oppression, and tyrannical and  illegal exactions.

He labors equally to defend and to improve the people. He  does not flatter them to mislead them, nor fawn upon them to  rule them, nor conceal his opinions to humor them, nor tell  them that they can never err, and that their voice is the voice  of God. He knows that the safety of every free government,  and its continuance and perpetuity depend upon the virtue and  intelligence of the common people; and that, unless their  liberty is of such a kind as arms can neither procure nor take  away; unless it is the fruit of manly courage, of justice,  temperance, and generous virtue-unless, being such, it has  taken deep root in the minds and hearts of the people at large,  there will not long be wanting those who will snatch from  them by treachery what they have acquired by arms or  institutions.

He knows that if, after being released from the toils of war,  the people neglect the arts of peace; if their peace and liberty  be a state of warfare; if war be their only virtue, and the  summit of their praise, they will soon find peace the most  adverse to their interests. It will be only a more distressing  war; and that which they imagined liberty will be the worst of  slavery. For, unless by the means of knowledge and morality,  not frothy and loquacious, but genuine, unadulterated, and  sincere, they clear the horizon of the mind from those mists of  error and passion which arise from ignorance and vice, they  will always have those who will bend their necks to the yoke  as if they were brutes; who, notwithstanding all their  triumphs, will put them up to the highest bidder, as if they  were mere booty made in war; and find an exuberant source  of wealth and power, in the people's ignorance, prejudice, and  passions.

The people that does not subjugate the propensity of the  wealthy to avarice, ambition, and sensuality, expel luxury  from them and their families, keep down pauperism, diffuse  knowledge among the poor, and labor to raise the abject from  the mire of vice and low indulgence, and to keep the  industrious from starving in sight of luxurious festivals, will  find that it has cherished, in that avarice, ambition, sensuality,  selfishness, and luxury of the one class, and that degradation,  misery, drunkenness, ignorance, and brutalization of the  other, more stubborn and intractable despots at home  p. 178  than it ever encountered in the field; and even its very bowels  will be continually teeming with the intolerable progeny of  tyrants.

These are the first enemies to be subdued; this constitutes the  campaign of Peace; these are triumphs, difficult indeed, but  bloodless; and far more honorable than those trophies which  are purchased only by slaughter and rapine; and if not victors  in this service, it is in vain to have been victorious over the  despotic enemy in the field.

For if any people thinks that it is a grander; a more beneficial,  or a wiser policy, to invent subtle expedients by stamps and  imposts, for increasing the revenue and draining the life-blood  of an impoverished people; to multiply its naval and military  force; to rival in craft the ambassadors of foreign states; to  plot the swallowing up of foreign territory; to make crafty  treaties and alliances; to rule prostrate states and abject  provinces by fear and force; than to administer unpolluted  justice to the people, to relieve the condition and raise the  estate of the toiling masses, redress the injured and succor the  distressed and conciliate the discontented, and speedily  restore to every one his own; then that people is involved in a  cloud of error, and will too late perceive, when the illusion of  these mighty benefits has vanished, that in neglecting these,  which it thought inferior considerations, it has only been  precipitating its own min and despair.

Unfortunately, every age presents its own special problem,  most difficult and often impossible to solve; and that which  this age offers, and forces upon the consideration of all  thinking men, is this—how, in a populous and wealthy  country, blessed with free institutions and a constitutional  government, are the great masses of the manual-labor class to  be enabled to have steady work at fair wages, to be kept from  starvation, and their children from vice and debauchery, and  to be furnished with that degree, not of mere reading and  writing, but of knowledge, that shall fit them intelligently to  do the duties and exercise the privileges of freemen; even to  be intmsted with the dangerous right of suffrage?

For though we do not know why God, being infinitely  merciful as well as wise, has so ordered it, it seems to be  unquestionably his law, that even in civilized and Christian  countries, the large mass of the population shall be fortunate,  if, during their whole life, from infancy to old age, in health  and sickness, they have enough of the commonest and  coarsest food to keep themselves and their  p. 179  children from the continual gnawing of hunger—enough of the  commonest and coarsest clothing to protect themselves and  their little ones from indecent exposure and the bitter cold;  and if they have over their heads the rudest shelter.

And He seems to have enacted this law—which no human  community has yet found the means to abrogate—that when a  country becomes populous, capital shall concentrate in the  hands of a limited number of persons, and labor become more  and more at its mercy, until mere manual labor, that of the  weaver and iron-worker, and other artisans, eventually ceases  to be worth more than a bare subsistence, and often, in great  cities and vast extents of country, not even that, and goes or  crawls about in rags, begging, and starving for want of work.

While every ox and horse can find work, and is worth being  fed, it is not always so with man. To be employed, to have a  chance to work at anything like fair wages, becomes the great  engrossing object of a man's life. The capitalist can live  without employing the laborer, and discharges him whenever  that labor ceases to be profitable. At the moment when the  weather is most inclement, provisions dearest, and rents  highest, he turns him off to starve, if the day-laborer is taken  sick, his wages stop. When old, he has no pension to retire  upon. His children cannot be sent to school; for before their  bones are hardened they must get to work lest they starve. The  man, strong and able-bodied, works for a shilling or two a  day, and the woman shivering over her little pan of coals,  when the mercury drops far below zero, after her hungry  children have wailed themselves to sleep, sews by the dim  light of her lonely candle, for a bare pittance, selling her life  to him who bargained only for the work of her needle.

Fathers and mothers slay their children, to have the burial-  fees, that with the price of one child's life they may continue  life in those that survive. Little girls with bare feet sweep the  street-crossings, when the winter wind pinches them, and beg  piteously for pennies of those who wear warm furs. Children  grow up in squalid misery and brutal ignorance; want compels  virgin and wife to prostitute themselves; women starve and  freeze, and lean up against the walls of workhouses, like  bundles of foul rags, all night long, and night after night,  when the cold rain falls, and there chances to be no room for  them within; and hundreds of families are crowded into a  single building, rife with horrors and teeming  p. 180  with foul air and pestilence; where men, women and children  huddle together in their filth; all ages and all colors sleeping  in-discriminately together; while, in a great, free, Republican 
State, in the full vigor of its youth and strength, one person in  every seventeen is a pauper receiving charity.

How to deal with this apparently inevitable evil and mortal  disease is by far the most important of all social problems. 
What is to be done with pauperism and over-supply of labor? 
How is the life of any country to last, when brutality and  drunken semi-barbarism vote, and hold offices in their gift,  and by fit representatives of themselves control a  government? How, if not wisdom and authority, but  turbulence and low vice are to exalt to senatorships  miscreants reeking with the odors and pollution of the hell,  the prize-ring, the brothel, and the stock-exchange, where  gambling is legalized and rascality is laudable?

Masonry will do all in its power, by direct exertion and co¬  operation, to improve and inform as well as to protect the  people; to better their physical condition, relieve their  miseries, supply their wants, and minister to their necessities. 
Let every Mason in this good work do all that may be in his  power.

For it is true now, as it always was and always will be, that to  be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be  temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and to be  magnanimous and brave; and to be the opposite of all these is  the same as to be a slave. And it usually happens, by the  appointment, and, as it were, retributive justice of the Deity,  that that people which cannot govern themselves, and  moderate their passions, but crouch under the slavery of their  lusts and vices, are delivered up to the sway of those whom  they abhor, and made to submit to an involuntary servitude.

And it is also sanctioned by the dictates of justice and by the  constitution of Nature, that he who, from the imbecility or  derangement of his intellect, is incapable of governing  himself, should, like a minor, be committed to the government  of another.

Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes  one great brotherhood; all bom to encounter suffering and  sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.

For no tower of Pride was ever yet high enough to lift its  possessor above the trials and fears and frailities of humanity. 
No human hand ever built the wall, nor ever shall, that will  keep out  p. 181  affliction, pain, and infirmity. Sickness and sorrow, trouble  and death, are dispensations that level everything. They know  none, high nor low. The chief wants of life, the great and  grave necessities of the human soul, give exemption to none. 
They make all poor, all weak. They put supplication in the  mouth of every human being, as truly as in that of the meanest  beggar.

But the principle of misery is not an evil principle. We err,  and the consequences teach us wisdom. All elements, all the  laws of things around us, minister to this end; and through the  paths of painful error and mistake, it is the design of 
Providence to lead us to truth and happiness. If erring only  taught us to err; if mistakes confirmed us in imprudence; if  the miseries caused by vicious indulgence had a natural  tendency to make us more abject slaves of vice, then suffering  would be wholly evil. But, on the contrary, all tends and is  designed to produce amendment and improvement. Suffering  is the discipline of virtue; of that which is infinitely better  than happiness, and yet embraces in itself all essential  happiness. It nourishes, invigorates, and perfects it. Virtue is  the prize of the severely-contested race and hard-fought  battle; and it is worth all the fatigue and wounds of the  conflict. Man should go forth with a brave and strong heart, to  battle with calamity. He is to master it, and not let it become  his master. He is not to forsake the post of trial and of peril;  but to stand firmly in his lot, until the great word of 
Providence shall bid him fly, or bid him sink. With resolution  and courage the Mason is to do the work which it is appointed  for him to do, looking through the dark cloud of human  calamity, to the end that rises high and bright before him. The  lot of sorrow is great and sublime. None suffer forever, nor  for nought, nor without purpose. It is the ordinance of God's  wisdom, and of His Infinite Love, to procure for us infinite  happiness and glory.

Virtue is the truest liberty; nor is he free who stoops to  passions; nor he in bondage who serves a noble master. 
Examples are the best and most lasting lectures; virtue the  best example. He that hath done good deeds and set good  precedents, in sincerity, is happy. Time shall not outlive his  worth. He lives truly after death, whose good deeds are his  pillars of remembrance; and no day but adds some grains to  his heap of glory. Good works are seeds, that after sowing  return us a continual harvest; and the memory of noble actions  is more enduring than monuments of marble.  p. 182

Life is a school. The world is neither prison nor penitentiary,  nor a palace of ease, nor an amphitheatre for games and  spectacles; but a place of instruction, and discipline. Life is  given for moral and spiritual training; and the entire course of  the great school of life is an education for virtue, happiness,  and a future existence. The periods of Life are its terms; all  human conditions, its forms; all human employments, its  lessons. Families are the primary departments of this moral  education; the various circles of society, its advanced stages; 
Kingdoms and Republics, its universities.

Riches and Poverty, Gayeties and Sorrows, Marriages and 
Funerals, the ties of life bound or broken, fit and fortunate, or  untoward and painful, are all lessons. Events are not blindly  and carelessly flung together. Providence does not school one  man, and screen another from the fiery trial of its lessons. It  has neither rich favorites nor poor victims. One event  happeneth to all. One end and one design concern and urge all  men.

The prosperous man has been at school. Perhaps he has  thought that it was a great thing, and he a great personage; but  he has been merely a pupil. He thought, perhaps, that he was 
Master, and had nothing to do, but to direct and command;  but there was ever a Master above him, the Master of Life. He  looks not at our splendid state, or our many pretensions, nor at  the aids and appliances of our learning; but at our learning  itself. He puts the poor and the rich upon the same form; and  knows no difference between them, but their progress.

If from prosperity we have learned moderation, temperance,  candor, modesty, gratitude to God, and generosity to man,  then we are entitled to be honored and rewarded. If we have  learned selfishness, self-indulgence, wrong-doing, and vice, to  forget and overlook our less fortunate brother, and to scoff at  the providence of God, then we are unworthy and dishonored,  though we have been nursed in affluence, or taken our  degrees from the lineage of an hundred noble descents; as  truly so, in the eye of Heaven, and of all right-thinking men,  as though we lay, victims of beggary and disease, in the  hospital, by the hedge, or on the dung-hill. The most ordinary  human equity looks not at the school, but at the scholar; and  the equity of Heaven will not look beneath that mark.

The poor man also is at school. Let him take care that he  p. 183  learn, rather than complain. Let him hold to his integrity, his  candor, and his kindness of heart. Let him beware of envy,  and of bondage, and keep his self-respect. The body's toil is  nothing. Let him beware of the mind's drudgery and  degradation. While he betters his condition if he can, let him  be more anxious to better his soul. Let him be willing, while  poor, and even if always poor, to learn poverty's great lessons,  fortitude, cheerfulness, contentment, and implicit confidence  in God's Providence. With these, and patience, calmness, self-  command, disinterestedness, and affectionate kindness, the  humble dwelling may be hallowed, and made more dear and  noble than the loftiest palace. Let him, above all things, see  that he lose not his independence. Let him not cast himself, a  creature poorer than the poor, an indolent, helpless, despised  beggar, on the kindness of others. Every man should choose  to have God for his Master, rather than man; and escape not  from this school, either by dishonesty or alms-taking, lest he  fall into that state, worse than disgrace, where he can have no  respect for himself.

The ties of Society teach us to love one another. That is a  miserable society, where the absence of affectionate kindness  is sought to be supplied by punctilious decorum, graceful  urbanity, and polished insincerity; where ambition, jealousy,  and distrust rule, in place of simplicity, confidence, and  kindness.

So, too, the social state teaches modesty and gentleness; and  from neglect, and notice unworthily bestowed on others, and  injustice, and the world's failure to appreciate us, we learn  patience and quietness, to be superior to society's opinion, not  cynical and bitter, but gentle, candid, and affectionate still.

Death is the great Teacher, stem, cold, inexorable, irresistible;  whom the collected might of the world cannot stay or ward  off. The breath, that parting from the lips of King or beggar,  scarcely stirs the hushed air, cannot be bought, or brought  back for a moment, with the wealth of Empires. What a lesson  is this, teaching our frailty and feebleness, and an Infinite 
Power beyond us! It is a fearful lesson, that never becomes  familiar. It walks through the earth in dread mystery, and lays  it hands upon all. It is a universal lesson, that is read  everywhere and by all men. Its message comes every year and  every day. The past years are crowded with its sad and solemn  mementoes; and death's finger races its handwriting upon the  walls of every human habitation.  p. 184

It teaches us Duty; to act our part well; to fulfill the work  assigned us. When one is dying, and after he is dead, there is  but one question: Has he lived well ? There is no evil in death  but that which life makes.

There are hard lessons in the school of God's Providence; and  yet the school of life is carelully adjusted, in all its  arrangements and tasks, to man's powers and passions. There  is no extravagance in its teachings; nor is anything done for  the sake of present effect. The whole course of human life is a  conflict with difficulties; and, if rightly conducted, a progress  in improvement. It is never too late for man to leam. Not part  only, but the whole, of life is a school. There never comes a  time, even amidst the decays of age, when it is fit to lay aside  the eagerness of acquisition, or the cheerfulness of endeavor. 
Man walks, all through the course of life, in patience and  strife, and sometimes in darkness; for, from patience is to  come perfection; from strife, triumph is to issue; from the  cloud of darkness the lightning is to flash that shall open the  way to eternity.

Let the Mason be faithful in the school of life, and to all its  lessons! Let him not leam nothing, nor care not whether he  leams or not. Let not the years pass over him, witnesses of  only his sloth and indifference; or see him zealous to acquire  everything but virtue. Nor let him labor only for himself; nor  forget that the humblest man that lives is his brother, and hath  a claim on his sympathies and kind offices; and that beneath  the rough garments which labor wears may beat hearts as  noble as throb under the stars of princes.

God, who counts by souls, not stations, 
Loves and pities you and me;

For to Him all vain distinctions 
Are as pebbles on the sea.

Nor are the other duties inculcated in this Degree of less  importance. Truth, a Mason is early told, is a Divine attribute  and the foundation of every virtue; and frankness, reliability,  sincerity, straightforwardness, plain-dealing, are but different  modes in which Truth develops itself. The dead, the absent,  the innocent, and those that trust him, no Mason will deceive  willingly. To all these he owes a nobler justice, in that they  are the most certain trials of human Equity. Only the most  abandoned of men, said  p. 185

[paragraph continues] Cicero, will deceive him, who would have  remained uninjured if he had not trusted. All the noble deeds  that have beat their marches through succeeding ages have  proceeded from men of truth and genuine courage. The man  who is always true is both virtuous and wise; and thus  possesses the greatest guards of safety: for the law has not  power to strike the virtuous; nor can fortune subvert the wise.

The bases of Masonry being morality and virtue, it is by  studying one and practising the other, that the conduct of a 
Mason becomes irreproachable. The good of Humanity being  its principal object, disinterestedness is one of the first virtues  that it requires of its members; for that is the source of justice  and beneficence.

To pity the misfortunes of others; to be humble, but without  meanness; to be proud, but without arrogance; to abjure every  sentiment of hatred and revenge; to show himself  magnanimous and liberal, without ostentation and without  profusion; to be the enemy of vice; to pay homage to wisdom  and virtue; to respect innocence; to be constant and patient in  adversity, and modest in prosperity; to avoid every  irregularity that stains the soul and distempers the body—it is  by following these precepts that a Mason will become a good  citizen, a faithful husband, a tender father, an obedient son,  and a true brother; will honor friendship, and fulfill with ardor  the duties which virtue and the social relations impose upon  him.

It is because Masonry imposes upon us these duties that it is  properly and significantly styled wort, and he who imagines  that he becomes a Mason by merely taking the first two or  three Degrees, and that he may, having leisurely stepped upon  that small elevation, thenceforward worthily wear the honors  of Masonry, without labor or exertion, or self-denial or  sacrifice, and that there is nothing to be done in Masonry, is  strangely deceived.

Is it true that nothing remains to be done in Masonry?

Does one Brother no longer proceed by law against another 
Brother of his Lodge, in regard to matters that could be easily  settled within the Masonic family circle?

Has the duel, that hideous heritage of barbarism, interdicted  among Brethren by our fundamental laws, and denounced by  the municipal code, yet disappeared from the soil we inhabit? 
Do Masons of high rank religiously refrain from it; or do they  not,  p. 186  bowing to a corrupt public opinion, submit to its arbitrament,  despite the scandal which it occasions to the Order, and in  violation of the feeble restraint of their oath?

Do Masons no longer form uncharitable opinions of their 
Brethren, enter harsh judgments against them, and judge  themselves by one rule and their Brethren by another?

Has Masonry any well-regulated system of charity? Has it  done that which it should have done for the cause of  education? Where are its schools, its academies, its colleges,  its hospitals, and infirmaries?

Are political controversies now conducted with no violence  and bitterness?

Do Masons refrain from defaming and denouncing their 
Brethren who differ with them in religious or political  opinions?

What grand social problems or useful projects engage our  attention at our communications? Where in our Lodges are  lectures habitually delivered for the real instruction of the 
Brethren? Do not our sessions pass in the discussion of minor  matters of business, the settlement of points of order and  questions of mere administration, and the admission and  advancement of Candidates, whom after their admission we  take no pains to instruct?

In what Lodge are our ceremonies explained and elucidated;  corrupted as they are by time, until their true features can  scarcely be distinguished; and where are those great primitive  truths of revelation taught, which Masonry has preserved to  the world?

We have high dignities and sounding titles. Do their  possessors qualify themselves to enlighten the world in  respect to the aims and objects of Masonry? Descendants of  those Initiates who governed empires, does your influence  enter into practical life and operate efficiently in behalf of  well-regulated and constitutional liberty?

Your debates should be but friendly conversations. You need  concord, union, and peace. Why then do you retain among  you men who excite rivalries and jealousies; why permit great  and violent controversy and ambitious pretensions? How do  your own words and acts agree? If your Masonry is a nullity,  how can you exercise any influence on others?

Continually you praise each other, and utter elaborate and  high-wrought  p. 187  eulogies upon the Order. Everywhere you assume that you are  what you should be, and nowhere do you look upon  yourselves as you are. Is it true that all our actions are so  many acts of homage to virtue? Explore the recesses of your  hearts; let us examine ourselves with an impartial eye, and  make answer to our own questioning! Can we bear to  ourselves the consoling testimony that we always rigidly  perform our duties; that we even /?«//perform them?

Let us away with this odious self-flattery! Let us be men, if  we cannot be sages! The laws of Masonry, above others  excellent, cannot wholly change men's natures. They  enlighten them, they point out the true way; but they can lead  them in it, only by repressing the fire of their passions, and  subjugating their selfishness. Alas, these conquer, and 
Masonry is forgotten!

After praising each other all our lives, there are always  excellent Brethren, who, over our coffins, shower unlimited  eulogies. Every one of us who dies, however useless his life,  has been a model of all the virtues, a very child of the celestial  light. In Egypt, among our old Masters, where Masonry was  more cultivated than vanity, no one could gain admittance to  the sacred asylum of the tomb until he had passed under the  most solemn judgment. A grave tribunal sat in judgment upon  all, even the kings. They said to the dead. "Whoever thou art,  give account to thy country of thy actions! What hast thou  done with thy time and life? The law interrogates thee, thy  country hears thee, Truth sits in judgment on thee!" Princes  came there to be judged, escorted only by their virtues and  their vices. A public accuser recounted, the history of the dead  man's life, and threw the blaze of the torch of truth .on all his  actions. If it were adjudged that he had led an evil life, his  memory was condemned in the presence of the nation, and his  body was denied the honors of sepulture. What a lesson the  old Masonry taught to the sons of the people!

Is it true that Masonry is effete; that the acacia, withered,  affords no shade; that Masonry no longer marches in the  advance-guard of Truth? No. Is freedom yet universal? Have  ignorance and prejudice disappeared from the earth? Are there  no longer enmities among men? Do cupidity and falsehood no  longer exist? Do toleration and harmony prevail among  religious and political sects? There are works yet left for 
Masonry to accomplish, greater than the twelve labors of 
Hercules; to advance ever  resolutely and steadily; to enlighten the minds of the people,  to reconstruct society, to reform the laws, and to improve the  public morals. The eternity in front of it is as infinite as the  one behind. And Masonry cannot cease to labor in the cause  of social progress, without ceasing to be true to itself, without  ceasing to be Masonry.

c.

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B. S.

XII.

GRAND MASTER ARCHITECT.

[Master Architect.]

THE great duties that are inculcated by the lessons taught by the working-  instruments of a Grand Master Architect, demanding so much of us, and taking  for granted the capacity to perform them faithfully and fully, bring us at once to  reflect upon the dignity of human nature, and the vast powers and capacities of  the human soul; and to that theme we invite your attention in this Degree. Let us  begin to rise from earth toward the Stars.

Evermore the human soul struggles toward the light, toward God, and the 
Infinite. It is especially so in its afflictions. Words go but a little way into the  depths of sorrow. The thoughts that writhe there in silence, that go into the  stillness of Infinitude and Eternity, have no emblems. Thoughts enough come  there, such as no tongue ever uttered. They do not so much want human  sympathy, as higher help. There is a loneliness in deep sorrow which the Deity  alone can relieve. Alone, the mind wrestles with the great problem of calamity,  and seeks the solution from the Infinite Providence of Heaven, and thus is led  directly to God.

There are many things in us of which we are not distinctly conscious: To waken  that slumbering consciousness into life, and so to lead the soul up to the Light,  is one office of every great ministration to human nature, whether its vehicle be  the pen, the pencil, or the tongue. We are unconscious of the intensity and  awfulness of the life within us. Health and sickness, joy and sorrow, success  and disappointment, life and death, love and loss, are  p. 190  familiar words upon our lips; and we do not know to what depths they point  within us.

We seem never to know what any thing means or is worth until we have lost it. 
Many an organ, nerve, and fibre in our bodily frame performs its silent part for  years, and we are quite unconscious of its value. It is not until it is injured that  we discover that value, and find how essential it was to our happiness and  comfort. We never know the full significance of the words, "property," "ease,"  and "health;" the wealth of meaning in the fond epithets, "parent," "child," 
"beloved," and "friend," until the thing or the person is taken away; until, in  place of the bright, visible being, comes the awful and desolate shadow, where  nothing is: where we stretch out our hands in vain, and strain our eyes upon  dark and dismal vacuity. Yet, in that vacuity, we do not lose the object that we  loved. It becomes only the more real to us. Our blessings not only brighten  when they depart, but are fixed in enduring reality; and love and friendship  receive their everlasting seal under the cold impress of death.

A dim consciousness of infinite mystery and grandeur lies beneath all the  commonplace of life. There is an awfulness and' a majesty around us, in all our  little worldliness. The rude peasant from the Apennines, asleep at the foot of a  pillar in a majestic Roman church, seems not to hear or see, but to dream only  of the herd he feeds or the ground he tills in the mountains. But the choral  symphonies fall softly upon his ear, and the gilded arches are dimly seen  through his half-slumbering eyelids.

So the soul, however given up to the occupations of daily life, cannot quite lose  the sense of where it is, and of what is above it and around it. The scene of its  actual engagements may be small; the path of its steps, beaten and familiar; the  objects it handles, easily spanned, and quite worn out with daily uses. So it may  be, and amidst such things that we all live. So we live our little life; but Heaven  is above us and all around and close to us; and Eternity is before us and behind  us; and suns and stars are silent witnesses and watchers over us. We are  enfolded by Infinity. Infinite Powers and Infinite spaces lie all around us. The  dread arch of Mystery spreads over us, and no voice ever pierced it. Eternity is  enthroned amid Heaven's myriad starry heights; and no utterance or word ever  came from those far-off and silent spaces. Above, is that awful majesty; around  us, everywhere, it stretches  p. 191  off into infinity; and beneath it is this little struggle of life, this poor day's  conflict, this busy ant-hill of Time.

But from that ant-hill, not only the talk of the streets, the sounds of music and  revelling, the stir and tread of a multitude, the shout of joy and the shriek of  agony go up into the silent and all-surrounding Infinitude; but also, amidst the  stir and noise of visible life, from the imnost bosom of the visible man, there  goes up an imploring call, a beseeching cry, an asking, unuttered, and  unutterable, for revelation, wailingly and in almost speechless agony praying  the dread arch of mystery to break, and the stars that roll above the waves of  mortal trouble, to speak; the enthroned majesty of those awful heights to find a  voice; the mysterious and reserved heavens to come near; and all to tell us what  they alone know; to give us information of the loved and lost; to make known to  us what we are, and whither we are going.

Man is encompassed with a dome of incomprehensible wonders. In him and  about him is that which should fill his life with majesty and sacredness. 
Something of sublimity and sanctity has thus flashed down from heaven into the  heart of every one that lives. There is no being so base and abandoned but hath  some traits of that sacredness left upon him; something, so much perhaps in  discordance with his general repute, that he hides it from all around him; some  sanctuary in his soul, where no one may enter; some sacred inclosure, where the  memory of a child is, or the image of a venerated parent, or the remembrance of  a pure love, or the echo of some word of kindness once spoken to him; an echo  that will never die away.

Life is no negative, or superficial or worldly existence. Our steps are evermore  haunted with thoughts, far beyond their own range, which some have regarded  as the reminiscences of a pre-existent state. So it is with us all, in the beaten and  worn track of this worldly pilgrimage. There is more here, than the world we  live in. It is not all of life to live. An unseen and infinite presence is here; a  sense of something greater than we possess; a seeking, through all the void  wastes of life, for a good beyond it; a crying out of the heart for interpretation; a  memory, of the dead, touching continually some vibrating thread in this great  tissue of mystery.

We all not only have better intimations, but are capable of better  p. 192  things than we know. The pressure of some great emergency would develop in  us powers, beyond the worldly bias of our spirits; and Heaven so deals with us,  from time to time, as to call forth those better things, There is hardly a family in  the world so selfish, but that, if one in it were doomed to die—one, to be  selected by the others,—it would be utterly impossible for its members, parents  and children, to choose out that victim; but that each would say, "I will die; but 
I cannot choose." And in how many, if that dire extremity had come, would not  one and another step forth, freed from the vile meshes of ordinary selfishness,  and say, like the Roman father and son, "Let the blow fall on me!" There are  greater and better things in us all, than the world takes account of, or than we  take note of; if we would but find them out. And it is one part of our Masonic  culture to find these traits of power and sublime devotion, to revive these faded  impressions of generosity and self-sacrifice, the almost squandered bequests of 
God's love and kindness to our souls; and to induce us to yield ourselves to their  guidance and control.

Upon all conditions of men presses down one impartial law, To all situations, to  all fortunes, high or low, the mind gives their character. They are, in effect, not  what they are in themselves, but what they are to the feeling of their possessors. 
The King may be mean, degraded, miserable; the slave of ambition, fear,  voluptuousness, and every low passion. The Peasant may be the real Monarch,  the moral master of his fate, a free and lofty being, more than a Prince in  happiness, more than a King in honor.

Man is no bubble upon the sea of his fortunes, helpless and irresponsible upon  the tide of events. Out of the same circumstances, different men bring totally  different results. The same difficulty, distress, poverty, or misfortune, that  breaks down one man, builds up another and makes him strong. It is the very  attribute and glory of a man, that he can bend the circumstances of his condition  to the intellectual and moral purposes of his nature, and it is the power and  mastery of his will that chiefly distinguish him from the brute.

The faculty of moral will, developed in the child, is a new element of his nature. 
It is a new power brought upon the scene, and a ruling power, delegated from 
Heaven. Never was a human being sunk so low that he had not, by God's gift,  the power to rise, Because God commands him to rise, it is certain that he can  rise,  p. 193

[paragraph continues] Every man has the power, and should use it, to make all  situations, trials, and temptations instruments to promote his virtue and  happiness; and is so far from being the creature of circumstances, that he creates  and controls them, making them to be all that they are, of evil or of good, to him  as a moral being.

Life is what we make it, and the world is what we make it. The eyes of the  cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very  different are the aspects which it bears to them. To the one, it is all beauty and  gladness; the waves of ocean roll in light, and the mountains are covered with  day. Life, to him, flashes, rejoicing, upon every flower and every tree that  trembles in the breeze. There is more to him, everywhere, than the eye sees; a  presence of profound joy on hill and valley, and bright, dancing water. The  other idly or mournfully gazes at the same scene, and everything wears a dull,  dim, and sickly aspect. The murmuring of the brooks is a discord to him, the  great roar of the sea has an angiy and threatening emphasis, the solemn music  of the pines sings the requiem of his departed happiness; the cheerful light  shines garishly upon his eyes and offends him. The great train of the seasons  passes before him like a funeral procession; and he sighs, and turns impatiently  away. The eye makes that which it looks upon; the ear makes its own melodies  and discords; the world without reflects the world within.

Let the Mason never forget that life and the world are what we make them by  our social character; by our adaptation, or want of adaptation to the social  conditions, relationships, and pursuits of the world. To the selfish, the cold, and  the insensible, to the haughty and presuming, to the proud, who demand more  than they are likely to receive, to the jealous, ever afraid they shall not receive  enough, to those who are unreasonably sensitive about the good or ill opinions  of others, to all violators of the social laws, the rude, the violent, the dishonest,  and the sensual,—to all these, the social condition, from its very nature, will  present annoyances, disappointments, and pains, appropriate to their several  characters. The benevolent affections will not revolve around selfishness; the  cold-hearted must expect to meet coldness; the proud, haughtiness; the  passionate, anger; and the violent, rudeness. Those who forget the rights of  others, must not be surprised if their own are forgotten; and those who stoop to  the lowest embraces of sense must not wonder, if others are not concerned to  p. 194  find their prostrate honor, and lift it up to the remembrance and respect of the  world.

To the gentle, many will be gentle; to the kind, many will be kind. A good man  will find that there is goodness in the world; an honest man will find that there  is honesty in the world; and a man of principle will find principle and integrity  in the minds of others.

There are no blessings which the mind may not convert into the bitterest of  evils; and no trials which it may not transform into the noblest and divinest  blessings. There are no temptations from which assailed virtue may not gain  strength, instead of falling before them, vanquished and subdued. It is true that  temptations have a great power, and virtue often falls; but the might of these  temptations lies not in themselves, but in the feebleness of our own virtue, and  the weakness of our own hearts. We rely too much on the strength of our  ramparts and bastions, and allow the enemy to make his approaches, by trench  and parallel, at his leisure. The offer of dishonest gain and guilty pleasure  makes the honest man more honest, and the pure man more pure. They raise his  virtue to the height of towering indignation. The fair occasion, the safe  opportunity, the tempting chance become the defeat and disgrace of the tempter. 
The honest and upright man does not wait until temptation has made its  approaches and mounted its batteries on the last parallel.

But to the impure, the dishonest, the false-hearted, the corrupt, and the sensual,  occasions come every day, and in every scene, and through every avenue of  thought and imagination. He is prepared to capitulate before the first approach  is commenced; and sends out the white flag when the enemy's advance comes  in sight of his walls. He makes occasions; or, if opportunities come not, evil  thoughts come, and he throws wide open the gates of his heart and welcomes  those bad visitors, and entertains them with a lavish hospitality.

The business of the world absorbs, corrupts, and degrades one mind, while in  another it feeds and nurses the noblest independence, integrity, and generosity. 
Pleasure is a poison to some, and a healthful refreshment to others. To one, the  world is a great harmony, like a noble strain of music with infinite modulations;  to another, it is a huge factory, the clash and clang of whose machinery jars  upon his ears and frets him to madness. Life is substantially  p. 195  the same thing to all who partake of its lot. Yet some rise to virtue and glory;  while others, undergoing the same discipline, and enjoying the same privileges,  sink to shame and perdition.

Thorough, faithful, and honest endeavor to improve, is always successful, and  the highest happiness. To sigh sentimentally over human misfortune, is fit only  for the mind's childhood; and the mind's misery is chiefly its own fault;  appointed, under the good Providence of God, as the punisher and corrector of  its fault. In the long run, the mind will be happy, just in proportion to its fidelity  and wisdom. When it is miserable, it has planted the thorns in its own path; it  grasps them, and cries out in loud complaint; and that complaint is but the  louder confession that the thorns which grew there, it planted.

A certain kind and degree of spirituality enter into the largest part of even the  most ordinary life. You can carry on no business, without some faith in man. 
You cannot even dig in the ground, without a reliance on the unseen result. You  cannot think or reason or even step, without confiding in the inward, spiritual  principles of your nature. All the affections and bonds, and hopes and interests  of life centre in the spiritual; and you know that if that central bond were  broken, the world would rush to chaos.

Believe that there is a God; that He is our father; that He has a paternal interest  in our welfare and improvement; that He has given us powers, by means of  which we may escape from sin and ruin; that He has destined us to a future life  of endless progress toward perfection and a knowledge of Himself—believe this,  as every Mason should, and you can live calmly, endure patiently, labor  resolutely, deny yourselves cheerfully, hope steadfastly, and be conquerors in  the great struggle of life. Take away any one of these principles, and what  remains for us? Say that there is no God; or no way opened for hope and  reformation and triumph, no heaven to come, no rest for the weary, no home in  the bosom of God for the afflicted and disconsolate soul; or that God is but an  ugly blind Chance that stabs in the dark; or a some what that is, when attempted  to be defined, a wowhat, emotionless, passionless, the Supreme Apathy to which  all things, good and evil, are alike indifferent; or a jealous God who  revengefully visits the sins of the fathers on the children, and when the fathers  have eaten  p. 196  sour grapes, sets the children's teeth on edge; an arbitrary supreme Will, that has  made it right to be virtuous, and wrong to lie and steal, because IT pleased to  make it so rather than other-wise, retaining the power to reverse the law; or a  fickle, vacillating, inconstant Deity, or a cruel, bloodthirsty, savage Hebrew or 
Puritanic one; and we are but the sport of chance and the victims of despair;  hapless wanderers upon the face of a desolate, forsaken, or accursed and hated  earth; surrounded by darkness, struggling with obstacles, toiling for barren  results and empty purposes, distracted with doubts, and misled by false gleams  of light; wanderers with no way, no prospect, no home; doomed and deserted  mariners on a dark and stormy sea, without compass or course, to whom no  stars appear; tossing helmless upon the weltering, angry waves, with no blessed  haven in the distance whose guiding-star invites us to its welcome rest.

The religious faith thus taught by Masonry is indispensable to the attainment of  the great ends of life; and must therefore have been designed to be a part of it. 
We are made for this faith; and there must be something, somewhere, for us to  believe in. We cannot grow healthfully, nor live happily, without it. It is  therefore true. If we could cut off from any soul all the principles taught by 
Masonry, the faith in a God, in immortality, in virtue, in essential rectitude, that  soul would sink into sin, misery, darkness, and ruin. If we could cut off all  sense of these truths, the man would sink at once to the grade of the animal.

No man can suffer and be patient, can struggle and conquer, can improve and be  happy, otherwise than as the swine are, without conscience, without hope,  without a reliance on a just, wise, and beneficent God. We must, of necessity,  embrace the great truths taught by Masonry, and live by them, to live happily. "/  put my trust in God," is the protest of Masonry against the belief in a cruel,  angry, and revengeful God, to be feared and not reverenced by His creatures.

Society, in its great relations, is as much the creation of Heaven as is the system  of the Universe. If that bond of gravitation that holds all worlds and systems  together, were suddenly severed, the universe would fly into wild and boundless  chaos. And if we were to sever all the moral bonds that hold society together; if  we could cut off from it every conviction of Truth and Integrity, of an authority  above it, and of a conscience within it, it would immediately  p. 197  rush to disorder and frightful anarchy and ruin. The religion we teach is  therefore as really a principle of things, and as certain and true, as gravitation.

Faith in moral principles, in virtue, and in God, is as necessary for the guidance  of a man, as instinct is for the guidance of an animal. And therefore this faith, as  a principle of man's nature, has a mission as truly authentic in God's 
Providence, as the principle of instinct. The pleasures of the soul, too, must  depend on certain principles. They must recognize a soul, its properties and  responsibilities, a conscience, and the sense of an authority above us; and these  are the principles of faith. No man can suffer and be patient, can struggle and  conquer, can improve and be happy, without conscience, without hope, without  a reliance on a just, wise, and beneficent God. We must of necessity embrace  the great truths taught by Masonry, and live by them, to live happily.

Everything in the universe has fixed and certain laws and principles for its  action; the star in its orbit, the animal in its activity, the physical man in his  functions. And he has likewise fixed and certain laws and principles as a  spiritual being. His soul does not die for want of aliment or guidance. For the  rational soul there is ample provision. From the lofty pine, rocked in the  darkening tempest, the cry of the young raven is heard; and it would be most  strange if there were no answer for the cry and call of the soul, tortured by want  and sorrow and agony. The total rejection of all moral and religious belief  would strike out a principle from human nature, as essential to it as gravitation  to the stars, instinct to animal life, the circulation of the blood to the human  body.

God has ordained that life shall be a social state. We are members of a civil  community. The life of that community depends upon its moral condition.

Public spirit, intelligence, uprightness, temperance, kindness, domestic purity,  will make it a happy community, and give it prosperity and continuance. 
Widespread selfishness, dishonesty, intemperance, libertinism, corruption, and  crime, will make it miserable, and bring about dissolution and speedy ruin. A  whole people lives one life; one mighty heart heaves in its bosom; it is one great  pulse of existence that throbs there. One stream of life flows there, with ten  thousand intermingled branches and channels, through all the homes of human  love. One sound as of many waters, a rapturous jubilee or a  p. 198  mournful sighing, comes up from the congregated dwellings of a whole nation.

The Public is no vague abstraction; nor should that which is done against that 
Public, against public interest, law, or virtue, press but lightly on the  conscience. It is but a vast expansion of individual life; an ocean of tears, an  atmosphere of sighs, or a great whole of joy and gladness. It suffers with the  suffering of millions; it rejoices with the joy of millions. What a vast crime does  he commit,—private man or public man, agent or contractor, legislator or  magistrate, secretaiy or president,—who dares, with indignity and wrong, to  strike the bosom of the Public Welfare, to encourage venality and corruption,  and shameful sale of the elective franchise, or of office; to sow dissension, and  to weaken the bonds of amity that bind a Nation together! What a huge iniquity,  he who, with vices like the daggers of a parricide, dares to pierce that mighty  heart, in which the ocean of existence is flowing!

What an unequalled interest lies in the virtue of eveiy one whom we love! In his  virtue, nowhere but in his virtue, is garnered up the incomparable treasure.

What care we for brother or friend, compared with what we care for his honor,  his fidelity, his reputation, his kindness? How venerable is the rectitude of a  parent! How sacred his reputation! No blight that can fall upon a child, is like a  parent's dishonor. Heathen or Christian, every, parent would have his child do  well; and pours out upon him all the fullness of parental love, in the one desire  that he may do well; that he may be worthy of his cares, and his freely bestowed  pains; that he may walk in the way of honor and happiness. In that way he  cannot walk one step without virtue. Such is life, in its relationships. A  thousand ties embrace it, like the fine nerves of a delicate organization; like the  strings of an instrument capable of sweet melodies, but easily put out of tune or  broken, by rudeness, anger, and selfish indulgence.

If life could, by any process, be made insensible to pain and pleasure; if the  human heart were hard as adamant, then avarice, ambition, and sensuality might  channel out their paths in it, and make it their beaten way; and none would  wonder or protest. If we could be patient under the load of a mere worldly life;  if we could bear that burden as the beasts bear it; then, like beasts, we might  bend all our thoughts to the earth; and no call from the  p. 199  great Heavens above us would startle us from our plodding and earthly course.

But we art not insensible brutes, who can refuse the call of reason and  conscience. The soul is capable of remorse. When the great dispensations of life  press down upon us, we weep, and suffer and sorrow. And sorrow and agony  desire other companion-ships than worldliness and irreligion. We are not  willing to bear those burdens of the heart, fear, anxiety, disappointment, and  trouble, without any object or use. We are not willing to suffer, to be sick and  afflicted, to have our days and months lost to comfort and joy, and  overshadowed with calamity and grief, without advantage or compensation; to  barter away the dearest treasures, the very sufferings, of the heart; to sell the  life-blood from failing frame and fading cheek, our tears of bitterness and  groans of anguish, for nothing. Human nature, frail, feeling, sensitive, and  sorrowing, cannot bear to suffer for nought.

Everywhere, human life is a great and solemn dispensation. Man, suffering,  enjoying, loving, hating, hoping, and fearing, chained to the earth and yet  exploring the far recesses of the universe, has the power to commune with God  and His angels. Around this great action of existence the curtains of Time are  drawn; but there are openings through them which give us glimpses of eternity.

God looks down upon this scene of human probation. The wise and the good in  all ages have interposed for it, with their teachings and their blood. Everything  that exists around us, every movement in nature, every counsel of Providence,  every interposition of God, centres upon one point—the fidelity of man. And  even if the ghosts of the departed and remembered could come at midnight  through the barred doors of our dwellings, and the shrouded dead should glide  through the aisles of our churches and sit in our Masonic Temples, their  teachings would be no more eloquent and impressive than the dread realities of  life; than those memories of misspent years, those ghosts of departed  opportunities, that, pointing to our conscience and eternity, cry continually in  our ears, " Work while the day lasts! for the night of death cometh, in which no  man can work."

There are no tokens of public mourning for the calamity of the soul. Men weep  when the body dies; and when it is borne to its last rest, they follow it with sad  and mournful procession. But  p. 200  for the dying soul there is no open lamentation; for the lost soul there are no  obsequies.

And yet the mind and soul of man have a value which nothing else has. They  are worth a care which nothing else is worth; and to the single, solitary  individual, they ought to possess an interest which nothing else possesses. The  stored treasures of the heart, the unfathomable mines that are in the soul to be  wrought, the broad and boundless realms of Thought, the freighted argosy of  man's hopes and best affections, are brighter than gold and dearer than treasure.

And yet the mind is in reality little known or considered. It is all which man  permanently is, his inward being, his divine energy, his immortal thought, his  boundless capacity, his infinite aspiration; and nevertheless, few value it for  what it is worth. Few see a brother-mind in others, through the rags with which  poverty has clothed it, beneath the crushing burdens of life, amidst the close  pressure of worldly troubles, wants and sorrows. Few acknowledge and cheer it  in that humble blot, and feel that the nobility of earth, and the commencing  glory of Heaven are there.

Men do not feel the worth of their own souls. They are proud of their mental  powers; but the intrinsic, inner, infinite worth of their own minds they do not  perceive. The poor man, admitted to a palace, feels, lofty and immortal being as  he is, like a mere ordinary thing amid the splendors that surround him. He sees  the carnage of wealth roll by him, and forgets the intrinsic and eternal dignity  of his own mind in a poor and degrading envy, and feels as an humbler creature,  because others are above him, not in mind, but in mensuration. Men respect  themselves, according as they are more wealthy, higher in rank or office, loftier  in the world's opinion, able to command more votes, more the favorites of the  people or of Power.

The difference among men is not so much in their nature and intrinsic power, as  in the faculty of communication. Some have the capacity of uttering and  embodying in words their thoughts. All men, more or lessee/ those thoughts. 
The glory of genius and the rapture of virtue, when rightly revealed, are  diffused and shared among unnumbered minds. When eloquence and poetry  speak; when those glorious arts, statuary, painting, and music, take audible or  visible shape; when patriotism, charity, and virtue  p. 201  speak with a thrilling potency, the hearts of thousands glow with a kindred joy  and ecstasy. If it were not so, there would be no eloquence; for eloquence is that  to which other hearts respond; it is the faculty and power of making other hearts  respond. No one is so low or degraded, as not sometimes to be touched with the  beauty of goodness. No heart is made of materials so common, or even base, as  not sometimes to respond, through every chord of it, to the call of honor,  patriotism, generosity, and virtue. The poor African Slave will die for the  master or mistress, or in defence of the children, whom he loves. The poor, lost,  scorned, abandoned, outcast woman will, without expectation of reward, nurse  those who are dying on every hand, utter strangers to her, with a contagious and  horrid pestilence. The pickpocket will scale burning walls to rescue child or  woman, unknown to him, from the ravenous flames.

Most glorious is this capacity! A power to commune with God and His Angels;  a reflection of the Uncreated Light; a mirror that can collect and concentrate  upon itself all the moral splendors of the Universe. It is the soul alone that gives  any value to the things of this world; and it is only by raising the soul to its just  elevation above all other things, that we can look rightly upon the purposes of  this earth. No sceptre nor throne, nor structure of ages, nor broad empire, can  compare with the wonders and grandeurs of a single thought. That alone, of all  things that have been made, comprehends the Maker of all. That alone is the  key which unlocks all the treasures of the Universe; the power that reigns over 
Space, Time, and Eternity. That, under God, is the Sovereign Dispenser to man  of all the blessings and glories that lie within the compass of possession, or the  range of possibility. Virtue, Heaven, and Immortality exist not, nor ever will  exist for us except as they exist and will exist, in the perception, feeling, and  thought of the glorious mind.

My Brother, in the hope that you have listened to and understood the Instruction  and Lecture of this Degree, and that you feel the dignity of your own nature and  the vast capacities of your own soul for good or evil, I proceed briefly to  communicate to you the remaining instruction of this Degree.

The Hebrew word, in the old Hebrew and Samaritan character, suspended in the 
East, over the five columns, is ADONAI, one of the names of God, usually  translated Lord; and which the Hebrews,  p. 202  in reading, always substitute for the True Name, which is for them ineffable.

The five columns, in the five different orders of architecture, are emblematical  to us of the five principal divisions of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite:

1 .—The Tuscan , of the three blue Degrees, or the primitive Masonry.

2. —The Doric , of the ineffable Degrees, from the fourth to the fourteenth,  inclusive.

3. —The Ionic, of the fifteenth and sixteenth, or second temple Degrees.

4. —The Corinthian, of the seventeenth and eighteenth Degrees, or those of the  new law.

5.—The Composite, of the philosophical and chivalric Degrees intermingled,  from the nineteenth to the thirty-second, inclusive.

The North Star, always fixed and immutable for us, represents the point in the  centre of the circle, or the Deity in the centre of the Universe. It is the especial  symbol of duty and of faith. To it, and the seven that continually revolve around  it, mystical meanings are attached, which you will learn hereafter, if you should  be permitted to advance, when you are made acquainted with the philosophical  doctrines of the Hebrews.

The Morning Star, rising in the East, Jupiter, called by the Hebrews Tsadoc or 
Tsydyk, Just , is an emblem to us of the ever-approaching dawn of perfection  and Masonic light.

The three great lights of the Lodge are symbols to us of the Power, Wisdom,  and Beneficence of the Deity. They are also symbols of the first three 
Sephiroth, or Emanations of the Deity, according to the Kabalah, Kether, the  omnipotent divine will; Chochmah, the divine intellectual power to generate  thought, and Binah, the divine intellectual capacity to produce it—the two latter,  usually translated Wisdom and Understanding, being the active and the passive,  the positive and the negative, which we do not yet endeavor to explain to you. 
They are the columns Jachin and Boaz, that stand at the entrance to the Masonic 
Temple.

In another aspect of this Degree, the Chief of the Architects [n'22 21 , Rab 
Banaim,] symbolizes the constitutional executive head and chief of a free  government; and the Degree teaches us that no free government can long  endure, when the people cease  p. 203  to select for their magistrates the best and the wisest of their statesmen; when,  passing these by, they permit factions or sordid interests to select for them the  small, the low, the ignoble, and the obscure, and into such hands commit the  country's destinies. There is, after all, a "divine right" to govern; and it is vested  in the ablest, wisest, best, of every nation. "Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: 
I am understanding: I am power: by me kings do reign, and princes decree  justice; by me princes rule, and nobles, even all the magistrates of the earth."

For the present, my Brother, let this suffice. We welcome you among us, to this  peaceful retreat of virtue, to a participation in our privileges, to a share in our  joys and our sorrows.

XIII.

ROYAL ARCH OF SOLOMON.

WHETHER the legend and history of this Degree are  historically true, or but an allegory, containing in itself a  deeper truth and a profounder meaning, we shall not now  debate. If it be but a legendary myth, you must find out for  yourself what it means. It is certain that the word which the 
Hebrews are not now permitted to pronounce was in common  use by Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Laban, Rebecca, and even  among tribes foreign to the Hebrews, before the time of 
Moses; and that it recurs a hundred times in the lyrical  effusions of David and other Hebrew poets.

We know that for many centuries the Hebrews have been  forbidden to pronounce the Sacred Name; that wherever it  occurs, they have for ages read the word Adona'i instead; and  that under it, when the masoretic points, which represent the  vowels, came to be used, they placed those which belonged to  the latter word. The possession of the true pronunciation was  deemed to confer on him who had it extraordinary and  supernatural powers; and the Word itself, worn upon the  person, was regarded as an amulet, a protection against  personal danger, sickness, and evil spirits. We know that all  this was a vain superstition, natural to a rude people,  necessarily disappearing as the intellect of man became  enlightened; and wholly unworthy of a Mason.

It is noticeable that this notion of the sanctity of the Divine 
Name or Creative Word was common to all the ancient  nations. The Sacred Word HOM was supposed by the ancient 
Persians (who were among the earliest emigrants from 
Northern India) to  p. 205  be pregnant with a mysterious power; and they taught that by  its utterance the world was created. In India it was forbidden  to pronounce the word AUM or OM, the Sacred Name of the 
One Deity, manifested as Brahma, Vishna, and Seeva.

These superstitious notions in regard to the efficacy of the 
Word, and the prohibition against pronouncing it, could,  being errors, have formed no part of the pure primitive  religion, or of the esoteric doctrine taught by Moses, and the  full knowledge of which was confined to the Initiates; unless  the whole was but an ingenious invention for the concealment  of some other Name or truth, the interpretation and meaning  whereof was made known only to the select few. If so, the  common notions in regard to the Word grew up in the minds  of the people, like other errors and fables among all the  ancient nations, out of original truths and symbols and  allegories misunderstood. So it has always been that  allegories, intended as vehicles of truth, to be understood by  the sages, have become or bred errors, by being literally  accepted.

It is true, that before the masoretic points were invented 
(which was after the beginning of the Christian era), the  pronunciation of a word in the Hebrew language could not be  known from the characters in which it was written. It was,  therefore, possible for that of the name of the Deity to have  been forgotten and lost. It is certain that its true pronunciation  is not that represented by the word Jehovah; and therefore that  that is not the true name of Deity, nor the Ineffable Word.

The ancient symbols and allegories always had more than one  interpretation. They always had a double meaning, and  sometimes more than two, one serving as the envelope of the  other. Thus the pronunciation of the word was a symbol; and  that pronunciation and the word itself were lost, when the  knowledge of the true nature and attributes of God faded out  of the minds of the Jewish people. That is one interpretation—  true, but not the inner andprofoundest one.

Men were figuratively said to forget the name of God, when  they lost that knowledge, and worshipped the heathen deities,  and burned incense to them on the high places, and passed  their children through the fire to Moloch.

Thus the attempts of the ancient Israelites and of the Initiates  to ascertain the True Name of the Deity, and its  pronunciation, and the loss of the True Word, are an allegory,  in which are represented  p. 206  the general ignorance of the true nature and attributes of God,  the proneness of the people of Judah and Israel to worship  other deities, and the low and erroneous and dishonoring  notions of the Grand Architect of the Universe, which all  shared except a few favored persons; for even Solomon built  altars and sacrificed to Astarat, the goddess of the Tsidunim,  and Malcum, the Aamunite god, and built high places for 
Kamus, the Moabite deity, and Malec the god of the Beni- 
Aamun. The true nature of God was unknown to them, like 
His name; and they worshipped the calves of Jeroboam, as in  the desert they did that made for them by Aarun.

The mass of the Hebrews did not believe in the existence of  one only God until a late period in their history. Their early  and popular ideas of the Deity were singularly low and  unworthy. Even while Moses was receiving the law upon 
Mount Sinai, they forced Aaron to make them an image of the 
Egyptian god Apis, and fell down and adored it. They were  ever ready to return to the worship of the gods of the 
Mitzraim; and soon after the death of Joshua they became  devout worshippers of the false gods of all the surrounding  nations. "Ye have home," Amos, the prophet, said to them,  speaking of their forty years' journeying in the desert, under 
Moses, "the tabernacle of your Malec and Kaiun your idols,  the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves."

Among them, as among other nations, the conceptions of God  formed by individuals varied according to their intellectual  and spiritual capacities; poor and imperfect, and investing 
God with the commonest and coarsest attributes of humanity,  among the ignorant and coarse; pure and lofty among the  virtuous and richly gifted. These conceptions gradually  improved and became purified and ennobled, as the nation  advanced in civilization—being lowest in the historical books,  amended in the prophetic writings, and reaching their highest  elevation among the poets.

Among all the ancient nations there was one faith and one  idea of Deity for the enlightened, intelligent, and educated,  and another for the common people. To this rule the Hebrews  were no exception. Yehovah, to the mass of the people, was  like the gods of the nations around them, except that he was  the peculiar God, first of the family of Abraham, of that of 
Isaac, and of that of Jacob, and afterward the National God;  and, as they believed, more powerful than the other gods of  the same nature worshipped  p. 207  by their neighbors—"Who among the Baalim is like unto thee,

O Yehovah?"—expressed their whole creed.

The Deity of the early Hebrews talked to Adam and Eve in  the garden of delight, as he walked in it in the cool of the day;  he conversed with Kayin; he sat and ate with Abraham in his  tent; that patriarch required a visible token, before he would  believe in his positive promise; he permitted Abraham to  expostulate with him, and to induce him to change his first  determination in regard to Sodom; he wrestled with Jacob; he  showed Moses his person, though not his face; he dictated the  minutest police regulations and the dimensions of the  tabernacle and its furniture, to the Israelites; he insisted on  and delighted in sacrifices and burnt-offerings; he was angry,  jealous, and revengeful, as well as wavering and irresolute; he  allowed Moses to reason him out of his fixed resolution  utterly to destroy his people; he commanded the performance  of the most shocking and hideous acts of cruelty and  barbarity. He hardened the heart of Pharaoh; he repented of  the evil that he had said he would do unto the people of 
Nineveh; and he did it not, to the disgust and anger of Jonah.

Such were the popular notions of the Deity; and either the  priests had none better, or took little trouble to correct these  notions; or the popular intellect was not enough enlarged to  enable them to entertain any higher conceptions of the 
Almighty.

But such were not the ideas of the intellectual and enlightened  few among the Hebrews. It is certain that they possessed a  knowledge of the true nature and attributes of God; as the  same class of men did among the other nations—Zoroaster, 
Menu, Confucius, Socrates, and Plato. But their doctrines on  this subject were esoteric; they did not communicate them to  the people at large, but only to a favored few; and as they  were communicated in Egypt and India, in Persia and 
Phoenicia, in Greece and Samothrace, in the greater mysteries,  to the Initiates.

The communication of this knowledge and other secrets,  some of which are perhaps lost, constituted, under other  names, what we now call Masonry, or Free or Frank- 
Masonry. That knowledge was, in one sense, the Lost Word,  which was made known to the Grand Elect, Perfect, and 
Sublime Masons. It would be folly to pretend that the forms  of Masonry were the same in those ages as they are now. The  present name of the Order, and its titles, and the names of the 
Degrees now in use, were not then known.  p. 208

[paragraph continues] Even Blue Masonry cannot trace back its  authentic history, with its present Degrees, further than the  year 1700, if so far. But, by whatever name it was known in  this or the other country, Masonry existed as it now exists, the  same in spirit and at heart, not only when Solomon builded  the temple, but centuries before—before even the first colonies  emigrated into Southern India, Persia, and Egypt, from the  cradle of the human race.

The Supreme, Self-existent, Eternal, All-wise, All-powerful, 
Infinitely Good, Pitying, Beneficent, and Merciful Creator  and Preserver of the Universe was the same, by whatever  name he was called, to the intellectual and enlightened men of  all nations. The name was nothing, if not a symbol and  representative hieroglyph of his nature and attributes. The  name AL represented his remoteness above men, his  inaccessibility, BAL and BALA, his might, ALOHIM, his  various potencies', IHUH, existence and the generation of  things. None of his names, among the Orientals, were the  symbols of a divinely infinite love and tenderness, and all-  embracing mercy. As MOLOCH or MALEK he was but an  omnipotent monarch, a tremendous and irresponsible Will', as 
ADONAI, only an arbitrary LORD and Master, as AL 
Shadai, potent and a DESTROYER.

To communicate true and correct ideas in respect of the Deity  was one chief object of the mysteries. In them, Khurum the 
King, and Khurum the Master, obtained their knowledge of  him and his attributes; and in them that knowledge was taught  to Moses and Pythagoras.

Wherefore nothing forbids you to consider the whole legend  of this Degree, like that of the Master's, an allegory,  representing the perpetuation of the knowledge of the True 
God in the sanctuaries of initiation. By the subterranean vaults  you may understand the places of initiation, which in the  ancient ceremonies were generally under ground. The Temple  of Solomon presented a symbolic image of the Universe; and  resembled, in its arrangements and furniture, all the temples  of the ancient nations that practised the mysteries. The system  of numbers was intimately connected with their religions and  worship, and has come down to us in Masonry; though the  esoteric meaning with which the numbers used by us are  pregnant is unknown to the vast majority of those who use  them. Those numbers were especially employed that had a  reference to the Deity, represented his attributes, or figured in  the  p. 209  frame-work of the world, in time and space, and formed more  or less the bases of that frame-work. These were universally  regarded as sacred, being the expression of order and  intelligence, the utterances of Divinity Himself.

The Holy of Holies of the Temple formed a cube; in which,  drawn on a plane surface, there are 4+3+2=9 lines visible, and  three sides or faces. It corresponded with the number four, by  which the ancients presented Nature, it being the number of  substances or corporeal forms, and of the elements, the  cardinal points and seasons, and the secondary colors. The  number three everywhere represented the Supreme Being. 
Hence the name of the Deity, engraven upon the triangular  plate, and that sunken into the cube of agate, taught the  ancient Mason, and teaches us, that the true knowledge of 
God, of His nature and His attributes, is written by Him upon  the leaves of the great Book of Universal Nature, and may be  read there by all who are endowed with the requisite amount  of intellect and intelligence. This knowledge of God, so  written there, and of which Masonry has in all ages been the  interpreter, is the Master Mason's Word.

Within the Temple, all the arrangements were mystically and  symbolically connected with the same system. The vault or  ceiling, starred like the firmament, was supported by twelve  columns, representing the twelve months of the year. The  border that ran around the columns represented the zodiac,  and one of the twelve celestial signs was appropriated to each  column. The brazen sea was supported by twelve oxen, three  looking to each cardinal point of the compass.

And so in our day every Masonic Lodge represents the 
Universe. Each extends, we are told, from the rising to the  setting sun, from the South to the North, from the surface of  the Earth to the Heavens, and from the same to the centre of  the globe. In it are represented the sun, moon, and stars; three  great torches in the East, West, and South, fonning a triangle,  give it light; and, like the Delta or Triangle suspended in the 
East, and inclosing the Ineffable Name, indicate, by the  mathematical equality of the angles and sides, the beautiful  and harmonious proportions which govern in the aggregate  and details of the Universe; while those sides and angles  represent, by their number, three, the Trinity of Power, 
Wisdom, and Harmony, which presided at the building of this  marvellous work, These three great lights also represent the  p. 210  great mystery of the three principles, of creation, dissolution  or destruction, and reproduction or regeneration, consecrated  by all creeds in their numerous Trinities.

The luminous pedestal, lighted by the perpetual flame within,  is a symbol of that light of Reason, given by God to man, by  which he is enabled to read in the Book of Nature the record  of the thought, the revelation of the attributes of the Deity.

The three Masters, Adoniram, Joabert, and Stolkin, are types  of the True Mason, who seeks for knowledge from pure  motives, and that he may be the better enabled to serve and  benefit his fellow-men; while the discontented and  presumptuous Masters who were buried in the ruins of the  arches represent those who strive to acquire it for unholy  purposes, to gain power over their fellows, to gratify their  pride, their vanity, or their ambition.

The Lion that guarded the Ark and held in his mouth the key  wherewith to open it, figuratively represents Solomon, the 
Lion of the Tribe of Judah, who preserved and communicated  the key to the true knowledge of God, of His laws, and of the  profound mysteries of the moral and physical Universe.

ENOCH ['pin Khanoc], we are told, walked with God three  hundred years, after reaching the age of sixty-five—"walked  with God, and he was no more, for God had taken him." His  name signified in the Hebrew, INITIATE or INITIATOR.

The legend of the columns, of granite and brass or bronze,  erected by him, is probably symbolical. That of bronze, which  survived the flood, is supposed to symbolize the mysteries, of  which Masonry is the legitimate successor—from the earliest  times the custodian and depository of the great philosophical  and religious truths, unknown to the world at large, and  handed down from age to age by an unbroken current of  tradition, embodied in symbols, emblems, and allegories.

The legend of this Degree is thus, partially, interpreted. It is of  little importance whether it is in anywise historical. For its  value consists in the lessons which it inculcates, and the  duties which it prescribes to those who receive it. The  parables and allegories of the Scriptures are not less valuable  than history. Nay, they are more so, because ancient history is  little instructive, and truths are concealed in and symbolized  by the legend and the myth.

There are profounder meanings concealed in the symbols of  this .Degree, connected with the philosophical system of the 
Hebrew  p. 211

[paragraph continues] Kabalists, which you will learn hereafter, if you  should be so fortunate as to advance. They are unfolded in the  higher Degrees. The lion [mx ,ns, Arai, Araiah, which also  means the altar] still holds in his mouth the key of the enigma  of the sphynx.

But there is one application of this Degree, that you are now  entitled to know; and which, remembering that Khurum, the 
Master, is the symbol of human freedom, you would probably  discover for yourself.

It is not enough for a people to gain its liberty. It must secure  it. It must not intrust it to the keeping, or hold it at the  pleasure, of any one man. The keystone of the Royal Arch of  the great Temple of Liberty is a fundamental law, charter, or  constitution; the expression of the fixed habits of thought of  the people, embodied in a written instrument, or the result of  the slow accretions and the consolidation of centuries; the  same in war as in peace; that cannot be hastily changed, nor  be violated with impunity, but is sacred, like the Ark of the 
Covenant of God, which none could touch and live.

A permanent constitution, rooted in the affections, expressing  the will and judgment, and built upon the instincts and settled  habits of thought of the people, with an independent judiciary,  an elective legislature of two branches, an executive  responsible to the people, and the right of trial by jury, will  guarantee the liberties of a people, if it be virtuous and  temperate, without luxury, and without the lust of conquest  and dominion, and the follies of visionary theories of  impossible perfection.

Masonry teaches its Initiates that the pursuits and occupations  of this life, its activity, care, and ingenuity, the predestined  developments of the nature given us by God, tend to promote 
His great design, in making the world; and are not at war with  the great purpose of life. It teaches that everything is beautiful  in its time, in its place, in its appointed office; that everything  which man is put to do, if rightly and faithfully done,  naturally helps to work out his salvation; that if he obeys the  genuine principles of his calling, he will be a good man: and  that it is only by neglect and non-performance of the task set  for him by Heaven, by wandering into idle dissipation, or by  violating their beneficent and lofty spirit, that he becomes a  bad man. The appointed action of life is the great training of 
Providence; and if man yields himself  p. 212  to it, he will need neither churches nor ordinances, except for  the expression of his religious homage and gratitude.

For there is a religion of toil. It is not all drudgery, a mere  stretching of the limbs and straining of the sinews to tasks. It  has a meaning and an intent. A living heart pours life-blood  into the toiling arm; and warm affections inspire and mingle  with man's labors. They are the home affections. Labor toils  a-field, or plies its task in cities, or urges the keels of  commerce over wide oceans; but home is its centre; and  thither it ever goes with its earnings, with the means of  support and comfort for others; offerings sacred to the thought  of every true man, as a sacrifice at a golden shrine. Many  faults there are amidst the toils of life; many harsh and hasty  words are uttered; but still the toils go on, weary and hard and  exasperating as they often are. For in that home is age or  sickness, or helpless infancy, or gentle childhood, or feeble  woman, that must not want. If man had no other than mere  selfish impulses, the scene of labor which we behold around  us would not exist.

The advocate who fairly and honestly presents his case, with a  feeling of true self-respect, honor, and conscience, to help the  tribunal on towards the right conclusion, with a conviction  that God's justice reigns there, is acting a religious part,  leading that day a religious life; or else right and justice are no  part of religion. Whether, during all that day, he has once  appealed, in form or in terms, to his conscience, or not;  whether he has once spoken of religion and God, or not; if  there has been the inward purpose, the conscious intent and  desire, that sacred justice should triumph, he has that day led  a good and religious life, and made a most essential  contribution to that religion of life and of society, the cause of  equity between man and man, and of truth and right action in  the world.

Books, to be of religious tendency in the Masonic sense, need  not be books of sermons, of pious exercises, or of prayers. 
What-ever inculcates pure, noble, and patriotic sentiments, or  touches the heart with the beauty of virtue, and the excellence  of an up-right life, accords with the religion of Masonry, and  is the Gospel of literature and art. That Gospel is preached  from many a book and painting, from many a poem and  fiction, and review and newspaper; and it is a painlul error  and miserable narrowness, not to recognize these wide-spread  agencies of Heaven's providing; not  p. 213  to see and welcome these many-handed coadjutors, to the  great and good cause. The oracles of God do not speak from  the pulpit alone.

There is also a religion of society. In business, there is much  more than sale, exchange, price, payment; for there is the  sacred faith of man in man. When we repose perfect  confidence in the integrity of another; when we feel that he  will not swerve from the right, frank, straightforward,  conscientious course, for any temptation; his integrity and  conscientiousness are the image of God to us; and when we  believe in it, it is as great and generous an act, as when we  believe in the rectitude of the Deity.

In gay assemblies for amusement, the good affections of life  gush and mingle. If they did not, these gathering-places would  be as dreary and repulsive as the caves and dens of outlaws  and robbers. When friends meet, and hands are warmly  pressed, and the eye kindles and the countenance is suffused  with gladness, there is a religion between their hearts; and  each loves and worships the True and Good that is in the  other. It is not policy, or self-interest, or selfishness that  spreads such a charm around that meeting, but the halo of  bright and beautiful affection.

The same splendor of kindly liking, and affectionate regard,  shines like the soft overarching sky, over all the world; over  all places where men meet, and walk or toil together; not over  lovers' bowers and marriage-altars alone, not over the homes  of purity and tenderness alone; but over all tilled fields, and  busy workshops, and dusty highways, and paved streets. 
There is not a worn stone upon the sidewalks, but has been  the altar of such offerings of mutual kindness; nor a wooden  pillar or iron railing against which hearts beating with  affection have not leaned. How many soever other elements  there are in the stream of life flowing thr ough these channels,  that is surely here and everywhere; honest, heartfelt,  disinterested, inexpressible affection.

Every Masonic Lodge is a temple of religion; and its  teachings are instruction in religion. For here are inculcated  disinterestedness, affection, toleration, devotedness,  patriotism, truth, a generous sympathy with those who suffer  and mourn, pity for the fallen, mercy for the erring, relief for  those in want, Faith, Hope, and .Charity. Here we meet as  brethren, to learn to know and love each other. Here we greet  each other gladly, are lenient to each other's faults, regardful  of each other's feelings, ready to relieve  p. 214  each other's wants. This is the true religion revealed to the  ancient patriarchs; which Masonry has taught for many  centuries, and which it will continue to teach as long as time  endures. If unworthy passions, or selfish, bitter, or revengeful  feelings, contempt, dislike, hatred, enter here, they are  intruders and not welcome, strangers uninvited, and not  guests.

Certainly there are many evils and bad passions, and much  hate and contempt and unkindness everywhere in the world. 
We cannot refuse to see the evil that is in life. But all is not  evil. We still see God in the world. There is good amidst the  evil. The hand of mercy leads wealth to the hovels of poverty  and sorrow. Truth and simplicity live amid many wiles and  sophistries. There are good hearts underneath gay robes, and  under tattered garments also.

Love clasps the hand of love, amid all the envyings and  distractions of showy competition; fidelity, pity, and  sympathy hold the long night-watch by the bedside of the  suffering neighbor, amidst the surrounding poverty and  squalid misery. Devoted men go from city to city to nurse  those smitten down by the terrible pestilence that renews at  intervals its mysterious marches. Women well-born and  delicately nurtured nursed the wounded soldiers in hospitals,  before it became fashionable to do so; and even poor lost  women, whom God alone loves and pities, tend the plague-  stricken with a patient and generous heroism. Masonry and its  kindred Orders teach men to love each other, feed the hungry,  clothe the naked, comfort the sick, and bury the friendless  dead. Everywhere God finds and blesses the kindly office, the  pitying thought, and the loving heart.

There is an element of good in all men's lawful pursuits and a  divine spirit breathing in all their lawful affections. The  ground on which they tread is holy ground. There is a natural  religion of life, answering, with however many a broken tone,  to the religion of nature. There is a beauty and glory in 
Humanity, in man, answering, with however many a mingling  shade, to the loveliness of soft landscapes, and swelling hills,  and the wondrous glory of the starry heavens.

Men may be virtuous, self-improving, and religious in their  employments. Precisely for that, those employments were  made. All their social relations, friendship, love, the ties of  family, were made to be holy, They may be religious, not by a  kind of protest  p. 215  and resistance against their several vocations; but by  conformity to their true spirit. Those vocations do not exclude  religion; but demand it, for their own perfection. They may be  religious laborers, whether in field or factory; religious  physicians, lawyers, sculptors, poets, painters, and musicians. 
They may be religions in all the toils and in all the  amusements of life. Their life may be a religion; the broad  earth its altar; its incense the very breath of life; its fires ever  kindled by the brightness of Heaven.

Bound up with our poor, frail life, is the mighty thought that  spurns the narrow span of all visible existence. Ever the soul  reaches outward, and asks for freedom. It looks forth from the  narrow and grated windows of sense, upon the wide  immeasurable creation; it knows that around it and beyond it  lie outstretched the infinite and everlasting paths.

Everything within us and without us ought to stir our minds to  admiration and wonder. We are a mystery encompassed with  mysteries. The connection of mind with matter is a mystery;  the wonderful telegraphic communication between the brain  and every part of the body, the power and action of the will. 
Every familiar step is more than a story in a land of  enchantment. The power of movement is as mysterious as the  power of thought. Memory, and dreams that are the indistinct  echoes of dead memories are alike inexplicable. Universal  harmony springs from infinite complication. The momentum  of every step we take in our dwelling contributes in part to the  order of the Universe. We are connected by ties of thought,  and even of matter and its forces, with the whole boundless 
Universe and all the past and coming generations of men.

The humblest object beneath our eye as completely defies our  scrutiny as the economy of the most distant star. Every leaf  and every blade of grass holds within itself secrets which no  human penetration will ever fathom. No man can tell what is  its principle of life. No man can know what his power of  secretion is. Both are inscrutable mysteries. Wherever we  place our hand we lay it upon the locked bosom of mystery. 
Step where we will, we tread upon wonders. The sea-sands,  the clods of the field, the water-worn pebbles on the hills, the  rude masses of rock, are traced over and over, in every  direction, with a hand-writing older and more significant and  sublime than all the ancient ruins, and all the overthrown and  buried cities that past generations  p. 216  have left upon the earth; for it is the handwriting of the 
Almighty.

A Mason's great business with life is to read the book of its  teaching; to find that life is not the doing of drudgeries, but  the hearing of oracles. The old mythology is but a leaf in that  book; for it peopled the world with spiritual natures; and  science, many-leaved, still spreads before us the same tale of  wonder.

We shall be just as happy hereafter, as we are pure and up¬  right, and no more, just as happy as our character prepares us  to be, and no more. Our moral, like our mental character, is  not formed in a moment; it is the habit of our minds; the result  of many thoughts and feelings and efforts, bound together by  many natural and strong ties. The great law of Retribution is,  that all coming experience is to be affected by every present  feeling; every future moment of being must answer for every  present moment; one moment, sacrificed to vice, or lost to  improvement, is forever sacrificed and lost; an hour's delay to  enter the right path, is to put us back so far, in the everlasting  pursuit of happiness; and every sin, even of the best men, is to  be thus answered for, if not according to the full measure of  its ill-desert, yet according to a rule of unbending rectitude  and impartiality.

The law of retribution presses upon every man, whether he  thinks of it or not. It pursues him through all the courses of  life, with a step that never falters nor tires, and with an eye  that never sleeps. If it were not so, God's government would  not be impartial; there would be no discrimination; no moral  dominion; no light shed upon the mysteries of Providence.

Whatsoever a man soweth, that, and not something else, shall  he reap. That which we are doing, good or evil, grave or gay,  that which we do to-day and shall do to-morrow; each  thought, each feeling, each action, each event; every passing  hour, every breathing moment; all are contributing to form the  character, according to which we are to be judged. Every  particle of influence that goes to form that aggregate,—our  character,—will, in that future scrutiny, be sifted out from the  mass; and, particle by particle, with ages perhaps intervening,  fall a distinct contribution to the sum of our joys or woes.

Thus every idle word and idle hour will give answer in the  judgment.

Let us take care, therefore, what we sow. An evil temptation  comes upon us; the opportunity of unrighteous gain, or of  unhallowed  p. 217  indulgence, either in the sphere of business or pleasure, of  society or solitude. We yield; and plant a seed of bitterness  and sorrow. To-morrow it will threaten discovery. Agitated  and alarmed, we cover the sin, and bury it deep in falsehood  and hypocrisy. In the bosom where it lies concealed, in the  fertile soil of kindred vices, that sin dies not, but thrives and  grows; and other and still other germs of evil gather around  the accursed root; until, from that single seed of corruption,  there springs up in the soul all that is horrible in habitual  lying, knavery, or vice. Loathingly, often, we take each  downward step; but a frightful power urges us onward; and  the hell of debt, disease, ignominy, or remorse gathers its  shadows around our steps even on earth; and are yet but the  beginnings of sorrows. The evil deed may be done in a single  moment; but conscience never dies, memory never sleeps;  guilt never can become innocence; and remorse can never  whisper peace.

Beware, thou who art tempted to evil! Beware what thou  layest up for the future! Beware what thou layest up in the  archives of eternity! Wrong not thy neighbor! lest the thought  of him thou injurest, and who suffers by thy act, be to thee a  pang which years will not deprive of its bitterness! Break not  into the house of innocence, to rifle it of its treasure; lest  when many years have passed over thee, the moan of its  distress may not have died away from thine ear! Build not the  desolate throne of ambition in thy heart; nor be busy with  devices, and circumventings, and selfish schemings; lest  desolation and loneliness be on thy path, as it stretches into  the long futurity! Live not a useless, an impious, or an  injurious life! for bound up with that life is the immutable  principle of an endless retribution, and elements of God's  creating, which will never spend their force, but continue ever  to unfold with the ages of eternity. Be not deceived! God has  formed thy nature, thus to answer to the future. His law can  never be abrogated, nor His justice eluded; and forever and  ever it will be true, that "Whatsoever a man soweth, that also  he shall reap.”

XIV.

GRAND ELECT, PERFECT, AND SUBLIME 
MASON.

[Perfect Elu.]

IT is for each individual Mason to discover the secret of 
Masonry, by reflection upon its symbols and a wise  consideration and analysis of what is said and done in the  work. Masonry does not inculcate her truths. She states them,  once and briefly; or hints them, perhaps, darkly; or interposes  a cloud between them and eyes that would be dazzled by  them. "Seek, and ye shall find," knowledge and the truth.

The practical object of Masonry is the physical and moral 
amelioration and the intellectual and spiritual improvement of  individuals and society. Neither can be effected, except by the  dissemination of truth. It is falsehood in doctrines and fallacy  in principles, to which most of the miseries of men and the  misfortunes of nations are owing. Public opinion is rarely  right on any point; and there are and always will be important  truths to be substituted in that opinion in the place of many  errors and absurd and injurious prejudices. There are few  truths that public opinion has not at some time hated and  persecuted as heresies; and few errors that have not at some  time seemed to it truths radiant from the immediate presence  of God. There are moral maladies, also, of man and society,  the treatment of which requires not only boldness, but also,  and more, prudence and discretion; since they are more the  fruit of false and pernicious doctrines, moral, political, and  religious, than of vicious inclinations.

Much of the Masonic secret manifests itself, without speech  p. 219  revealing it, to him who even partially comprehends all the 
Degrees in proportion as he receives them; and particularly to  those who advance to the highest Degrees of the Ancient and 
Accepted Scottish Rite. That Rite raises a comer of the veil,  even in the Degree of Apprentice; for it there declares that 
Masonry is a worship.

Masonry labors to improve the social order by enlightening  men's minds, warming their hearts with the love of the good,  inspiring them with the great principle of human fraternity,  and requiring of its disciples that their language and actions  shall con-form to that principle, that they shall enlighten each  other, control their passions, abhor vice, and pity the vicious  man as one afflicted with a deplorable malady.

It is the universal, eternal, immutable religion, such as God  planted it in the heart of universal humanity. No creed has  ever been long-lived that was not built on this foundation. It is  the base, and they are the superstructure. "Pure religion and  undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the  fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself  unspotted from the world." "Is not this the fast that I have  chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy  burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break  every yoke?" The ministers of this religion are all Masons  who comprehend it and are devoted to it; its sacrifices to God  are good works, the sacrifices of the base and disorderly  passions, the offering up of self-interest on the altar of  humanity, and perpetual efforts to attain to all the moral  perfection of which man is capable.

To make honor and duty the steady beacon-lights that shall  guide your life-vessel over the stormy seas of time; to do that  which it is right to do, not because it will insure you success,  or bring with it a reward, or gain the applause of men, or be 
"the best policy," more prudent or more advisable; but  because it is right, and therefore ought to be done; to war  incessantly against error, intolerance, ignorance, and vice, and  yet to pity those who err, to be tolerant even of intolerance, to  teach the ignorant, and to labor to reclaim the vicious, are  some of the duties of a Mason.

A good Mason is one that can look upon death, and see its  face with the same countenance with which he hears its story;  that can endure all the labors of his life with his soul  supporting his body, that can equally despise riches when he  hath them and  p. 220  when he hath them not; that is, not sadder if they are in his  neighbor's exchequer, nor more lifted up if they shine around  about his own walls; one that is not moved with good fortune  coming to him, nor going from him; that can look upon  another man's lands with equanimity and pleasure, as if they  were his own; and yet look upon his own, and use them too,  just as if they were another man's; that neither spends his  goods prodigally and foolishly, nor yet keeps them  avariciously and like a miser; that weighs not benefits by  weight and number, but by the mind and circumstances of  him who confers them; that never thinks his charity  expensive, if a worthy person be the receiver; that does  nothing for opinion's sake, but everything for conscience,  being as careful of his thoughts as of his acting in markets and  theatres, and in as much awe of himself as of a whole  assembly; that is, bountiful and cheerful to his friends, and  charitable and apt to forgive his enemies; that loves his  country, consults its honor, and obeys its laws, and desires  and endeavors nothing more than that he may do his duty and  honor God. And such a Mason may reckon his life to be the  life of a man, and compute his months, not by the course of  the sun, but by the zodiac and circle of his virtues.

The whole world is but one republic, of which each nation is a  family, and every individual a child. Masonry, not in anywise  derogating from the differing duties which the diversity of  states requires, tends to create a new people, which, composed  of men of many nations and tongues, shall all be bound  together by the bonds of science, morality, and virtue.

Essentially philanthropic, philosophical, and progressive, it  has for the basis of its dogma a firm belief in the existence of 
God and his providence, and of the immortality of the soul;  for its object, the dissemination of moral, political,  philosophical, and religious truth, and the practice of all the  virtues. In every age, its device has been, "Liberty, Equality, 
Fraternity," with constitutional government, law, order,  discipline, and subordination to legitimate authority—  government and not anarchy.

But it is neither a political party nor a religious sect. It  embraces all parties and all sects, to form from among them  all a vast fraternal association. It recognizes the dignity of  human nature, and man's right to such freedom as he is fitted  for; and it knows nothing that should place one man below  another, except  p. 221  ignorance, debasement, and crime, and the necessity of  subordination to lawful will and authority.

It is philanthropic; for it recognizes the great truth that all men  are of the same origin, have common interests, and should co¬  operate together to the same end.

Therefore it teaches its members to love one another, to give  to each other mutual assistance and support in all the  circumstances of life, to share each other's pains and sorrows,  as well as their joys and pleasures; to guard the reputations,  respect the opinions, and be perfectly tolerant of the errors, of  each other, in matters of faith and beliefs.

It is philosophical, because it teaches the great Truths  concerning the nature and existence of one Supreme Deity,  and the existence and immortality of the soul. It revives the 
Academy of Plato, and the wise teachings of Socrates. It  reiterates the maxims of Pythagoras, Confucius, and 
Zoroaster, and reverentially enforces the sublime lessons of 
Him who died upon the Cross.

The ancients thought that universal humanity acted under the  influence of two opposing Principles, the Good and the Evil:  of which the Good urged men toward Truth, Independence,  and Devotedness; and the Evil toward Falsehood, Servility,  and Selfishness. Masonry represents the Good Principle and  constantly wars against the evil one. It is the Hercules, the 
Osiris, the Apollo, the Mithras, and the Ormuzd, at  everlasting and deadly feud with the demons of ignorance,  brutality, baseness, falsehood, slavishness of soul, intolerance,  superstition, tyranny, meanness, the insolence of wealth, and  bigotry.

When despotism and superstition, twin-powers of evil and  darkness, reigned everywhere and seemed invincible and  immortal, it invented, to avoid persecution, the mysteries, that  is to say, the allegory, the symbol, and the emblem, and  transmitted its doctrines by the secret mode of initiation.

Now, retaining its ancient symbols, and in part its ancient  ceremonies, it displays in every civilized country its banner,  on which in letters of living light its great principles are  written; and it smiles at the puny efforts of kings and popes to  crush it out by excommunication and interdiction.

Man's views in regard to God, will contain only so much  positive truth as fde human mind is capable of receiving;  whether that truth is attained by the exercise of reason, or  communicated  p. 222  by revelation. It must necessarily be both limited and alloyed,  to bring it within the competence of finite human intelligence. 
Being finite, we can form no correct or adequate idea of the 
Infinite; being material, we can form no clear conception of  the Spiritual. We do believe in and know the infinity of Space  and Time, and the spirituality of the Soul; but the idea of that  infinity and spirituality eludes us. Even Omnipotence cannot  infuse infinite conceptions into finite minds; nor can God,  without first entirely changing the conditions of our being,  pour a complete and frill knowledge of His own nature and  attributes into the narrow capacity of a 'human soul. Human  intelligence could not grasp it, nor human language express it. 
The visible is, necessarily, the measure of the invisible.

The consciousness of the individual reveals itself alone. His  knowledge cannot pass beyond the limits of his own being. 
His conceptions of other things and other beings are only his  conceptions. They are not those things or beings themselves. 
The living principle of a living Universe must be INFINITE;  while all our ideas and conceptions are finite, and applicable  only to finite beings.

The Deity is thus not an object of knowledge, but of faith ; not  to be approached by the understanding, but by the moral  sense', not to be conceived, but to be felt. All attempts to  embrace the Infinite in the conception of the Finite are, and  must be only accommodations to the frailty of man. Shrouded  from human comprehension in an obscurity from which a  chastened imagination is awed back, and Thought retreats in  conscious weakness, the Divine Nature is a theme on which  man is little entitled to dogmatize. Here the philosophic 
Intellect becomes most painfully aware of its own  insufficiency.

And yet it is here that man most dogmatizes, classifies and  describes God's attributes, makes out his map of God's nature,  and his inventory of God's qualities, feelings, impulses, and  passions; and then hangs and burns his brother, who, as  dogmatically as he, makes out a different map and inventory. 
The common understanding has no humility. Its God is an  incarnate Divinity. Imperfection imposes its own limitations  on the Illimitable, and clothes the Inconceivable Spirit of the 
Universe in forms that come within the grasp of the senses  and the intellect, and are derived from that infinite and  imperfect nature which is but God's creation.  p. 223

We are all of us, though not all equally, mistaken. The  cherished dogmas of each of us are not, as we fondly suppose,  the pure truth of God; but simply our own special form of  error, our guesses at truth, the refracted and fragmentary rays  of light that have fallen upon our own minds. Our little  systems have their day, and cease to be; they are but broken  lights of God; and He is more than they. Perfect truth is not  attainable anywhere. We style this Degree that of Perfection;  and yet what it teaches is imperfect and defective. Yet we are  not to relax in the pursuit of truth, nor contentedly acquiesce  in error. It is our duty always to press forward in the search;  for though absolute truth is unattainable, yet the amount of  error in our views is capable of progressive and perpetual  diminution; and thus Masonry is a continual struggle toward  the light.

All errors are not equally innocuous. That which is most  injurious is to entertain unworthy conceptions of the nature  and attributes of God; and it is this that Masonry symbolizes  by ignorance of the True Word. The true word of a Mason is,  not the entire, perfect, absolute truth in regard to God; but the  highest and noblest conception of Him that our minds are  capable of forming; and this word is Ineffable, because one  man cannot communicate to another his own conception of 
Deity; since every man's conception of God must be  proportioned to his mental cultivation, and intellectual  powers, and moral excellence. God is, as man conceives Him,  the reflected image of man himself.

For every man's conception of God must vary with his mental  cultivation and mental powers. If any one contents himself  with any lower image than his intellect is capable of grasping,  then he contents himself with that which is false to him, as  well as false in fact. If lower than he can reach, he must needs  feel it to be false. And if we, of the nineteenth century after 
Christ, adopt the conceptions of the nineteenth century before 
Him; if our conceptions of God are those of the ignorant,  narrow-minded, and vindictive Israelite; then we think worse  of God, and have a lower, meaner, and more limited view of 
His nature, than the faculties which He has bestowed are  capable of grasping. The highest view we can form is nearest  to the truth. If we acquiesce in any lower one, we acquiesce in  an untruth. We feel that it is an affront and an indignity to 
Him, to conceive of Him as cruel, short-sighted, capricious,  and unjust; as a jealous, an angry, a vindictive Being.  p. 224

[paragraph continues] When we examine our conceptions of His  character, if we can conceive of a loftier, nobler, higher, more  beneficent, glorious, and magnificent character, then this  latter is to us the true conception of Deity; for nothing can be  imagined more excellent than He.

Religion, to obtain currency and influence with the great mass  of mankind, must needs be alloyed with such an amount of  error as to place it far below the standard attainable by the  higher human capacities. A religion as pure as the loftiest and  most cultivated human reason could discern, would not be  comprehended by, or effective over, the less educated portion  of mankind. What is Truth to the philosopher, would not be 
Truth, nor have the effect of Truth, to the peasant. The  religion of the many must necessarily be more incorrect than  that of the refined and reflective few, not so much in its  essence as in its forms, not so much in the spiritual idea which  lies latent at the bottom of it, as in the symbols and dogmas in  which that idea is embodied. The truest religion would, in  many points, not be comprehended by the ignorant, nor  consolatory to them, nor guiding and supporting for them.

The doctrines of the Bible are often not clothed in the  language of strict truth, but in that which was fittest to convey  to a rude and ignorant people the practical essentials of the  doctrine. A perfectly pure faith, free from all extraneous  admixtures, a system of noble theism and lofty morality,  would find too little preparation for it in the common mind  and heart, to admit of prompt reception by the masses of  mankind; and Truth might not have reached us, if it had not  borrowed the wings of Error.

The Mason regards God as a Moral Governor, as well as an 
Original Creator; as a God at hand, and not merely one afar  off in the distance of infinite space, and in the remoteness of 
Past or Future Eternity. He conceives of Him as taking a  watchful and presiding interest in the affairs of the world, and  as influencing the hearts and actions of men.

To him, God is the great Source of the World of Life and 
Matter; and man, with his wonderful corporeal and mental  frame, His direct work. He believes that God has made men  with different intellectual capacities; and enabled some, by  superior intellectual power, to see and originate truths which  are hidden from the mass of men. He believes that when it is 
His will that mankind should make some great step forward,  or achieve some pregnant discovery, He calls into being some  intellect of more than ordinary  p. 225  magnitude and power, to give birth to new ideas, and grander  conceptions of the Truths vital to Humanity.

We hold that God has so ordered matters in this beautiful and  hannonious, but mysteriously-governed Universe, that one  great mind after another will arise, from time to time, as such  are needed, to reveal to men the truths that are wanted, and  the amount of truth than can be borne. He so arranges, that  nature and the course of events shall send men into the world,  endowed with that higher mental and moral organization, in  which grand truths, and sublime gleams of spiritual light will  spontaneously and inevitably arise. These speak to men by  inspiration.

Whatever Hiram really was, he is the type, perhaps an  imaginary type, to us, of humanity in its highest phase; an  exemplar of what man may and should become, in the course  of ages, in his progress toward the realization of his destiny;  an individual gifted with a glorious intellect, a noble soul, a  fine organization, and a perfectly balanced moral being; an  earnest of what humanity may be, and what we believe it will  hereafter be in God's good time; the possibility of the race  made real.

The Mason believes that God has arranged this glorious but  perplexing world with a purpose, and on a plan. He holds that  every man sent upon this earth, and especially every man of  superior capacity, has a duty to perform, a mission to fulfill, a  baptism to be baptized with; that every great and good man  possesses some portion of God's truth, which he must  proclaim to the world, and which must bear fruit in his own  bosom. In a true and simple sense, he believes all the pure,  wise, and intellectual to be inspired, and to be so for the  instruction, advancement, and elevation of mankind. That  kind of inspiration, like God's omnipresence, is not limited to  the few writers claimed by Jews, Christians, or Moslems, but  is co-extensive with the race. It is the consequence of a  faithful use of our faculties. Each man is its subject, God is its  source, and Truth its only test. It differs in degrees, as the  intellectual endowments, the moral wealth of the soul, and the  degree of cultivation of those endowments and faculties  differ. It is limited to no sect, age, or nation. It is wide as the  world and common as God. It was not given to a few men, in  the infancy of mankind, to monopolize inspiration, and bar 
God out of the soul. We are not bom in the dotage and decay  of the world. The stars are beautiftil as in their prime; the  most ancient Heavens  p. 225  are fresh and strong. God is still everywhere in nature. 
Wherever a heart beats with love, wherever Faith and Reason  utter their oracles, there is God, as formerly in the hearts of  seers and prophets. No soil on earth is so holy as the good  man's heart; nothing is so full of God. This inspiration is not  given to the learned alone, not alone to the great and wise, but  to every faithful child of God. Certain as the open eye drinks  in the light, do the pure in heart see God; and he who lives  truly, feels Him as a presence within the soul. The conscience  is the very voice of Deity.

Masonry, around whose altars the Christian, the Hebrew, the 
Moslem, the Brahmin, the followers of Confucius and 
Zoroaster, can assemble as brethren and unite in prayer to the  one God who is above all the Baalim, must needs leave it to  each of its Initiates to look for the foundation of his faith and  hope to the written scriptures of his own religion. For itself it  finds those truths definite enough, which are written by the  finger of God upon the heart of man and on the pages of the  book of nature. Views of religion and duty, wrought out by  the meditations of the studious, confirmed by the allegiance of  the good and wise, stamped as sterling by the response they  find in every uncorrupted mind, commend themselves to 
Masons of every creed, and may well be accepted by all.

The Mason does not pretend to dogmatic certainty, nor vainly  imagine such certainty attainable. He considers that if there  were no written revelation, he could safely rest the hopes that  animate him and the principles that guide him, on the  deductions of reason and the convictions of instinct and  consciousness. He can find a sure foundation for his religious  belief, in these deductions of the intellect and convictions of  the heart. For reason proves to him the existence and  attributes of God; and those spiritual instincts which he feels  are the voice of God in his soul, infuse into his mind a sense  of his relation to God, a conviction of the beneficence of his 
Creator and Preserver, and a hope of future existence; and his  reason and conscience alike unerringly point to virtue as the  highest good, and the destined aim and purpose of man's life.

He studies the wonders of the Heavens, the frame-work and  revolutions of the Earth, the mysterious beauties and  adaptations of animal existence, the moral and material  constitution of the human creature, so fearfully and  wonderfully made; and is satisfied  p. 227  that God IS; and that a Wise and Good Being is the author of  the starry Heavens above him, and of the moral world within  him; and his mind finds an adequate foundation for its hopes,  its worship, its principles of action, in the far-stretching 
Universe, in the glorious firmament, in the deep, full soul,  bursting with unutterable thoughts.

These are truths which every reflecting mind will  unhesitatingly receive, as not to be surpassed, nor capable of  improvement; and fitted, if obeyed, to make earth indeed a 
Paradise, and man only a little lower than the angels. The  worthlessness of ceremonial observances, and the necessity of  active virtue; the enforcement of purity of heart as the security  for purity of life, and of the government of the thoughts, as  the originators and forerunners of action; universal  philanthropy, requiring us to love all men, and to do unto  others that and that only which we should think it right, just,  and generous for them to do unto us; forgiveness of injuries;  the necessity of self-sacrifice in the discharge of duty;  humility; genuine sincerity, and being that which we seem to  be; all these sublime precepts need no miracle, no voice from  the clouds, to recommend them to our allegiance, or to assure  us of y their divine origin. They command obedience by  virtue of their inherent rectitude and beauty; and have been,  and are, and will be the law in every age and every country of  the world. God revealed them to man in the beginning.

To the Mason, God is our Father in Heaven, to be Whose  especial children is the sufficient reward of the peacemakers,  to see Whose face the highest hope of the pure in heart; Who  is ever at hand to strengthen His true worshippers; to Whom  our most fervent love is due, our most humble and patient  submission; Whose most acceptable worship is a pure and  pitying heart and a beneficent life; in Whose constant  presence we live and act, to Whose merciful disposal we are  resigned by that death which, we hope and believe, is but the  entrance to a better life; and Whose wise decrees forbid a man  to lap his soul in an elysium of mere indolent content.

As to our feelings toward Him and our conduct toward man, 
Masonry teaches little about which men can differ, and little  from which they can dissent. He is our Father, and we are all  brethren. This much lies open to the most ignorant and busy,  as fully as to those who have most leisure and are most  learned. This needs no Priest to teach it, and no authority to  indorse it; and if  p. 228  every man did that only which is consistent with it, it would  exile barbarity, cruelty, intolerance, uncharitableness, perfidy,  treachery, revenge, selfishness, and all their kindred vices and  bad passions beyond the confines of the world.

The true Mason, sincerely holding that a Supreme God  created and governs this world, believes also that He governs  it by laws, which, though wise, just, and beneficent, are yet  steady, unwavering, inexorable. He believes that his agonies  and sorrows are ordained for his chastening, his  strengthening, his elaboration and development; because they  are the necessary results of the operation of laws, the best that  could be devised for the happiness and purification of the  species, and to give occasion and opportunity for the practice  of all the virtues, from the homeliest and most common, to the  noblest and most sublime; or perhaps not even that, but the  best adapted to work out the vast, awful, glorious, eternal  designs of the Great Spirit of the Universe. He believes that  the ordained operations of nature, which have brought misery  to him, have, from the very unswerving tranquility of their  career, showered blessings and sunshine upon many another  path; that the unrelenting chariot of Time, which has crushed  or maimed him in its allotted course, is pressing onward to the  accomplishment of those serene and mighty purposes, to have  contributed to which, even as a victim, is an honor and a  recompense. He takes this view of Time and Nature and God,  and yet bears his lot without murmur or distrust; because it is  a portion of a system, the best possible, because ordained by 
God. He does not believe that God loses sight of him, while  superintending the march of the great harmonies of the 
Universe; nor that it was not foreseen, when the Universe was  created, its laws enacted, and the long succession of its  operations pre-ordained, that in the great march of those  events, he would suffer pain and undergo calamity. He  believes that his individual good entered into God's  consideration, a, well as the great cardinal results to which the  course of all things is tending.

Thus believing, he has attained an eminence in virtue, the  highest, amid passive excellence, which humanity can reach. 
He finds his reward and his support in the reflection that he is  an unreluctant and self-sacrificing co-operator with the 
Creator of the Universe; and in the noble consciousness of  being worthy and capable of so sublime a conception, yet so  sad a destiny. He is then truly  p. 229  entitled to be called a Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime 
Mason. He is content to fall early in the battle, if his body  may but form a stepping-stone for the future conquests of  humanity.

It cannot be that God, Who, we are certain, is perfectly good,  can choose us to suffer pain, unless either we are ourselves to  receive from it an antidote to what is evil in ourselves, or else  as such pain is a necessary part in the scheme of the Universe,  which as a whole is good. In either case, the Mason receives it  with submission. He would not suffer unless it was ordered  so. What-ever his creed, if he believes that God is, and that 
He cares for His creatures, he cannot doubt that; nor that it  would not have been so ordered, unless it was either better for  himself, or for some other persons, or for some things. To  complain and lament is to murmur against God's will, and  worse than unbelief.

The Mason, whose mind is cast in a nobler mould than those  of the ignorant and unreflecting, and is instinct with a diviner  life,—who loves truth more than rest, and the peace of Heaven  rather than the peace of Eden,—to whom a loftier being brings  severer cares,—who knows that man does not live by pleasure  or content alone, but by the presence of the power of God,-  must cast behind him the hope of any other repose or  tranquillity, than that which is the last reward of long agonies  of thought; he must relinquish all prospect of any Heaven  save that of which trouble is the avenue and portal; he must  gird up his loins, and trim his lamp, for a work that must be  done, and must not be negligently done. If he does not like to  live in the furnished lodgings of tradition, he must build his  own house, his own system of faith and thought, for himself.

The hope of success, and not the hope of reward, should be  our stimulating and sustaining power. Our object, and not  ourselves, should be our inspiring thought. Selfishness is a  sin, when temporary, and for time. Spun out to eternity, it  does not become celestial prudence. We should toil and die,  not for Heaven or Bliss, but for Duty.

In the more frequent cases, where we have to join our efforts  to those of thousands of others, to contribute to the carrying  forward of a great cause; merely to till the ground or sow the  seed for a very distant harvest, or to prepare the way for the  future advent of some great amendment; the amount which  each one contributes to the achievement of ultimate success,  the portion of the  p. 230  price which justice should assign to each as his especial  production, can never be accurately ascertained. Perhaps few  of those who have ever labored, in the patience of secrecy and  silence, to bring about some political or social change, which  they felt convinced would ultimately prove of vast service to  humanity, lived to see the change effected, or the anticipated  good flow from it. Fewer still of them were able to pronounce  what appreciable weight their several efforts contributed to  the achievement of the change desired. Many will doubt,  whether, in truth, these exertions have any influence  whatever; and, discouraged, cease all active effort.

Not to be thus discouraged, the Mason must labor to elevate  and purify his motives, as well as sedulously cherish the  conviction, assuredly a true one, that in this world there is no  such thing as effort thrown away; that in all labor there is  profit; that all sincere exertion, in a righteous and unselfish  cause, is necessarily followed, in spite of all appearance to the  contrary, by an appropriate and proportionate success; that no  bread cast upon the waters can be wholly lost; that no seed  planted in the ground can fail to quicken in due time and  measure; and that, however we may, in moments of  despondency, be apt to doubt, not only whether our cause will  triumph, but whether, if it does, we shall have contributed to  its triumph,—there is One, Who has not only seen every  exertion we have made, but Who can assign the exact degree  in which each soldier has assisted to gain the great victory  over social evil. No good work is done wholly in vain,

The Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason will in nowise  deserve that honorable title, if he has not that strength, that  will, that self-sustaining energy; that Faith, that feeds upon no  earthly hope, nor ever thinks of victory, but, content in its  own consummation, combats because it ought to combat,  rejoicing fights, and still rejoicing falls.

The Augean Stables of the World, the accumulated  uncleanness and misery of centuries, require a mighty river to  cleanse them thoroughly away; every drop we contribute aids  to swell that river and augment its force, in a degree  appreciable by God, though not by man; and he whose zeal is  deep and earnest, will not be over-anxious that his individual  drops should be distinguishable amid the mighty mass of  cleansing and fertilizing  p. 231  waters; far less that, for the sake of distinction, it should flow  in ineffective singleness away.

The true Mason will not be careful that his name should be  inscribed upon the mite which he casts into the treasury of 
God. It suffices him to know that if he has labored, with  purity of purpose, in any good cause, he must have  contributed to its success; that the degree in which he has  contributed is a matter of infinitely small concern; and still  more, that the consciousness of having so contributed,  however obscurely and unnoticed, is his sufficient, even if it  be his sole, reward. Let every Grand Elect, Perfect, and 
Sublime Mason cherish this faith. It is a duty. It is the brilliant  and never-dying light that shines within and through the  symbolic pedestal of alabaster, on which reposes the perfect  cube of agate, symbol of duty, inscribed with the divine name  of God. He who industriously sows and reaps is a good  laborer, and worthy of his hire. But he who sows that which  shall be reaped by others, by those who will know not of and  care not for the sower, is a laborer of a nobler order, and,  worthy of a more excellent reward.

The Mason does not exhort others to an ascetic undervaluing  of this life, as an insignificant and unworthy portion of  existence; for that demands feelings which are unnatural, and  which, therefore, if attained, must be morbid, and if merely  professed, insincere; and teaches us to look rather to a future  life for the compensation of social evils, than to this life for  their cure; and so does injury to the cause of virtue and to that  of social progress. Life is real, and is earnest, and it is frill of  duties to be performed. It is the beginning of our immortality. 
Those only who feel a deep interest and affection for this  world will work resolutely for its amelioration; those whose  affections are transferred to Heaven, easily acquiesce in the  miseries of earth, deeming them hopeless, befitting, and  ordained; and console themselves with the idea of the amends  which are one day to be theirs. It is a sad truth, that those most  decidedly given to spiritual contemplation, and to making  religion rale in their hearts, are often most apathetic toward  all improvement of this world's systems, and in many cases  virtual conservatives of evil, and hostile to political and social  reform, as diverting men's energies from eternity.

The Mason does not war with his own instincts, macerate the  body into weakness and disorder, and disparage what he sees  to be  p. 232  beautiful, knows to be wonderful, and feels to be unspeakably  dear and fascinating. He does not put aside the nature which 
God has given him, to stmggle after one which He has not  bestowed. He knows that man is sent into the world, not a  spiritual, but a composite being, made up of body and mind,  the body having, as is fit and needful in a material world, its  full, rightful, and allotted share. His life is guided by a full  recognition of this fact. He does not deny it in bold words,  and admit it in weaknesses and inevitable failings. He  believes that his spirituality will come in the next stage of his  being, when he puts on the spiritual body; that his body will  be dropped at death; and that, until then, God meant it to be  commanded and controlled, but not neglected, despised, or  ignored by the soul, under pain of, heavy consequences.

Yet the Mason is not indifferent as to the fate of the soul, after  its present life, as to its continued and eternal being, and the  character of the scenes in which that being will be fully  developed. These are to him topics of the profoundest interest,  and the most ennobling and refining contemplation. They  occupy much of his leisure; and as he becomes familiar with  the sorrows and calamities of this life, as his hopes are  disappointed and his visions of happiness here fade away;  when life has wearied him in its race of hours; when the is  harassed and toil-worn, and the burden of his years weighs  heavy on him, the balance of attraction gradually inclines in  favor of another life; and he clings to his lofty speculations  with a tenacity of interest which needs no in-junction, and  will listen to no prohibition. They are the consoling privilege  of the aspiring, the wayworn, the weary, and the bereaved.

To him the contemplation of the Future lets in light upon the 
Present, and develops the higher portions of his nature. He  endeavors rightly to adjust the respective claims of Heaven  and earth upon his time and thought, so as to give the proper  proportions thereof to performing the duties and entering into  the interests of this world, and to preparation for a better; to  the cultivation and purification of his own character, and to  the public service of his fellow-men.

The Mason does not dogmatize, but entertaining and uttering  his own convictions, he leaves every one else free to do the  same; and only hopes that the time will cone, even if after the  lapse of  p. 233  ages, when all men shall form one great family of brethren,  and one law alone, the law of love, shall govern God's whole 
Universe.

Believe as you may, my brother; if the Universe is not, to you,  without a God, and if man is not like the beast that perishes,  but hath an immortal soul, we welcome you among us, to  wear, as we wear, with humility, and conscious of your  demerits and short-comings, the title of Grand Elect, Perfect,  and Sublime Mason.

It was not without a secret meaning, that twelve was the  number of the Apostles of Christ, and seventy-two that of his 
Disciples: that John addressed his rebukes and menaces to the 
Seven churches, the number of the Archangels and the 
Planets. At Babylon were the Seven Stages ofBersippa, a  pyramid of Seven stories, and at Ecbatana Seven concentric  inclosures, each of a different color. Thebes also had Seven  gates, and the same number is repeated again and again in the  account of the flood. The Sephiroth, or Emanations, ten in  number, three in one class, and seven in the other, repeat the  mystic numbers of Pythagoras. Seven Amschaspands or  planetary spirits were invoked with Ormuzd: Seven inferior 
Rishis of Hindustan were saved with the head of their family  in an ark: and Seven ancient personages alone returned with  the British just man, Hu, from the dale of the grievous waters. 
There were Seven Heliadas, whose father Hellas, or the Sun,  once crossed the sea in a golden cup; Seven Titans, children  of the older Titan, Kronos or Saturn; Seven Corybantes; and 
Seven Cabiri, sons of Sydyk; Seven primeval Celestial spirits  of the Japanese, and Seven Karfesters who escaped from the  deluge and began to be the parents of a new race, on the  summit of Mount Albordi. Seven Cyclopes, also, built the  walls of Tiryus.

Celsus, as quoted by Origen, tells us that the Persians  represented by symbols the two-fold motion of the stars, fixed  and planetary, and the passage of the Soul through their  successive spheres. They erected in their holy caves, in which  the mystic rites of the Mithriac initiations were practised,  what he denominates a high ladder, on the Seven steps of  which were Seven gates or portals, according to the number  of the Seven principal heavenly bodies. Through these the  aspirants passed, until they reached the summit of the whole;  and this passage was styled a transmigration through the  spheres.  p. 234

Jacob saw in his dream a ladder planted or set on the earth,  and its top reaching to Heaven, and the Malaki Alohim  ascending and descending on it, and above it stood INUH,  declaring Himself to be Ihuh-Alhi Abraham. The word  translated ladder, is nbo Salam, from V?o, Salal, raised,  elevated, reared up, exalted, piled up into a heap, Aggeravit.  nV?o Salalah, means a heap, rampart, or other accumulation of  earth or stone, artificially made; and ybo, Salaa or Salo, is a  rock or cliff or boulder, and the name of the city of Petra. 
There is no ancient Hebrew word to designate a pyramid.

The symbolic mountain Meru was ascended by Seven steps or  stages; and all the pyramids and artificial tumuli and hillocks  thrown up in fiat countries were imitations of this fabulous  and mystic mountain, for purposes of worship. These were the 
"High Places" so often mentioned in the Hebrew books, on  which the idolaters sacrificed to foreign gods.

The pyramids were sometimes square, and sometimes round. 
The sacred Babylonian tower [bTffl, Magdol], dedicated to the  great Father Bal, was an artificial hill, of pyramidal shape,  and Seven stages, built of brick, and each stage of a different  color, representing the Seven planetary spheres by the  appropriate color of each planet. Meru itself was said to be a  single mountain, terminating in three peaks, and thus a  symbol of the Trimurti. The great Pagoda at Tanjore was of  six stories, surmounted by a temple as the seventh, and on this  three spires or towers. An ancient pagoda at Deogur was  surmounted by a tower, sustaining the mystic egg and a  trident. Herodotus tells us that the Temple of Bal at Babylon  was a tower composed of Seven towers, resting on an eighth  that served as basis, and successively diminishing in size from  the bottom to the top; and Strabo tells us it was a pyramid.

Faber thinks that the Mithriac ladder was really a pyramid  with Seven stages, each provided with a narrow door or  aperture, through each of which doors the aspirant passed, to  reach the summit, and then descended through similar doors  on the opposite side of the pyramid; the ascent and descent of  the Soul being thus represented.

Each Mithriac cave and all the most ancient temples were  intended to symbolize the Universe, which itself was  habitually called the Temple and habitation of Deity. Every  temple was  p. 235  the world in miniature; and so the whole world was one grand  temple. The most ancient temples were roofless; and therefore  the Persians, Celts, and Scythians strongly disliked artificial  covered edifices. Cicero says that Xerxes burned the Grecian  temples, on the express ground that the whole world was the 
Magnificent Temple and Habitation of the Supreme Deity. 
Macrobius says that the entire Universe was judiciously  deemed by many the Temple of God. Plato pronounced the  real Temple of the Deity to be the world; and Heraclitus  declared that the Universe, variegated with animals and plants  and stars was the only genuine Temple of the Divinity.

How completely the Temple of Solomon was symbolic, is  manifest, not only from the continual reproduction in it of the  sacred numbers and of astrological symbols in the historical  descriptions of it; but also, and yet more, from the details of  the imaginary reconstructed edifice, seen by Ezekiel in his  vision. The Apocalypse completes the demonstration, and  shows the kabalistic meanings of the whole. The Symbola 
Architectonica are found on the most ancient edifices; and  these mathematical figures and instruments, adopted by the 
Templars, and identical with those on the gnostic seals and  abraxas, connect their dogma with the Chaldaic, Syriac, and 
Egyptian Oriental philosophy. The secret Pythagorean  doctrines of numbers were preserved by the monks of Thibet,  by the Hierophants of Egypt and Eleusis, at Jerusalem, and in  the circular Chapters of the Druids; and they are especially  consecrated in that mysterious book, the Apocalypse of Saint 
John.

All temples were surrounded by pillars, recording the number  of the constellations, the signs of the zodiac, or the cycles of  the planets; and each one was a microcosm or symbol of the 
Universe, having for roof or ceiling the starred vault of 
Heaven.

All temples were originally open at the top, having for roof  the sky. Twelve pillars described the belt of the zodiac. 
Whatever the number of the pillars, they were mystical  everywhere. At Abury, the Druidic temple reproduced all the  cycles by its columns. Around the temples of Chilminar in 
Persia, of Baalbec, and of Tukhti Schlomoh in Tartary, on the  frontier of China, stood forty pillars. On each side of the  temple at Paestum were fourteen, recording the Egyptian cycle  of the dark and light sides  p. 236  of the moon, as described by Plutarch; the whole thirty-eight  that surrounded them recording the two meteoric cycles so  often found in the Druidic temples.

The theatre built by Scaurus, in Greece, was surrounded by 
360 columns; the Temple at Mecca, and that at Iona in 
Scotland, by 360 stones.

MORALS AND DOGMA 
CHAPTER OF ROSE CROIX

XV.

KNIGHT OF THE EAST OR OF THE SWORD.

[Knight of the East, of the Sword, or of the Eagle.]

THIS Degree, like all others in Masonry, is symbolical. Based upon historical  truth and authentic tradition, it is still an allegory. The leading lesson of this 
Degree is Fidelity to obligation, and Constancy and Perseverance under  difficulties and discouragement.

Masonry is engaged in her crusade, against ignorance, intolerance, fanaticism,

superstition, uncharitableness, and error. She does not sail with the trade-  winds, upon a smooth sea, with a steady free breeze, fair for a welcoming  harbor; but meets and must overcome many opposing currents, baffling winds,  and dead calms.

The chief obstacles to her success are the apathy and faithlessness of her own  selfish children, and the supine indifference of the world. In the roar and crush  and hurry of life and business, and the tumult and uproar of politics, the quiet  voice of Masonry is unheard and unheeded. The first lesson which one learns,  who engages in any great work of reform or beneficence, is, that men are  essentially careless, lukewarm, and indifferent as to everything that does not  concern their own personal and immediate  p. 238  welfare. It is to single men, and not to the united efforts of many, that all the  great works of man, struggling toward perfection, are owing. The enthusiast,  who imagines that he can inspire with his own enthusiasm the multitude that  eddies around him, or even the few who have associated themselves with him  as co-workers, is grievously mistaken; and most often the conviction of his  own mistake is followed by discouragement and disgust. To do all, to pay all,  and to suffer all, and then, when despite all obstacles and hindrances, success  is accomplished, and a great work done, to see those who opposed or looked  coldly on it, claim and reap all the praise and reward, is the common and  almost universal lot of the benefactor of his kind.

He who endeavors to serve, to benefit, and improve the world, is like a  swimmer, who struggles against a rapid current, in a river lashed into angry  waves by the winds. Often they roar over his head, often they beat him back  and baffle him. Most men yield to the stress of the current, and float with it to  the shore, or are swept over the rapids; and only here and there the stout,  strong heart and vigorous anns struggle on toward ultimate success.

It is the motionless and stationary that most frets and impedes the current of  progress; the solid rock or stupid dead tree, rested firmly on the bottom; and  around which the river whirls and eddies: the Masons that doubt and hesitate  and are discouraged; that disbelieve in the capability of man to improve; that  are not disposed to toil and labor for the interest and well-being of general  humanity; that expect others to do all, even of that which they do not oppose  or ridicule; while they sit, applauding and doing nothing, or perhaps  prognosticating failure.

There were many such at the rebuilding of the Temple. There were prophets of  evil and misfortune—the lukewarm and the in-different and the apathetic; those  who stood by and sneered; and those who thought they did God service  enough if they now and then faintly applauded. There were ravens croaking ill  omen, and murmurers who preached the folly and futility of the attempt. The  world is made up of such; and they were as abundant then as they are now.

But gloomy and discouraging as was the prospect, with lukewarmness within  and bitter opposition without, our ancient brethren persevered. Let us leave  them engaged in the good work, and whenever to us, as to them, success is  uncertain, remote, and  p. 239  contingent, let us still remember that the only question for us to ask, as true  men and Masons, is, what does duty require; and not what will be the result  and our reward if we do our duty. Work on, with the Sword in one hand, and  the Trowel in the other!

Masonry teaches that God is a Paternal Being, and has an interest in his  creatures, such as is expressed in the title Father ,; an interest unknown to all  the systems of Paganism, untaught in all the theories of philosophy; an interest  not only in the glorious beings of other spheres, the Sons of Light, the dwellers  in Heavenly worlds, but in us, poor, ignorant, and unworthy; that He has pity  for the erring, pardon for the guilty, love for the pure, knowledge for the  humble, and promises of immortal life for those who trust in and obey Him.

Without a belief in Him, life is miserable, the world is dark, the Universe  disrobed of its splendors, the intellectual tie to nature broken, the charm of  existence dissolved, the great hope of being lost; and the mind, like a star  struck from its sphere, wanders through the infinite desert of its conceptions,  without attraction, tendency, destiny, or end.

Masonry teaches, that, of all the events and actions, that take place in the  universe of worlds and the eternal succession of ages, there is not one, even  the minutest, which God did not forever foresee, with all the distinctness of  immediate vision, combining all, so that man's free will should be His  instrument, like all the other forces of, nature.

It teaches that the soul of man is formed by Him for a purpose; that, built up in  its proportions, and fashioned in every part, by infinite skill, an emanation  from His spirit, its nature, necessity, and design are virtue. It is so formed, so  moulded, so fashioned, so exactly balanced, so exquisitely proportioned in  every part, that sin introduced into it is misery; that vicious thoughts fall upon  it like drops of poison; and guilty desires, breathing on its delicate fibres, make  plague-spots there, deadly as those of pestilence upon the body. It is made for  virtue, and not for vice; for purity, as its end, rest, and happiness. Not more  vainly would we attempt to make the mountain sink to the level of the valley,  the waves of the angry sea turn back from its shores and cease to thunder upon  the beach, the stars to halt in their swift courses, than to change any one law of  our own nature. And one of those laws, uttered by God's voice, and speaking  through every nerve  p. 240  and fibre, every force and element, of the moral constitution He has given us,  is that we must be upright and virtuous; that if tempted we must resist; that we  must govern our unruly passions, and hold in hand our sensual appetites. And  this is not the dictate of an arbitrary will, nor of some stem and impracticable  law; but it is part of the great firm law of harmony that binds the Universe  together: not the mere enactment of arbitrary will; but the dictate of Infinite 
Wisdom.

We know that God is good, and that what He does is right. This known, the  works of creation, the changes of life, the destinies of eternity, are all spread  before us, as the dispensations and counsels of infinite love. This known, we  then know that the love of God is working to issues, like itself, beyond all  thought and imagination good and glorious; and that the only reason why we  do not understand it, is that it is too glorious for us to understand. God's love  takes care for all, and nothing is neglected. It watches over all, provides for all,  makes wise adaptations for all; for age, for infancy, for maturity, for  childhood; in every scene of this or another world; for want, weakness, joy,  sorrow, and even for sin. All is good and well and right; and shall be so  forever. Through the eternal ages the light of God's beneficence shall shine  hereafter, disclosing all, consummating all, rewarding all that deserve reward. 
Then we shall see, what now we can only believe. The cloud will be lifted up,  the gate of mystery be passed, and the full light shine forever; the light of  which that of the Lodge is a symbol. Then that which caused us trial shall  yield us triumph; and that which made our heart ache shall fill us with  gladness; and we shall then feel that there, as here, the only true happiness is  to learn, to advance, and to improve; which could not happen unless we had  commenced with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through  the darkness, to reach the light.

XVI.

PRINCE OF JERUSALEM.

WE no longer expect to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem. To  us it has become but a symbol. To us the whole world is 
God's Temple, as is every upright heart. To establish all over  the world the New Law and Reign of Love, Peace, Charity,  and Toleration, is to build that Temple, most acceptable to 
God, in erecting which Masonry is now engaged. No longer  needing to repair to Jerusalem to worship, nor to offer up  sacrifices and shed blood to propitiate the Deity, man may  make the woods and mountains his Churches and Temples,  and worship God with a devout gratitude, and with works of  charity and beneficence to his fellow-men. Wherever the  humble and contrite heart silently offers up its adoration,  under the overarching trees, in the open, level meadows, on  the hill-side, in the glen, or in the city's swarming streets;  there is God's House and the New Jerusalem.

The Princes of Jerusalem no longer sit as magistrates to judge  between the people; nor is their number limited to five. But  their duties still remain substantially the same, and their  insignia and symbols retain their old significance. Justice and 
Equity are still their characteristics. To reconcile disputes and  heal dissensions, to restore amity and peace, to soothe dislikes  and soften prejudices, are their peculiar duties; and they know  that the peacemakers are blessed.

Their emblems have been already explained. They are part of  the language of Masonry; the same now as it was when Moses  learned it from the Egyptian Hierophants.

Still we observe the spirit of the Divine law, as thus  enunciated to our ancient brethren, when the Temple was  rebuilt, and the book of the law again opened:

"Execute true judgment; and show mercy and compassion  every man to his brother. Oppress not the widow nor the  fatherless, the stranger nor the poor; and let none of you  imagine evil against his brother in his heart. Speak ye every  man the truth  p. 242  to his neighbor; execute the judgment of Truth and Peace in  your gates; and love no false oath; for all these I hate, saith  the Lord.

"Let those who have power rule in righteousness, and Princes  in judgment. And let him that is a judge be as an hiding-place  from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of  water in a dry place; as the shadow of a great rock in a weary  land. Then the vile person shall no more be called liberal; nor  the churl bountiful; and the work of justice shall be peace; and  the effect of justice, quiet and security; and wisdom and  knowledge shall be the stability of the times. Walk ye  righteously and speak uprightly; despise the gains of  oppression, shake from your hands the contamination of  bribes; stop not your ears against the cries of the oppressed,  nor shut your eyes that you may not see the crimes of the  great; and you shall dwell on high, and your place of defence  be like munitions of rocks."

Forget not these precepts of the old Law; and especially do  not forget, as you advance, that every Mason, however  humble, is your brother, and the laboring man your peer! 
Remember always that all Masonry is work, and that the  trowel is an emblem of the Degrees in this Council. Labor,  when rightly understood, is both noble and ennobling, and  intended to develop man's moral and spiritual nature, and not  to be deemed a disgrace or a misfortune.

Everything around us is, in its bearings and influences, moral. 
The serene and bright morning, when we recover our  conscious existence from the embraces of sleep; when, from  that image of Death God calls us to a new life, and again  gives us existence, and His mercies visit us in every bright ray  and glad thought, and call for gratitude and content; the  silence of that early dawn, the hushed silence, as it were, of  expectation; the holy eventide, its cooling breeze, its  lengthening shadows, its falling shades, its still and sober  hour; the sultry noontide and the stern and solemn midnight;  and Spring-time, and chastening Autumn; and Summer, that  unbars our gates, and carries us forth amidst the ever-renewed  wonders of the world; and Winter, that gathers us around the  evening hearth:—all these, as they pass, touch by turns the  springs of the spiritual life in us, and are conducting that life  to good or evil. The idle watch-hand often points to  something within us; and the shadow of the gnomon on the  dial often falls upon the conscience.  p. 243

A life of labor is not a state of inferiority or degradation. The 
Almighty has not cast man's lot beneath the quiet shades, and  amid glad groves and lovely hills, with no task to perfonn;  with nothing to do but to rise up and eat, and to lie clown and  rest. He has ordained that Work shall be done, in all the  dwellings of life, in every productive field, in every busy city,  and on every wave of every ocean. And this He has done,  because it has pleased Him to give man a nature destined to  higher ends than indolent repose and irresponsible profitless  indulgence; and because, for developing the energies of such  a nature, work was the necessary and proper element. We  might as well ask why He could not make two and two be six,  as why He could not develop these energies without the  instrumentality of work. They are equally impossibilities.

This, Masonry teaches, as a great Truth; a great moral land¬  mark, that ought to guide the course of all mankind. It teaches  its toiling children that the scene of their daily life is all  spiritual, that the very implements of their toil, the fabrics  they weave, the merchandise they barter, are designed for  spiritual ends; that so believing, their daily lot may be to them  a sphere for the noblest improvement. That which we do in  our intervals of relaxation, our church-going, and our book¬  reading, are especially designed to prepare our minds for the  action of Life. We are to hear and read and meditate, that we  may act well; and the action of Life is itself the great field for  spiritual improvement. There is no task of industry or  business, in field or forest, on the wharf or the ship's deck, in  the office or the exchange, but has spiritual ends. There is no  care or cross of our daily labor, but was especially ordained to  nurture in us patience, calmness, resolution, perseverance,  gentleness, disinterestedness, magnanimity. Nor is there any  tool or implement of toil, but is a part of the great spiritual  instrumentality.

All the relations of life, those of parent, child, brother, sister,  friend, associate, lover and beloved, husband, wife, are moral,  throughout every living tie and thrilling nerve that bind them  together. They cannot subsist a day nor an hour without  putting the mind to a trial of its truth, fidelity, forbearance,  and disinterestedness.

A great city is one extended scene of moral action. There is  no blow struck in it but has a purpose, ultimately good or bad,  p. 244  and therefore moral. There is no action performed, but has a  motive; and motives are the special jurisdiction of morality. 
Equipages, houses, and furniture are symbols of what is  moral, and they in a thousand ways minister to right or wrong  feeling. Everything that belongs to us, ministering to our  comfort or luxury, awakens in us emotions of pride or  gratitude, of selfishness or vanity; thoughts of self-  indulgence, or merciful remembrances of the needy and the  destitute.

Everything acts upon and influences us. God's great law of  sympathy and harmony is potent and inflexible as His law of  gravitation. A sentence embodying a noble thought stirs our  blood; a noise made by a child frets and exasperates us, and  influences our actions.

A world of spiritual objects, influences, and relations lies  around us all. We all vaguely deem it to be so; but he only  lives a charmed life, like that of genius and poetic inspiration,  who communes with the spiritual scene around him, hears the  voice of the spirit in every sound, sees its signs in every  passing form of things, and feels its impulse in all action,  passion, and being. Very near to us lies the mines of wisdom;  unsuspected they lie all around us. There is a secret In the  simplest things, a wonder in the plainest, a charm in the  dullest.

We are all naturally seekers of wonders. We travel far to see  the majesty of old ruins, the venerable forms of the hoary  mountains, great water-falls, and galleries of art. And yet the  world-wonder is all around us; the wonder of setting suns, and  evening stars, of the magic spring-time, the blossoming of the  trees, the strange transformations of the moth; the wonder of  the Infinite Divinity and of His boundless revelation. There is  no splendor beyond that which sets its morning throne in the  golden East; no. dome sublime as that of Heaven; no beauty  so fair as that of the verdant, blossoming earth; no place,  however invested with the sanctities of old time, like that  home which is hushed and folded within the embrace of the  humblest wall and roof.

And all these are but the symbols of things far greater and  higher. All is but the clothing of the spirit. In this vesture of  time is wrapped the immortal nature: in this show of  circumstance and form stands revealed the stupendous reality. 
Let man but be, as he is, a living soul, communing with  himself and with  p. 245

[paragraph continues] God, and his vision becomes eternity; his  abode, infinity; his home, the bosom of all-embracing love.

The great problem of Humanity is wrought out in the  humblest abodes; no more than this is done in the highest. A  human heart throbs beneath the beggar's gabardine; and that  and no more stirs with its beating the Prince's mantle. The  beauty of Love, the charm of friendship, the sacredness of 
Sorrow, the heroism of Patience, the noble Self-sacrifice,  these and their like, alone, make life to be life indeed, and are  its grandeur and its power. They are the priceless treasures  and glory of humanity; and they are not things of condition. 
All places and all scenes are alike clothed with the grandeur  and charm of virtues such as these.

The million occasions will come to us all, in the ordinary  paths of our life, in our homes, and by our firesides, wherein  we may act as nobly, as if, all our life long, we led armies, sat  in senates, or visited beds of sickness and pain. Varying every  hour, the million occasions will come in which we may  restrain our passions, subdue our hearts to gentleness and  patience, resign our own interest for another's advantage,  speak words of kindness and wisdom, raise the fallen, cheer  the fainting and sick in spirit, and soften and assuage the  weariness and bitterness of their mortal lot. To every Mason  there will be opportunity enough for these. They cannot be  written on his tomb; but they will be written deep in the hearts  of men, of friends, of children, of kindred all around him, in  the book of the great account, and, in their eternal influences,  on the great pages of the Universe.

To such a destiny, at least, my Brethren, let us all aspire! 
These laws of Masonry let us all strive to obey! And so may  our hearts become true temples of the Living God! And may 
He encourage our zeal, sustain our hopes, and assure us of  success!

instruction which will fully unveil to you the heart and inner  mysteries of Masonry. Do not despair because you have often  seemed on the point of attaining the inmost light, and have as  often been disappointed. In all time, truth has been hidden  under symbols, and often under a succession of allegories:  where veil after veil had to be penetrated before the true Light  was reached, and the essential truth stood revealed. The 
Human Light is but an imperfect reflection of a ray of the 
Infinite and Divine.

We are about to approach those ancient Religions which once  p. 247  ruled the minds of men, and whose ruins encumber the plains  of the great Past, as the broken columns of Palmyra and 
Tadmor lie bleaching on the sands of the desert. They rise  before us, those old, strange, mysterious creeds and faiths,  shrouded in the mists of antiquity, and stalk dimly and  undefined along the line which divides Time from Eternity;  and forms of strange, wild, startling beauty mingled in the  vast throngs of figures with shapes monstrous, grotesque, and  hideous.

The religion taught by Moses, which, like the laws of Egypt,  enunciated the principle of exclusion, borrowed, at every  period of its existence, from all the creeds with which it came  in contact. While, by the studies of the learned and wise, it  enriched itself with the most admirable principles of the  religions of Egypt and Asia, it was changed, in the  wanderings of the People, by everything that was most impure  or seductive in the pagan manners and superstitions. It was  one thing in the times of Moses and Aaron, another in those  of David and Solomon, and still another in those of Daniel  and Philo.

At the time when John the Baptist made his appearance in the  desert, near the shores of the Dead Sea, all the old  philosophical and religious systems were approximating  toward each other. A general lassitude inclined the minds of  all toward the quietude of that amalgamation of doctrines for  which the expeditions of Alexander and the more peaceful  occurrences that followed, with the establishment in Asia and 
Africa of many Grecian dynasties and a great number of 
Grecian colonies, had prepared the way. After the  intermingling of different nations, which resulted from the  wars of Alexander in three-quarters of the globe, the doctrines  of Greece, of Egypt, of Persia, and of India, met and  intermingled everywhere. All the barriers that had formerly  kept the nations apart, were thrown down; and while the 
People of the West readily connected their faith with those of  the East, those of the Orient hastened to learn the traditions of 
Rome and the legends of Athens. While the Philosophers of 
Greece, all (except the disciples of Epicurus) more or less 
Platonists, seized eagerly upon the beliefs and doctrines of the 
East,—the Jews and Egyptians, before then the most exclusive  of all peoples, yielded to that eclecticism which prevailed  among their masters, the Greeks and Romans.

Under the same influences of toleration, even those who  embraced Christianity, mingled together the old and the new, 
Christianity  p. 248  and Philosophy, the Apostolic teachings and the traditions of 
Mythology. The man of intellect, devotee of one system,  rarely displaces it with another in all its purity. The people  take such a creed as is offered them. Accordingly, the  distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric doctrine,  immemorial in other creeds, easily gained a foothold among  many of the Christians; and it was held by a vast number,  even during the preaching of Paul, that the writings of the 
Apostles were incomplete; that they contained only the germs  of another doctrine, which must receive from the hands of  philosophy, not only the systematic arrangement which was  wanting, but all the development which lay concealed therein. 
The writings of the Apostles, they said, in addressing  themselves to mankind in general, enunciated only the articles  of the vulgar faith; but transmitted the mysteries of  knowledge to superior minds, to the Elect,-mysteries handed  down from generation to generation in esoteric traditions; and  to this science of the mysteries they gave the name of Tvu)ai<;; 
[Gnosis].

The Gnostics derived their leading doctrines and ideas from 
Plato and Philo, the Zend-avesta and the Kabalah, and the 
Sacred books of India and Egypt; and thus introduced into the  bosom of Christianity the cosmological and theosophical  speculations, which had formed the larger portion of the  ancient religions of the Orient, joined to those of the 
Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish doctrines, which the Neo- 
Platonists had equally adopted in the Occident.

Emanation from the Deity of all spiritual beings, progressive  degeneration of these beings from emanation to emanation,  redemption and return of all to the purity of the Creator; and,  after the re-establishment of the primitive harmony of all, a  fortunate and truly divine condition of all, in the bosom of 
God; such were the fundamental teachings of Gnosticism. The  genius of the Orient, with its contemplations, irradiations, and  intuitions, dictated its doctrines. Its language corresponded to  its origin. Full of imagery, it had all the magnificence, the  inconsistencies, and the mobility of the figurative style.

Behold, it said, the light, which emanates from an immense  centre of Light, that spreads everywhere its benevolent rays;  so do the spirits of Light emanate from the Divine Light. 
Behold, all the springs which nourish, embellish, fertilize, and  purify the Earth: they emanate from one and the same ocean;  so from the  p. 249  bosom of the Divinity emanate so many streams, which form  and fill the universe of intelligences. Behold numbers, which  all emanate from one primitive number, all resemble it, all are  composed of its essence, and still vary infinitely; and  utterances, decomposable into so many syllables and  elements, all contained in the primitive Word, and still  infinitely various; so the world of Intelligences emanated  from a Primary Intelligence, and they all resemble it, and yet  display an infinite variety of existences.

It revived and combined the old doctrines of the Orient and  the Occident; and it found in many passages of the Gospels  and the Pastoral letters, a warrant for doing so. Christ himself  spoke in parables and allegories, John borrowed the  enigmatical language of the Platonists, and Paul often  indulged in incomprehensible rhapsodies, the meaning of  which could have been clear to the Initiates alone.

It is admitted that the cradle of Gnosticism is probably to be  looked for in Syria, and even in Palestine. Most of its  expounders wrote in that corrupted form of the Greek used by  the Hellenistic Jews, and in the Septuagint and the New 
Testament; and there was a striking analogy between their  doctrines and those of the Judeo-Egyptian Philo, of 
Alexandria; itself the seat of three schools, at once  philosophic and religious—the Greek, the Egyptian, and the 
Jewish.

Pythagoras and Plato, the most mystical of the Grecian 
Philosophers (the latter heir to the doctrines of the former),  and who had travelled, the latter in Egypt, and the former in 
Phoenicia, India, and Persia, also taught the esoteric doctrine  and the distinction between the initiated and the profane. The  dominant doctrines of Platonism were found in Gnosticism.

Emanation of Intelligences from the bosom of the Deity; the  going astray in error and the sufferings of spirits, so long as  they are remote from God, and imprisoned in matter; vain and  long-continued efforts to arrive at the knowledge of the Truth,  and re-enter into their primitive union with the Supreme 
Being; alliance of a pure and divine soul with an irrational  soul, the seat of evil desires; angels or demons who dwell in  and govern the planets, having but an imperfect knowledge of  the ideas that presided at the creation; regeneration of all  beings by their return to the icoopoc vopioc, [kosmos noetos],  the world of Intelligences, and its Chief, the Supreme Being;  sole possible mode of re-establishing that primitive  p. 250  harmony of the creation, of which the music of the spheres of 
Pythagoras was the image; these were the analogies of the two  systems; and we discover in them some of the ideas that form  a part of Masonry; in which, in the present mutilated  condition of the symbolic Degrees, they are disguised and  overlaid with fiction and absurdity, or present themselves as  casual hints that are passed by wholly unnoticed.

The distinction between the esoteric and exoteric doctrines (a  distinction purely Masonic), was always and from the very  earliest times preserved among the Greeks. It remounted to  the fabulous times of Orpheus; and the mysteries of 
Theosophy were found in all their traditions and myths. And  after the time of Alexander, they resorted for instruction,  dogmas, and mysteries, to all the schools, to those of Egypt  and Asia, as well as those of Ancient Thrace, Sicily, Etruria,  and Attica.

The Jewish-Greek School of Alexandria is known only by  two of its Chiefs, Aristobulus and Philo, both Jews of 
Alexandria in Egypt. Belonging to Asia by its origin, to Egypt  by its residence, to Greece by its language and studies, it  strove to show that all truths embedded in the philosophies of  other countries were trans-planted thither from Palestine. 
Aristobulus declared that all the facts and details of the Jewish 
Scriptures were so many allegories, concealing the most  profound meanings, and that Plato had borrowed from them  all his finest ideas. Philo, who lived a century after him,  following the same theory, endeavored to show that the 
Hebrew writings, by their system of allegories, were the true  source of all religious and philosophical doctrines. According  to him, the literal meaning is for the vulgar alone. Whoever  has meditated on philosophy, purified himself by virtue, and  raised himself by contemplation, to God and the intellectual  world, and received their inspiration, pierces the gross  envelope of the letter, discovers a wholly different order of  things, and is initiated into mysteries, of which the elementary  or literal instruction offers but an imperfect image. A  historical fact, a figure, a word, a letter, a number, a rite, a  custom, the parable or vision of a prophet, veils the most  profound truths; and he who has the key of science will  interpret all according to the light he possesses.

Again we see the symbolism of Masonry, and the search of  the Candidate for light. "Let men of narrow minds withdraw,"  he says, "with closed ears. We transmit the divine mysteries  to  p. 251  those who have received the sacred initiation, to those who  practise true piety, and who are not enslaved by the empty  trappings of words or the preconceived opinions of the  pagans."

To Philo, the Supreme Being was the Primitive Light, or the 
Archetype of Light, Source whence the rays emanate that  illuminate Souls. He was also the Soul of the Universe, and as  such acted in all its parts. He Himself fills and limits His  whole Being. His Powers and Virtues fill and penetrate all. 
These Powers [Auvupeic, dunameis] are Spirits distinct from 
God, the "Ideas" of Plato personified. He is without  beginning, and lives in the prototype of Time [atcov, aion].

His image is THE WORD [Aoyoi;], a form more brilliant than  fire; that not being the pure light. This LOGOS dwells in 
God; for the Supreme Being makes to Himself within His 
Intelligence the types or ideas of everything that is to become  reality in this World. The Logos is the vehicle by which God  acts on the Universe, and may be compared to the speech of  man.

The LOGOS being the World of Ideas [icoopoc vor|Toc], by  means whereof God has created visible things, He is the most  ancient God, in comparison with the World, which is the  youngest production. The LOGOS, Chief of Intelligence, of  which He is the general representative, is named Archangel,  type and representative of all spirits, even those of mortals.

He is also styled the man-type and primitive man, Adam 
Kadmon.

God only is Wise. The wisdom of man is but the reflection  and image of that of God. He is the Father, and His WISDOM  the mother of creation: for He united Himself with WISDOM 
[Locpta, Sophia], and communicated to it the germ of creation,  and it brought forth the material world. He created the ideal  world only, and caused the material world to be made real  after its type, by His LOGOS, which is His speech, and at the  same time the Idea of Ideas, the Intellectual World. The 
Intellectual City was but the Thought of the Architect, who  meditated the creation, according to that plan of the Material 
City.

The Word is not only the Creator, but occupies the place of  the Supreme Being. Through Him all the Powers and 
Attributes of God act. On the other side, as first representative  of the Human Family, He is the Protector of men and their 
Shepherd.

God gives to man the Soul or Intelligence, which exists before  the body, and which he unites with the body. The reasoning  p. 252

[paragraph continues] Principle comes from God through the Word,  and communes with God and with the Word; but there is also  in man an irrational Principle, that of the inclinations and  passions which produce disorder, emanating from inferior  spirits who fill the air as ministers of God. The body, taken  from the Earth, and the irrational Principle that animates it  concurrently with the rational Principle, are hated by God,  while the rational soul which He has given it, is, as it were,  captive in this prison, this coffin, that encompasses it. The  present condition of man is not his primitive condition, when  he was the image of the Logos. He has fallen from his first  estate. But he may raise himself again, by following the  directions of WISDOM [Xocpiu] and of the Angels which God  has commissioned to aid him in freeing himself from the  bonds of the body, and combating Evil, the existence whereof 
God has permitted, to furnish him the means of exercising his  liberty. The souls that are purified, not by the Law but by  light, rise to the Heavenly regions, to enjoy there a perfect  felicity. Those that persevere in evil go from body to body,  the seats of passions and evil desires. The familiar lineaments  of these doctrines will be recognized by all who read the 
Epistles of St. Paul, who wrote after Philo, the latter living till  the reign of Caligula, and being the contemporary of Christ.

And the Mason is familiar with these doctrines of Philo: that  the Supreme Being is a centre of Light whose rays or  emanations pervade the Universe; for that is the Light for  which all Masonic journeys are a search, and of which the sun  and moon in our Lodges are only emblems: that Light and

Darkness, chief enemies from the beginning of Time, dispute  with each other the empire of the world; which we symbolize  by the candidate wandering in darkness and being brought to  light: that the world was created, not by the Supreme Being,  but by a secondary agent, who is but His WORD [the Aoyo<;],  and by types which are but his ideas, aided by an 
INTELLIGENCE, or WISDOM [Loipia], which gives one of 
His Attributes; in which we see the occult meaning of the  necessity of recovering "the Word"; and of our two columns  of STRENGTH and WISDOM, which are also the two  parallel lines that bound the circle representing the Universe:  that the visible world is the image of the invisible world; that  the essence of the Human Soul is the image of God, and it  existed before the body; that the object of its terrestrial life is  to disengage itself of its body or its  p. 253  sepulchre; and that it will ascend to the Heavenly regions  whenever it shall be purified; in which we see the meaning,  now almost forgotten in our Lodges, of the mode of  preparation of the candidate for apprenticeship, and his tests  and purifications in the first Degree, according to the Ancient  and Accepted Scottish Rite.

Philo incorporated in his eclecticism neither Egyptian nor 
Oriental elements. But there were other Jewish Teachers in 
Alexandria who did both. The Jews of Egypt were slightly  jealous of, and a little hostile to, those of Palestine,  particularly after the erection of the sanctuary at Leontopolis  by the High-Priest Onias; and therefore they admired and  magnified those sages, who, like Jeremiah, had resided in 
Egypt. "The wisdom of Solomon" was written at Alexandria,  and, in the time of St. Jerome, was attributed to Philo; but it  contains principles at variance with his. It personifies 
Wisdom, and draws between its children and the Profane, the  same line of demarcation that Egypt had long before taught to  the Jews. That distinction existed at the beginning of the 
Mosaic creed. Moshah himself was an Initiate in the mysteries  of Egypt, as he was compelled to be, as the adopted son of the  daughter of Pharaoh, Thouoris, daughter of Sesostris-Ramses;  who, as her tomb and monuments show, was, in the right of  her infant husband, Regent of Lower Egypt or the Delta at the  time of the Hebrew Prophet's birth, reigning at Heliopolis.

She was also, as the reliefs on her tomb show, a Priestess of 
HATHOR and NEITH, the two great primeval goddesses. As  her adopted son, living in her Palace and presence forty years,  and during that time scarcely acquainted with his brethren the 
Jews, the law of Egypt compelled his initiation: and we find  in many of his enactments the intention of preserving,  between the common people and the Initiates, the line of  separation which he found in Egypt. Moshah and Aharun his  brother, the whole series of High-Priests, the Council of the 
70 Elders, Salomoh and the entire succession of Prophets,  were in possession of a higher science; and of that science 
Masonry is, at least, the lineal descendant. It was familiarly  known as THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORD.

AMUN, at first the God of Lower Egypt only, where Moshah  was reared [a word that in Hebrew means Truth], was the 
Supreme God. He was styled "the Celestial Lord, who sheds 
Light on hidden things." He was the source of that divine life,  of which the crux ansata is the symbol; and the source of all  power, He  p. 254  united all the attributes that the Ancient Oriental Theosophy  assigned to the Supreme Being. He was the 7rlf|pcopa 
(Pleroma), or "Fullness of things," for He comprehended in 
Himself everything; and the LIGHT; for he was the Sun-God. 
He was unchangeable in the midst of everything phenomenal  in his worlds. He created nothing; but everything emanated  from Him; and of Him all the other Gods were but  manifestations.

The Ram was His living symbol; which you see reproduced in  this Degree, lying on the book with seven seals on the tracing-  board. He caused the creation of the world by the Primitive 
Thought [Evvoia, Ennoia], or Spirit [I Iveupu, Pneuma], that  issued from him by means of his Voice or the WORD; and  which Thought or Spirit was personified as the Goddess 
NEITH. She, too, was a divinity of Light, and mother of the 
Sun; and the Feast of Lamps was celebrated in her honor at 
Sais. The Creative Power, another manifestation of Deity,  proceeding to the creation conceived of in her, the Divine 
Intelligence, produced with its Word the Universe,  symbolized by an egg issuing from the mouth of KNEPH;  from which egg came PHTHA, image of the Supreme

Intelligence as realized in the world, and the type of that  manifested in man; the principal agent, also, of Nature, or the  creative and productive Fire. PURE or RE, the Sun, or 
Celestial Light, whose symbol was O, the point within a  circle, was the son of PHTHA; and TIPHE, his wife, or the  celestial firmament, with the seven celestial bodies, animated  by spirits of genii that govern them, was represented on many  of the monuments, clad in blue or yellow, her garments  sprinkled with stars, and accompanied by the sun, moon, and  five planets; and she was the type of Wisdom, and they of the 
Seven Planetary Spirits of the Gnostics, that with her presided  over and governed the Sublunary world.

In this Degree, unknown for a hundred years to those who  have practised it, these emblems reproduced refer to these old  doctrines. The lamb, the yellow hangings strewed with stars,  the seven columns, candlesticks, and seals all recall them to  us.

The Lion was the symbol of ATHOM-RE, the Great God of 
Upper Egypt; the Hawk, of RA or PHRE; the Eagle, of 
MENDES; the Bull, of APIS; and three of these are seen  under the platform on which our altar stands.

The first HERMES was the INTELLIGENCE or WORD of 
God. Moved with compassion for a race living without law,  and wishing  p. 255  to teach them that they sprang from His bosom, and to point  out to them the way that they should go [the books which the  first Hermes, the same with Enoch, had written on the  mysteries of divine science, in the sacred characters, being  unknown to those who lived after the flood], God sent to man 
OSIRIS and Isis, accompanied by THOTH, the incarnation or  terrestrial repetition of the first HERMES; who taught men  the arts, science, and the ceremonies of religion; and then  ascended to Heaven or the Moon. OSIRIS was the Principle  of Good. TYPHON, like AHRIMAN, was the principle and  source of all that is evil in the moral and physical order. Like  the Satan of Gnosticism, he was confounded with Matter.

From Egypt or Persia the new Platonists borrowed the idea,  and the Gnostics received it from them, that man, in his  terrestrial career, is successively under the influence of the 
Moon, of Mercury, of Venus, of the Sun, of Mars, of Jupiter,  and of Saturn, until he finally reaches the Elysian Fields; an  idea again symbolized in the Seven Seals.

The Jews of Syria and Judea were the direct precursors of 
Gnosticism; and in their doctrines were ample oriental  elements. These Jews had had with the Orient, at two different  periods, intimate relations, familiarizing them with the  doctrines of Asia, and especially of Chaldea and Persia;—their  forced residence in Central Asia under the Assyrians and 
Persians; and their voluntary dispersion over the whole East,  when subjects of the Seleucidas and the Romans. Living near  two-thirds of a century, and many of them long afterward, in

Mesopotamia, the cradle of their race; speaking the same  language, and their children reared with those of the 
Chaldeans, Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, and receiving  from them their names (as the case of Danayal, who was  called Baeltasatsar, proves), they necessarily adopted many of  the doctrines of their conquerors. Their descendants, as Azra  and Nahamaiah show us, hardly desired to leave Persia, when  they were allowed to do so. They had a special jurisdiction,  and governors and judges taken from their own people; many  of them held high office, and their children were educated  with those of the highest nobles. Danayal was the friend and  minister of the King, and the Chief of the College of the Magi  at Babylon; if we may believe the book which bears his name,  and trust to the incidents related in its highly figurative and  imaginative style. Mordecai,  p. 256  too, occupied a high station, no less than that of Prime 
Minister, and Esther or Astar, his cousin, was the Monarch's  wife.

The Magi of Babylon were expounders of figurative writings,  interpreters of nature, and of dreams,—astronomers and  divines; and from their influences arose among the Jews, after  their rescue from captivity, a number of sects, and a new  exposition, the mystical interpretation, with all its wild fancies  and infinite caprices. The A ions of the Gnostics, the Ideas of 
Plato, the Angels of the Jews, and the Demons of the Greeks,  all correspond to the Ferouers of Zoroaster.

A great number of Jewish families remained permanently in  their new country; and one of the most celebrated of their  schools was at Babylon. They were soon familiarized with the  doctrine of Zoroaster, which itself was more ancient than 
Kuros. From the system of the Zend-Avesta they borrowed,  and subsequently gave large development to, everything that  could be reconciled with their own faith; and these additions  to the old doctrine were soon spread, by the constant  intercourse of commerce, into Syria and Palestine.

In the Zend-Avesta, God is Illimitable Time. No origin can be  assigned to Him: He is so entirely enveloped in His glory, His  nature and attributes are so inaccessible to human 
Intelligence, that He can be only the object of a silent 
Veneration. Creation took place by emanation from Him. The  first emanation was the primitive Light, and from that the 
King of Light, ORMUZD. By the "WORD," Ormuzd created  the world pure. He is its preserver and judge; a Being Holy  and Heavenly; Intelligence and Knowledge; the First-bom of 
Time without limits; and invested with all the Powers of the 
Supreme Being.

Still he is, strictly speaking, the Fourth Being. He had a 
Ferouer, a pre-existing Soul [in the language of Plato, a type  or ideal]', and it is said of Him, that He existed from the  beginning, in the primitive Light. But, that Light being but an  element, and His Ferouer a type, he is, in ordinary language,  the First-born of ZEROUANE-AKHERENE. Behold, again, 
"THE WORD" of Masonry; the Man, on the Tracing-Board of  this Degree; the LIGHT toward which all Masons travel.

He created after his own image, six Genii called 
Amshaspands, who surround his Throne, are his organs of  communication with inferior spirits and men, transmit to Him  their prayers, solicit for  p. 257  them His favors, and serve them as models of purity and  perfection. Thus we have the Demiourgos of Gnosticism, and  the six Genii that assist him. These are the Hebrew 
Archangels of the Planets.

The names of these Amshaspands are Bahman, Ardibehest, 
Schariver, Sapandomad, Khordad, and Amerdad.

The fourth, the Holy SAPANDOMAD, created the first man  and woman.

Then ORMUZD created 28 Izeds, of whom MITHRAS is the  chief. They watch, with Ormuzd and the Amshaspands, over  the happiness, purity, and preservation of the world, which is  under their government; and they are also models for mankind  and interpreters of men's prayers. With Mithras and Ormuzd,  they make a pleroma [or complete number] of 30,  corresponding to the thirty Aions of the Gnostics, and to the  ogdoade, do decade, and decade of the Egyptians. Mithras  was the Sun-God, invoked with, and soon confounded with  him, becoming the object of a special worship, and eclipsing

Ormuzd himself.

The third order of pure spirits is more numerous. They are the 
Ferouers, the THOUGHTS of Ormuzd, or the IDEAS which  he conceived before proceeding to the creation of things.

They too are superior to men. They protect them during their  life on earth; they will purify them from evil at their  resurrection. They are their tutelary genii, from the fall to the  complete regeneration.

AHRIMAN, second-bom of the Primitive Light, emanated  from it, pure like ORMUZD; but, proud and ambitious,  yielded to jealousy of the First-bom. For his hatred and pride,  the Eternal condemned him to dwell, for 12,000 years, in that  part of space where no ray of light reaches; the black empire  of darkness. In that period the stmggle between Light and 
Darkness, Good and Evil, will be terminated.

AHRIMAN scorned to submit, and took the field against 
ORMUZD. To the good spirits created by his Brother, he  opposed an innumerable army of Evil Ones. To the seven 
Amshaspands he opposed seven Archdevs, attached to the  seven Planets; to the Izeds and Ferouers an equal number of 
Devs, which brought upon the world all moral and physical  evils. Hence Poverty, Maladies, Impurity, Envy, Chagrin, 
Drunkenness, Falsehood, Calumny, and their horrible array.

The image of Ahriman was the Dragon, confounded by the  p. 258

[paragraph continues] Jews with Satan and the Serpent-Tempter. After  a reign of 3000 years, Ormuzd had created the Material 
World, in six periods, calling successively into existence the 
Light, Water, Earth, plants, animals, and Man. But Ahriman  concurred in creating the earth and water; for darkness was  already an element, and Ormuzd could not exclude its Master. 
So also the two concurred in producing Man. Ormuzd  produced, by his Will and Word, a Being that was the type  and source of universal life for everything that exists under 
Heaven. He placed in man a pure principle, or Life,  proceeding from the Supreme Being. But Ahriman destroyed  that pure principle, in the fonn wherewith it was clothed; and  when Ormuzd had made, of its recovered and purified  essence, the first man and woman, Ahriman seduced and  tempted them with wine and fruits; the woman yielding first.

Often, during the three latter periods of 3000 years each, 
Ahriman and Darkness are, and are to be, triumphant. But the  pure souls are assisted by the Good Spirits; the Triumph of 
Good is decreed by the Supreme Being, and the period of that  triumph will infallibly arrive. When the world shall be most  afflicted with the evils poured out upon it by the spirits of  perdition, three Prophets will come to bring relief to mortals. 
SOSIOSCH, the principal of the Three, will regenerate the  earth, and restore to it its primitive beauty, strength, and  purity. He will judge the good and the wicked. After the  universal resurrection of the good, he will conduct them to a  home of everlasting happiness. Ahriman, his evil demons, and  all wicked men, will also be purified in a torrent of melted  metal. The law of Ormuzd will reign everywhere; all men will  be happy; all, enjoying unalterable bliss, will sing with 
Sosiosch the praises of the Supreme Being.

These doctrines, the details of which were sparingly borrowed  by the Pharisaic Jews, were much more fully adopted by the 
Gnostics; who taught the restoration of all things, their return  to their original pure condition, the happiness of those to be  saved, and their admission to the feast of Heavenly Wisdom.

The doctrines of Zoroaster came originally from Bactria, an 
Indian Province of Persia. Naturally, therefore, it would  include Hindu or Buddhist elements, as it did. The  fundamental idea of Buddhism was, matter subjugating the  intelligence, and intelligence freeing itself from that slavery. 
Perhaps something came to Gnosticism from China. "Before  the chaos which preceded  p. 259  the birth of Heaven and Earth," says Lao-Tseu, "a single 
Being existed, immense and silent, immovable and ever  active—the mother of the Universe. I know not its name: but I  designate it by the word Reason. Man has his type and model  in the Earth; Earth in Heaven; Heaven in Reason; and Reason  in Itself." Here again are the Ferouers, the Ideas, the Aions the 
REASON or INTELLIGENCE [Ewoux], SILENCE [Iiyrj], 
WORD [Aoyoi;], and WISDOM [Xotpiu] of the Gnostics.

The dominant system among the Jews after their captivity was  that of the Pharoschim or Pharisees. Whether their name was  derived from that of the Parsees, or followers of Zoroaster, or  from some other source, it is certain that they had borrowed  much of their doctrine from the Persians. Like them they  claimed to have the exclusive and mysterious knowledge,  unknown to the mass. Like them they taught that a constant  war was waged between the Empire of Good and that of Evil. 
Like them they attributed the sin and fall of man to the  demons and their chief; and like them they admitted a special  protection of the righteous by inferior beings, agents of 
Jehovah. All their doctrines on these subjects were at bottom  those of the Holy Books; but singularly developed; and the 
Orient was evidently the source from which those  developments came.

They styled themselves Interpreters', a name indicating their  claim to the exclusive possession of the true meaning of the 
Holy Writings, by virtue of the oral tradition which Moses  had received on Mount Sinai, and which successive  generations of Initiates had transmitted, as they claimed,  unaltered, unto them. Their very costume, their belief in the  influences of the stars, and in the immortality and  transmigration of souls, their system of angels and their  astronomy, were all foreign.

Sadduceeism arose merely from an opposition essentially 
Jewish, to these foreign teachings, and that mixture of  doctrines, adopted by the Pharisees, and which constituted the  popular creed.

We come at last to the Essenes and Therapeuts , with whom  this Degree is particularly concerned. That intermingling of  oriental and occidental rites, of Persian and Pythagorean  opinions, which we have pointed out in the doctrines of Philo,  is unmistakable in the creeds of these two sects.

They were less distinguished by metaphysical speculations  than by simple meditations and moral practices. But the latter  always  p. 260  partook of the Zoroastrian principle, that it was necessary to  free the soul from the trammels and influences of matter;  which led to a system of abstinence and maceration entirely  opposed to the ancient Hebraieideas. favorable as they were  to physical pleasures.

In general, the life and manners of these mystical  associations, as Philo and Josephus describe them, and  particularly their prayers at sunrise, seem the image of what  the Zend-Avesta prescribes to the faithful adorer or Ormuzd;  and some of their observances cannot otherwise be explained.

The Therapeuts resided in Egypt, in the neighborhood of 
Alexandria; and the Essenes in Palestine, in the vicinity of the 
Dead Sea. But there was nevertheless a striking coincidence  in their ideas, readily explained by attributing it to a foreign  influence. The Jews of Egypt, under the influence of the 
School of Alexandria, endeavored in general to make their  doctrines harmonize with the traditions of Greece; and thence  came, in the doctrines of the Therapeuts, as stated by Philo,  the many analogies between the Pythagorean and Orphic  ideas, on one side, and those of Judaism on the other: while  the Jews of Palestine, having less communication with 
Greece, or contemning its teachings, rather imbibed the 
Oriental doctrines, which they drank in at the source and with  which their relations with Persia made them familiar. This  attachment was particularly shown in the Kabalah, which  belonged rather to Palestine than to Egypt, though extensively  known in the latter; and furnished the Gnostics with some of  their most striking theories.

It is a significant fact, that while Christ spoke often of the 
Pharisees and Sadducees, He never once mentioned the 
Essenes, between whose doctrines and His there was so great  a resemblance, and, in many points, so perfect an identity. 
Indeed, they are not named, nor even distinctly alluded to,  anywhere in the New Testament.

John, the son of a Priest who ministered in the Temple at 
Jerusalem, and whose mother was of the family of Aharun,  was in the deserts until the day of his showing unto Israel. He  drank neither wine nor strong drink. Clad in hair-cloth, and  with a girdle of leather, and feeding upon such food as the  desert afforded, he preached, in the country about Jordan, the  baptism of repentance, for the remission of sins; that is, the  necessity of repentance proven by reformation. He taught the  people charity and  p. 261  liberality; the publicans, justice, equity, and fair dealing; the  soldiery, peace, truth, and contentment; to do violence to  none, accuse none falsely, and be content with their pay. He  inculcated the necessity of a virtuous life, and the folly of  trusting to their descent from Abraham.

He denounced both Pharisees and Sadducees as a generation  of vipers, threatened with the anger of God. He baptized those  who confessed their sins. He preached in the desert; and  therefore in the country where the Essenes lived, professing  the same doctrines. He was imprisoned before Christ began to  preach. Matthew mentions him without preface or  explanation; as if, apparently, his history was too well known  to need any. "In those days," he says, "came John the Baptist,  preaching in the wilderness of Judea." His disciples frequently  fasted; for we find them with the Pharisees coming to Jesus to  inquire why His Disciples did not fast as often as they; and He  did not denounce them, as His habit was to denounce the 
Pharisees; but answered them kindly and gently.

From his prison, John sent two of his disciples to inquire of 
Christ: "Art thou he that is to come, or do we look for  another?" Christ referred them to his miracles as an answer;  and declared to the people that John was a prophet, and more  than a prophet, and that no greater man had ever been bom;  but that the humblest Christian was his superior. He declared  him to be Elias, who was to come.

John had denounced to Herod his marriage with his brother's  wife as unlawful; and for this he was imprisoned, and finally  executed to gratify her. His disciples buried him; and Herod  and others thought he had risen from the dead and appeared  again in the person of Christ. The people all regarded John as  a prophet; and Christ silenced the Priests and Elders by asking  them whether he was inspired. They feared to excite the anger  of the people by saying that he was not. Christ declared that  he came "in the way of righteousness"; and that the lower  classes believed him, though the Priests and Pharisees did not.

Thus John, who was often consulted by Herod, and to whom  that monarch showed great deference, and was often governed  by his advice; whose doctrine prevailed very extensively  among the people and the publicans, taught some creed older  than Christianity. That is plain: and it is equally plain, that the  very large  p. 262  body of the Jews that adopted his doctrines, were neither 
Pharisees nor Sadducees, but the humble, common people. 
They must, therefore, have been Essenes. It is plain, too, that 
Christ applied for baptism as a sacred rite, well known and  long practiced. It was becoming to him, he said, to fulfill all  righteousness.

In the 18th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read thus: 
"And a certain Jew, named Apollos, bom at Alexandria, an  eloquent man, and mighty in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus.

This man was instructed in the way of the Lord, and, being  fervent in spirit, he spake and taught diligently the things of  the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John ; and he began to  speak boldly in the synagogue; whom, when Aquilla and 
Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded  unto him the way of God more perfectly."

Translating this from the symbolic and figurative language  into the true ordinary sense of the Greek text, it reads thus: 
"And a certain Jew, named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth,  an eloquent man, and of extensive learning, came to Ephesus. 
He had learned in the mysteries the true doctrine in regard to 
God; and, being a zealous enthusiast, he spoke and taught  diligently the truths in regard to the Deity, having received no  other baptism than that of John." He knew nothing in regard  to Christianity; for he had resided in Alexandria, and had just  then come to Ephesus; being, probably, a disciple of Philo,  and a Therapeut.

"That, in all times," says St. Augustine, "is the Christian  religion, which to know and follow is the most sure and  certain health, called according to that name, but not  according to the thing itself, of which it is the name; for the  thing itself, which is now called the Christian religion, really  was known to the Ancients, nor was wanting at any time from  the beginning of the human race, until the time when Christ  came in the flesh; from whence the true religion, which had  previously existed, began to be called Christian; and this in  our days is the Christian religion, not as having been wanting  in former times, but as having, in later times, received this  name." The disciples were fust called "Christians," at 
Antioch, when Barnabas and Paul began to preach there.

The Wandering or Itinerant Jews or Exorcists, who assumed  to employ the Sacred Name in exorcising evil spirits, were no  doubt Therapeutic or Essenes,  p. 263

"And it came to pass," we read in the 19th chapter of the Acts,  verses 1 to 4, "that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having  passed through the upper parts of Asia Minor, came to 
Ephesus; and finding certain disciples, he said to them, 'Have  ye received the Holy Ghost since ye became Believers?' And  they said unto him, 'We have not so much as heard that there  is any Holy Ghost.' And he said to them, 'In what, then, were  you baptized?' And they said 'In John's baptism.' Then said 
Paul, 'John indeed baptized with the baptism of repentance,  saying to the people that they should believe in Him who was  to come after him, that is, in Jesus Christ. When they heard  this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus."

This faith, taught by John, and so nearly Christianity, could  have been nothing but the doctrine of the Essenes; and there  can be no doubt that John belonged to that sect. The place  where he preached, his macerations and frugal diet, the  doctrines he taught, all prove it conclusively. There was no  other sect to which he could have belonged; certainly none so  numerous as his, except the Essenes.

We find, from the two letters written by Paul to the brethren  at Corinth, that City of Luxury and Conniption, that there  were contentions among them. Rival sects had already, about  the 57th year of our era, reared their banners there, as  followers, some of Paul, some of Apollos, and some of 
Cephas. Some of them denied the resurrection. Paul urged  them to adhere to the doctrines taught by himself, and had  sent Timothy to them to bring them afresh to their  recollection.

According to Paul, Christ was to come again. He was to put  an end to all other Principalities and Powers, and finally to 
Death, and then be Himself once more merged in God; who  should then be all in all.

The forms and ceremonies of the Essenes were symbolical. 
They had, according to Philo the Jew, four Degrees; the  members being divided into two Orders, the Practici and 
Therapeutici; the latter being the contemplative and medical 
Brethren; and the former the active, practical, business men. 
They were Jews by birth; and had a greater affection for each  other than the members of any other sect. Their brotherly love  was intense. They fulfilled the Christian law, "Love one  another." They despised riches. No one was to be found  among them, having more than  p. 264  another. The possessions of one were intermingled with those  of the others; so that they all had but one patrimony, and were  brethren. Their piety toward God was extraordinary. Before  sunrise they never spake a word about profane matters; but  put up certain prayers which they had received from their  forefathers. At dawn of day, and before it was light, their  prayers and hymns ascended to Heaven. They were eminently  faithful and true, and the Ministers of Peace. They had  mysterious ceremonies, and initiations into their mysteries;  and the Candidate promised that he would ever practise  fidelity to all men, and especially to those in authority, 
"because no one obtains the government without God's  assistance."

Whatever they said, was firmer than an oath; but they avoided  swearing, and esteemed it worse than perjury. They were  simple in their diet and mode of living, bore torture with  fortitude, and despised death. They cultivated the science of  medicine and were very skillful. They deemed it a good omen  to dress in white robes. They had their own courts, and passed  righteous judgments. They kept the Sabbath more rigorously  than the Jews.

Their chief towns were Engaddi, near the Dead Sea, and 
Hebron. Engaddi was about 30 miles southeast from 
Jerusalem, and Hebron about 20 miles south of that city. 
Josephus and Eusebius speak of them as an ancient sect; and  they were no doubt the first among the Jews to embrace 
Christianity: with whose faith and doctrine their own tenets  had so many points of resemblance, and were indeed in a  great measure the same. Pliny regarded them as a very ancient  people.

In their devotions they turned toward the rising sun; as the 
Jews generally did toward the Temple. But they were no  idolaters; for they observed the law of Moses with scrupulous  fidelity. They held all things in common, and despised riches,  their wants being supplied by the administration of Curators  or Stewards. The Tetractys, composed of round dots instead  of jods, was revered among them. This being a Pythagorean  symbol, evidently shows their connection with the school of 
Pythagoras; but their peculiar tenets more resemble those of 
Confucius and Zoroaster; and probably were adopted while  they were prisoners in Persia; which explains their turning  toward the Sun in prayer.

Their demeanor was sober and chaste. They submitted to the  superintendence of governors whom they appointed over  themselves.  p. 265

[paragraph continues] The whole of their time was spent in labor,  meditation, and prayer; and they were most sedulously  attentive to every call of justice and humanity, and every  moral duty. They believed in the unity of God. They supposed  the souls of men to have fallen, by a disastrous fate, from the  regions of purity and light, into the bodies which they occupy;  during their continuance in which they considered them  confined as in a prison. Therefore they did not believe in the  resurrection of the body; but in that of the soul only. They  believed in a future state of rewards and punishments; and  they disregarded the ceremonies or external forms enjoined in  the law of Moses to be observed in the worship of God;  holding that the words of that lawgiver were to be understood  in a mysterious and recondite sense, and not according to their  literal meaning. They offered no sacrifices, except at home;  and by meditation they endeavored, as far as possible, to  isolate the soul from the body, and carry it back to God.

Eusebius broadly admits "that the ancient Therapeutas were 
Christians; and that their ancient writings were our Gospels  and Epistles."

The ESSENES were of the Eclectic Sect of Philosophers, and  held PLATO in the highest esteem; they believed that true  philosophy, the greatest and most salutary gift of God to  mortals, was scattered, in various portions, through all the  different Sects; and that it was, consequently, the duty of  every wise man to gather it from the several quarters where it  lay dispersed, and to employ it, thus reunited, in destroying  the dominion of impiety and vice.

The great festivals of the Solstices were observed in a  distinguished manner by the Essenes; as would naturally be  supposed, from the fact that they reverenced the Sun, not as a  god, but as a symbol of light and fire; the fountain of which,  the Orientals supposed God to be. They lived in continence  and abstinence, and had establishments similar to the  monasteries of the early Christians.

The writings of the Essenes were full of mysticism, parables,  enigmas, and allegories. They believed in the esoteric and  exoteric meanings of the Scriptures; and, as we have already  said, they had a warrant for That in the Scriptures themselves. 
They found it in the Old Testament, as the Gnostics found it  in the New. The Christian writers, and even Christ himself,  recognized it as a  p. 266  truth, that all Scripture had an inner and an outer meaning. 
Thus we find it said as follows, in one of the Gospels:

"Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of 
God; but unto men that are without, all these things are done  in parables; that seeing, they may see and not perceive, and  hearing they may hear and not understand.. .. And the  disciples came and said unto him, 'Why speakest Thou the  truth in parables?'—He answered and said unto them, 'Because  it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of 
Heaven, but to them it is not given.'"

Paul, in the 4th chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians,  speaking of the simplest facts of the Old Testament, asserts  that they are an allegory. In the 3d chapter of the second letter  to the Corinthians, he declares himself a minister of the New 
Testament, appointed by God; "Not of the letter, but of the  spirit; for the letter killeth." Origen and St. Gregory held that  the Gospels were not to be taken in their literal sense; and 
Athanasius admonishes us that "Should we understand sacred  writ according to the letter, we should fall into the most  enormous blasphemies."

Eusebius said, "Those who preside over the Holy Scriptures,  philosophize over them, and expound their literal sense by  allegory."

The sources of our knowledge of the Kabalistic doctrines, are  the books of Jezirah and Sohar, the former drawn up in the  second century, and the latter a little later; but containing  materials much older than themselves. In their most  characteristic elements, they go back to the time of the exile. 
In them, as in the teachings of Zoroaster, everything that  exists emanated from a source of infinite LIGHT. Before  everything, existed THE ANCIENT OF DAYS, the KING OF 
LIGHT; a title often given to the Creator in the Zend-Avesta  and the code of the Sabceans. With the idea so expressed is  connected the pantheism of India. THE KING OR LIGHT, 
THE ANCIENT, is ALL THAT IS. He is not only the real  cause of all Existences; he is Infinite [AINSOPH], He is 
HIMSELF: there is nothing in Him that We can call Thou.

In the Indian doctrine, not only is the Supreme Being the real  cause of all, but he is the only real Existence: all the rest is  illusion. In the Kabalah, as in the Persian and Gnostic  doctrines, He is the Supreme Being unknown to all, the 
"Unknown Father." The world is his revelation, and subsists  only in Him. His attributes  p. 267  are reproduced there, with different modifications, and in  different degrees, so that the Universe is His Holy Splendor: it  is but His Mantle; but it must be revered in silence. All beings  have emanated from the Supreme Being: The nearer a being is  to Him, the more perfect it is; the more remote in the scale,  the less its purity.

A ray of Light, shot from the Deity, is the cause and principle  of all that exists. It is at once Father and Mother of All, in the  sublimest sense. It penetrates everything; and without it  nothing can exist an instant. From this double FORCE,  designated by the two parts of the word I-'-H-'-U-'-H-'.  emanated the FIRST-BORN of God, the Universal FORM, in  which are contained all beings; the Persian and Platonic 
Archetype of things, united with the Infinite by the primitive  ray of Light.

This First-Born is the Creative Agent, Conservator, and  animating Principle of the Universe. It is THE LIGHT of 
LIGHT. It possesses the three Primitive Forces of the 
Divinity, LIGHT, SPIRIT, and LIFE [ Oo'jc, I Iveupa, and 
Zcov]. As it has received what it gives, Light and Life, it is  equally considered as the generative and conceptive Principle,  the Primitive Man, ADAM KADMON. As such, it has  revealed itself in ten emanations or Sephiroth, which are not  ten different beings, nor even beings at all; but sources of life,  vessels of Omnipotence, and types of Creation. They are 
Sovereignty or Will, Wisdom, Intelligence, Benignity, Severity, 
Beauty, Victory, Glory, Permanency, and Empire. These are  attributes of God; and this idea, that God reveals Himself by 
His attributes, and that the human mind cannot perceive or  discern God Himself, in his works, but only his mode of  manifesting Himself, is a profound Truth. We know of the 
Invisible only what the Visible reveals.

Wisdom was called NOUS and LOGOS [and Nou<; Aoyo<;], 
INTELLECT or the WORD. Intelligence, source of the oil of  anointing, responds to the Holy Ghost of the Christian Faith.

Beauty is represented by green and yellow. Victory is 
YAHOVAH-TSABAOTH, the column on the right hand, the  column Jackin'. Glory is the column Boaz, on the left hand. 
And thus our symbols appear again in the Kabalah. And again  the LIGHT, the object of our labors, appears as the creative  power of Deity. The circle, also, was the special symbol of the  first Sephirah, Kether, or the Crown,  p. 268

We do not further follow the Kabalah in its four Worlds of 
Spirits, Aziluth, Briah, Yezirah, and Asiah, or of emanation,  creation, formation, and fabrication, one inferior to and one  emerging from the other, the superior always enveloping the  inferior; its doctrine that, in all that exists, there is nothing  purely material; that all comes from God, and in all He  proceeds by irradiation; that everything subsists by the Divine  ray that penetrates creation; and all is united by the Spirit of 
God, which is the life of life; so that all is God; the Existences  that inhabit the four worlds, inferior to each other in  proportion to their distance from the Great King of Light: the  contest between the good and evil Angels and Principles, to  endure until the Eternal Himself cones to end it and re¬  establish the primitive harmony; the four distinct parts of the 
Soul of Man; and the migrations of impure souls, until they  are sufficiently purified to share with the Spirits of Light the  contemplation of the Supreme Being whose Splendor fills the 
Universe.

The WORD was also found in the Phoenician Creed. As in all  those of Asia, a WORD of God, written in starry characters,  by the planetary Divinities, and communicated by the Demi- 
Gods, as a profound mystery, to the higher classes of the  human race, to be communicated by them to mankind, created  the world. The faith of the Phoenicians was an emanation from  that ancient worship of the Stars, which in the creed of 
Zoroaster alone, is connected with a faith in one God. Light  and Fire are the most important agents in the Phoenician faith. 
There is a race of children of the Light. They adored the 
Heaven with its Lights, deeming it the Supreme God.

Everything emanates from a Single Principle, and a Primitive 
Love, which is the Moving Power of All and governs all. 
Light, by its union with Spirit, whereof it is but the vehicle or  symbol, is the Life of everything, and penetrates everything. It  should therefore be respected and honored everywhere; for  everywhere it governs and controls.

The Chaldaic and Jerusalem Paraphrasts endeavored to render  the phrase, DEBAR-YAHOVAH [mm mi], the Word of God,  a personality , wherever they met with it. The phrase, "And 
God created man," is, in the Jerusalem Targum, "And the 
Word of IHUH created man."

So, in xxviii. Gen. 20, 21, where Jacob says: "If God [mm  crrfrN  p. 269

[paragraph continues] IHIH ALHIM] will be with me ... then shall 
IHUH be my ALHIM ’*? mm mm, UHIH IHUH LI

LALHIM]; and this stone shall be God's House [am^N mn mm 
, IHUH BITH ALHIM]: Onkelos paraphrases it, "If the word  of IHUH will be my help .... then the word of IHUH shall be  my God."

So, in iii. Gen. 8, for "The Voice of the Lord God" [nvfts mm 
IHUH ALHIM], we have, "The Voice of the Word of IHUH."

In ix. Wisdom, 1, "O God of my Fathers and Lord of Mercy!  who has made all things with thy word, ev Xoyov oou."

And in xviii. Wisdom, 15, "Thine Almighty Word [Aoyoc]  leaped down from Heaven."

Philo speaks of the Word as being the same with God. So in  several places he calls it "5euxepo<; Qeioc Aoyoc" the Second 
Divinity; "ekurv xou ©sou," the Image of God: the Divine

Word that made all things: "the ujrapxoi;" substitute, of God;  and the like.

Thus, when John commenced to preach, had been for ages  agitated, by the Priests and Philosophers of the East and West,  the great questions concerning the eternity or creation of  matter: immediate or intermediate creation of the Universe by  the Supreme God; the origin, object, and final extinction of  evil; the relations between the intellectual and material  worlds, and between God and man; and the creation, fall,  redemption, and restoration to his first estate, of man.

The Jewish doctrine, differing in this from all the other 
Oriental creeds, and even from the Alohayistic legend with  which the book of Genesis commences, attributed the creation  to the immediate action of the Supreme Being. The 
Theosophists of the other Eastern Peoples interposed more  than one intermediary between God and the world. To place  between them but a single Being, to suppose for the  production of the world but a single intermediary, was, in  their eyes, to lower the Supreme Majesty. The interval  between God, who is perfect Purity, and matter, which is base  and foul, was too great for them to clear it at a single step. 
Even in the Occident, neither Plato nor Philo could thus  impoverish the Intellectual World.

Thus, Cerinthus of Ephesus, with most of the Gnostics, Philo,  the Kabalah, the Zend-Avesta, the Puranas, and all the Orient,  deemed the distance and antipathy between the Supreme

Being and the material world too great, to attribute to the  former the creation of the latter. Below, and emanating from,  or created  p. 270  by, the Ancient of Days, the Central Light, the Beginning, or 
First Principle [Apxij], one, two, or more Principles, 
Existences, or Intellectual Beings were imagined, to some one  or more of whom [without any immediate creative act on the  part of the Great Immovable, Silent Deity], the immediate  creation of the material and mental universe was due.

We have already spoken of many of the speculations on this  point. To some, the world was created by the LOGOS or 
WORD, first manifestation of, or emanation from, the Deity. 
To others, the beginning of creation was by the emanation of  a ray of LIGHT, creating the principle of Light and Life. The 
Primitive THOUGHT, creating the inferior Deities, a  succession of INTELLIGENCES, the Iynges of Zoroaster, his 
Amshaspands , Izeds, and Ferouers, the Ideas of Plato, the 
A ions of the Gnostics, the Angels of the Jews, the Nous, the 
Demiourgos, the DIVINE REASON, the Powers or Forces of 
Philo, and the Alohayim, Forces or Superior Gods of the  ancient legend with which Genesis begins; to these and other  intermediaries the creation was owing. No restraints were laid  on the Fancy and the Imagination. The veriest Abstractions  became Existences and Realities. The attributes of God,  personified, became Powers, Spirits, Intelligences.

God was the Light of Light, Divine Fire, the Abstract 
Intellectuality, the Root or Germ of the Universe. Simon 
Magus, founder of the Gnostic faith, and many of the early 
Judaizing Christians, admitted that the manifestations of the 
Supreme Being, as FATHER, or JEHOVAH, SON or 
CHRIST, and HOLY SPIRIT, were only so many different  modes of Existence, or Forces [Snvapsn;] of the same God.

To others they were, as were the multitude of Subordinate 
Intelligences, real and distinct beings.

The Oriental imagination revelled in the creation of these 
Inferior Intelligences, Powers of Good and Evil, and Angels. 
We have spoken of those imagined by the Persians and the 
Kabalists. In the Talmud, every star, every country, every  town, and almost every tongue has a Prince of Heaven as its 
Protector. JEHUEL is the guardian of fire, and MICHAEL, of  water. Seven spirits assist each; those of fire being Seraphiel, 
Gabriel, Nitriel, Tammael, Tchimschiel, Hadarniel, and 
Sarniel. These seven are represented by the square columns of  this Degree, while the columns JACHIN and BOAZ represent  the angels of fire and water. But the columns are not  representatives of these alone.  p. 271

To Basilides, God was without name, uncreated, at first  containing and concealing in Himself the Plenitude of His 
Perfections; and when these are by Him displayed and  manifested, there result as many particular Existences, all  analogous to Him, and still and always Him. To the Essenes  and the Gnostics, the East and the West both devised this  faith; that the Ideas, Conceptions, or Manifestations of the 
Deity were so many Creations, so many Beings, all God,  nothing without Him, but more than what we now understand  by the word ideas. They emanated from and were again  merged in God. They had a kind of middle existence between  our modem ideas, and the intelligences or ideas, elevated to  the rank of genii, of the Oriental mythology.

These personified attributes of Deity, in the theory of 
Basilides, were the npcox6yovo<; or First-born, NoOi; [Nous or 
Mind]: from it emanates Aoyog [Logos, or THE WORD] from  it ct>p6vr|Gi<;: [Phronesis, Intellect ]: from it Eoipia [ Sophia, 
Wisdom ]: from it Auvapn; [Dunamis, Power]: and from it 
AiKaioouvr) [ Dikaiosune, Righteousness]: to which latter the 
Jews gave the name of Eipiyvri [Eirene, Peace, or Calm], the  essential characteristics of Divinity, and harmonious effect of  all His perfections. The whole number of successive  emanations was 365, expressed by the Gnostics, in Greek  letters, by the mystic word ABPA5AS [Abraxas]: designating 
God as manifested, or the aggregate of his manifestations; but  not the Supreme and Secret God Himself. These three  hundred and sixty-five Intelligences compose altogether the 
Fullness or Plenitude [niqpcopa] of the Divine Emanations.

With the Ophites, a sect of the Gnostics, there were seven  inferior spirits [inferior to Ialdabaoth, the Demiourgos or 
Actual Creator]: Michael, Suriel, Raphael, Gabriel, 
Thauthabaoth, Erataoth, and Athaniel, the genii of the stars  called the Bull, the Dog, the Lion, the Bear, the Serpent, the 
Eagle, and the Ass that formerly figured in the constellation 
Cancer, and symbolized respectively by those animals; as 
Ialdabaoth, Iao, Adonai, Elo'i, Oral, and Astaphai were the  genii of Saturn, the Moon, the Sun, Jupiter, Venus, and 
Mercury.

The WORD appears in all these creeds. It is the Ormuzd of 
Zoroaster, the Ainsoph of the Kabalah, the Nous of Platonism  and Philonism, and the Sophia or Demiourgos of the 
Gnostics.

And all these creeds, while admitting these different  manifestations of the Supreme Being, held that His identity  was immutable  p. 272  and permanent. That was Plato's distinction between the 
Being always the same [to ov] and the perpetual flow of  things incessantly changing, the Genesis.

The belief in dualism in some shape, was universal. Those  who held that everything emanated from God, aspired to God,  and re-entered into God, believed that, among those  emanations were two adverse Principles, of Light and 
Darkness, Good and Evil. This prevailed in Central Asia and  in Syria; while in Egypt it assumed the form of Greek  speculation. In the former, a second Intellectual Principle was  admitted, active in its Empire of Darkness, audacious against  the Empire of Light. So the Persians and Sabeans understood  it. In Egypt, this second Principle was Matter, as the word was  used by the Platonic School, with its sad attributes, Vacuity, 
Darkness, and Death. In their theory, matter could be  animated only by the low communication of a principle of  divine life. It resists the influences that would spiritualize it. 
That resisting Power is Satan, the rebellious Matter, Matter  that does not partake of God.

To many there were two Principles; the Unknown Father, or 
Supreme and Eternal God, living in the centre of the Light,  happy in the perfect purity of His being; the other, eternal 
Matter, that inert, shapeless, darksome mass, which they  considered as the source of all evils, the mother and dwelling-  place of Satan.

To Philo and the Platonists, there was a Soul of the world,  creating visible things, and active in them, as agent of the 
Supreme Intelligence; realizing therein the ideas  communicated to Him by that Intelligence, and which  sometimes excel His conceptions, but which He executes  without comprehending them.

The Apocalypse or Revelations, by whomever written,  belongs to the Orient and to extreme antiquity. It reproduces  what is far older than itself. It paints, with the strongest colors  that the Oriental genius ever employed, the closing scenes of  the great struggle of Light, and Truth, and Good, against 
Darkness, Error, and Evil; personified in that between the

New Religion on one side, and Paganism and Judaism on the  other. It is a particular application of the ancient myth of 
Ormuzd and his Genii against Ahriman and his Devs; and it  celebrates the final triumph of Truth against the combined  powers of men and demons. The ideas and imagery are  borrowed from every quarter; and allusions are found in it to  the doctrines of all ages. We are continually reminded  p. 273  of the Zend-Avesta, the Jewish Codes, Philo, and the Gnosis. 
The Seven Spirits surrounding the Throne of the Eternal, at  the opening of the Grand Drama, and acting so important a  part throughout, everywhere the fu st instruments of the 
Divine Will and Vengeance, are the Seven Amshaspands of 
Parsism; as the Twenty-four Ancients, offering to the 
Supreme Being the first supplications and the first homage,  remind us of the Mysterious Chiefs of Judaism, foreshadow  the Eons of Gnosticism, and re-produce the twenty-four Good 
Spirits created by Ormuzd and inclosed in an egg.

The Christ of the Apocalypse, First-bom of Creation and of  the Resurrection, is invested with the characteristics of the 
Ormuzd and Sosiosch of the Zend-Avesta, the Ainsoph of the 
Kabalah and the Carpistes [KupTnoipc] of the Gnostics. The  idea that the true Initiates and Faithful become Kings and 
Priests, is at once Persian, Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic.

And the definition of the Supreme Being, that He is at once 
Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end—He that was,  and is, and is to come, i.e., Time illimitable, is Zoroaster's  definition of Zerouane-Akherene.

The depths of Satan which no man can measure; his triumph  for a time by fraud and violence; his being chained by an  angel; his reprobation and his precipitation into a sea of metal;  his names of the Serpent and the Dragon; the whole conflict  of the Good Spirits or celestial annies against the bad; are so  many ideas and designations found alike in the Zend-Avesta,  the Kabalah, and the Gnosis.

We even find in the Apocalypse that singular Persian idea,  which regards some of the lower animals as so many Devs or  vehicles of Devs.

The guardianship of the earth by a good angel, the renewing  of the earth and heavens, and the final triumph of pure and  holy men, are the same victory of Good over Evil, for which  the whole Orient looked.

The gold, and white raiments of the twenty-four Elders are, as  in the Persian faith, the signs of a lofty perfection and divine  purity.

Thus the Human mind labored and struggled and tortured  itself for ages, to explain to itself what it felt, without  confessing it, to be inexplicable. A vast crowd of indistinct  abstractions, hovering  p. 274  in the imagination, a train of words embodying no tangible  meaning, an inextricable labyrinth of subtleties, was the  result.

But one grand idea ever emerged and stood prominent and  unchangeable over the weltering chaos of confusion. God is  great, and good, and wise. Evil and pain and sorrow are  temporary, and for wise and beneficent purposes. They must  be consistent with God's goodness, purity, and infinite  perfection; and there must be a mode of explaining them, if  we could but find it out; as, in all ways we will endeavor to  do. Ultimately, Good will prevail, and Evil be overthrown. 
God alone can do this, and He will do it, by an Emanation  from Himself, assuming the Human form and redeeming the  world.

Behold the object, the end, the result, of the great speculations  and logomachies of antiquity; the ultimate annihilation of  evil, and restoration of Man to his first estate, by a Redeemer,  a Masayah, a Christos, the incarnate Word, Reason, or Power  of Deity.

This Redeemer is the Word or Logos, the Ormuzd of 
Zoroaster, the Ainsoph of the Kabalah, the Nous of Platonism  and Philonism; He that was in the Beginning with God, and  was God, and by Whom everything was made. That He was  looked for by all the People of the East is abundantly shown  by the Gospel of John and the Letters of Paul; wherein  scarcely anything seemed necessary to be said in proof that  such a Redeemer was to come; but all the energies of the  writers are devoted to showing that Jesus was that Christos  whom all the nations were expecting; the "Word," the 
Masayah, the Anointed or Consecrated One.

In this Degree the great contest between good and evil, in  anticipation of the appearance and advent of the Word or 
Redeemer is symbolized; and the mysterious esoteric  teachings of the Essenes and the Cabalists. Of the practices of  the former we gain but glimpses in the ancient writers; but we  know that, as their doctrines were taught by John the Baptist,  they greatly resembled those of greater purity and more nearly  perfect, taught by Jesus; and that not only Palestine was full  of John's disciples, so that the Priests and Pharisees did not  dare to deny John's inspiration; but his doctrine had extended  to Asia Minor, and had made converts in luxurious Ephesus,  as it also had in Alexandria in Egypt; and that they readily  embraced the Christian faith, of which they had before not  even heard.

These old controversies have died away, and the old faiths  have  p. 275  faded into oblivion. But Masonry still survives, vigorous and  strong, as when philosophy was taught in the schools of 
Alexandria and under the Portico; teaching the same old  truths as the Essenes taught by the shores of the Dead Sea,  and as John the Baptist preached in the Desert;, truths  imperishable as the Deity, and undeniable as Light. Those  truths were gathered by the Essenes from the doctrines of the 
Orient and the Occident, from the Zend-Avesta and the 
Vedas, from Plato and Pythagoras, from India, Persia, 
Phoenicia, and Syria, from Greece and Egypt, and from the 
Holy Books of the Jews. Hence we are called Knights of the 
East and West, because their doctrines came from both. And  these doctrines, the wheat sifted from the chaff, the Truth  separated from Error, Masonry has garnered up in her heart of  hearts, and through the fires of persecution, and the storms of  calamity, has brought them and delivered them unto us. That 
God is One, immutable, unchangeable, infinitely just and  good; that Light will finally overcome Darkness,—Good  conquer Evil, and Truth be victor over Error;—these, rejecting  all the wild and useless speculations of the Zend-Avesta, the 
Kabalah, the Gnostics, and the Schools, are the religion and 
Philosophy of Masonry.

Those speculations and fancies it is useful to study; that  knowing in what worthless and unfruitful investigations the  mind may engage, you may the more value and appreciate the  plain, simple, sublime, universally-acknowledged truths,  which have in all ages been the Light by which Masons have  been guided on their way; the Wisdom and Strength that like  imperishable columns have sustained and will continue to  sustain its glorious and magnificent Temple.

XVIII. KNIGHT ROSE CROIX.

[Prince Rose Croix.]

EACH of us makes such applications to his own faith and creed, of the  symbols and ceremonies of this Degree, as seems to him proper. With these  special interpretations we have here nothing to do. Like the legend of the 
Master Khurum, in which some see figured the condemnation and sufferings  of Christ; others those of the unfortunate Grand Master of the Templars;  others those of the first Charles, King of England; and others still the annual  descent of the Sun at the winter Solstice to the regions of darkness, the basis  of many an ancient legend; so the ceremonies of this Degree receive different  explanations; each interpreting them for himself, and being offended at the  interpretation of no other.

In no other way could Masonry possess its character of Universality; that  character which has ever been peculiar to it from its origin; and which  enables two Kings, worshippers of different Deities, to sit together as 
Masters, while the walls of the first temple arose; and the men of Gebal,  bowing down to the Phoenician Gods, to work by the side of the Hebrews to  whom those Gods were abomination; and to sit with them in the same Lodge  as brethren.  p. 277

You have already learned that these ceremonies have one general  significance, to every one, of every faith, who believes in God, and the soul's  immortality.

The primitive men met in no Temples made with human hands. "God," said 
Stephen, the first Martyr, "dwelleth not in Temples made with hands." In the  open air, under the overarching mysterious sky, in the great World-Temple,  they uttered their vows and thanksgivings, and adored the God of Light; of  that Light that was to them the type of Good, as darkness was the type of 
Evil.

All antiquity solved the enigma of the existence of Evil, by supposing the  existence of a Principle of Evil, of Demons, fallen Angels, an Ahriman, a 
Typhon, a Siva, a Lok, or a Satan, that, first falling themselves, and plunged  in misery and darkness, tempted man to his fall, and brought sin into the  world. All believed in a future life, to be attained by purification and trials; in  a state or successive states of reward and punishment; and in a Mediator or 
Redeemer, by whom the Evil Principle was to be overcome, and the Supreme 
Deity reconciled to His creatures. The belief was general, that He was to be  bom of a Virgin, and suffer a painful death. The Indians called him Chrishna;  the Chinese, Kioun-tse; the Persians, Sosiosch; the Chaldeans, Dhouvanai;  the Egyptians, Har-Oeri; Plato, Love; and the Scandinavians, Balder.

Chrishna, the Hindoo Redeemer, was cradled and educated among 
Shepherds. A Tyrant, at the time of his birth, ordered all the male children to  be slain. He performed miracles, say his legends, even raising the dead. He  washed the feet of the Brahmins, and was meek and lowly of spirit. He was  bom of a Virgin; descended to Hell, rose again, ascended to Heaven, charged  his disciples to teach his doctrines, and gave them the gift of miracles.

The first Masonic Legislator whose memory is preserved to us by history,  was Buddha, who, about a thousand years before the Christian era, reformed  the religion of Manous. He called to the Priesthood all men, without  distinction of caste, who felt themselves inspired by God to instruct men. 
Those who so associated themselves formed a Society of Prophets under the  name of Samaneans. They recognized the existence of a single uncreated 
God, in whose bosom everything grows, is developed and transformed.  p. 278

[paragraph continues] The worship of this God reposed upon the obedience of all the  beings He created. His feasts were those of the Solstices. The doctrines of 
Buddha pervaded India, China, and Japan. The Priests of Brahma, professing  a dark and bloody creed, brutalized by Superstition, united together against 
Buddhism, and with the aid of Despotism, exterminated its followers. But  their blood fertilized the new doctrine, which produced a new Society under  the name of Gymnosophists; and a large number, fleeing to Ireland, planted  their doctrines there, and there erected the round towers, some of which still  stand, solid and unshaken as at first, visible monuments of the remotest ages.

The Phoenician Cosmogony, like all others in Asia, was the Word of God,  written in astral characters, by the planetary Divinities, and communicated by  the Demi-gods, as a profound mystery, to the brighter intelligences of 
Humanity, to be propagated by them among men. Their doctrines resembled  the Ancient Sabeism, and being the faith of Hiram the King and his namesake  the Artist, are of interest to all Masons. With them, the First Principle was  half material, half spiritual, a dark air, animated and impregnated by the  spirit; and a disordered chaos, covered with thick darkness. From this came  the WORD, and thence creation and generation; and thence a race of men,  children of light, who adored Heaven and its Stars as the Supreme Being; and  whose different gods were but incarnations of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars,  and the Ether. Chrysor was the great igneous power of Nature, and Baal and 
Malakarth representations of the Sun and Moon, the latter word, in Hebrew,  meaning Queen.

Man had fallen, but not by the tempting of the serpent. For, with the 
Phoenicians, the serpent was deemed to partake of the Divine Nature, and was  sacred, as he was in Egypt. He was deemed to be immortal, unless slain by  violence, becoming young again in his old age, by entering into and  consuming himself. Hence the Serpent in a circle, holding his tail in his  mouth, was an emblem of eternity. With the head of a hawk he was of a 
Divine Nature, and a symbol of the sun. Hence one Sect of the Gnostics took  him for their good genius, and hence the brazen serpent reared by Moses in  the Desert, on which the Israelites looked and lived.

"Before the chaos, that preceded the birth of Heaven and Earth," said the 
Chinese Lao-Tseu, "a single Being existed, immense  p. 279  and silent, immutable and always acting; the mother of the Universe. I know  not the name of that Being, but I designate it by the word Reason. Man has  his model in the earth, the earth in Heaven, Heaven in Reason, and Reason in  itself."

"1 am," says Isis, "Nature; parent of all things, the sovereign of the Elements,  the primitive progeny of Time, the most exalted of the Deities, the first of the 
Heavenly Gods and Goddesses, the Queen of the Shades, the uniform  countenance; who dispose with my rod the numerous lights of Heaven, the  salubrious breezes of the sea, and the mournful silence of the dead; whose  single Divinity the whole world venerates in many forms, with various rites  and by many names. The Egyptians, skilled in ancient lore, worship me with  proper ceremonies, and call me by my true name, Isis the Queen."

'The Hindu Vedas thus define the Deity:

"He who surpasses speech, and through whose power speech is expressed,  know thou that He is Brahma; and not these perish-able things that man  adores.

"He whom Intelligence cannot comprehend, and He alone, say the sages,  through whose Power the nature of Intelligence can be understood, know  thou that He is Brahma; and not these perish-able things that man adores.

"He who cannot be seen by the organ of sight, and through whose power the  organ of seeing sees, know thou that He is Brahma; and not these perishable  things that man adores.

"He who cannot be heard by the organ of hearing, and through whose power  the organ of hearing hears, know thou that He is Brahma; and not these  perishable things that man adores.

"He who cannot be perceived by the organ of smelling, and through whose  power the organ of smelling smells, know thou that He is Brahma; and not  these perishable things that man adores."

"When God resolved to create the human race," said Arius , "He made a Being  that He called The WORD, The Son, Wisdom, to the end that this Being  might give existence to men." This WORD is the Onnuzd of Zoroaster, the 
Ainsoph of the Kabalah, the Nou<; of Plato and Philo, the Wisdom or 
Demiourgos of the Gnostics.

That is the True Word, the knowledge of which our ancient brethren sought  as the priceless reward of their labors on the Holy Temple: the Word of Life,  the Divine Reason, "in whom  p. 280  was Life, and that Life the Light of men"; "which long shone in darkness, and  the darkness comprehended it not;" the Infinite Reason that is the Soul of 
Nature, immortal, of which the Word of this Degree reminds us; and to  believe wherein and revere it, is the peculiar duty of every Mason.

"In the beginning," says the extract from some older work, with which John  commences his Gospel, "was the Word, and the Word was near to God, and  the Word was God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not  anything made that was made. In Him was Life, and the life was the Light of  man; and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not contain it."

It is an old tradition that this passage was from an older work. And 
Philostorgius and Nicephorus state, that when the Emperor Julian undertook  to rebuild the Temple, a stone was taken up, that covered the mouth of a deep  square cave, into which one of the laborers, being let down by a rope, found  in the centre of the floor a cubical pillar, on which lay a roll or book, wrapped  in a fine linen cloth, in which, in capital letters, was the foregoing passage.

However this may have been, it is plain that John's Gospel is a polemic  against the Gnostics; and, stating at the outset the current doctrine in regard to  the creation by the Word, he then addresses himself to show and urge that  this Word was Jesus Christ.

And the first sentence, fully-rendered into our language, would read thus: 
"When the process of emanation, of creation or evolution of existences  inferior to the Supreme God began, the Word came into existence and was:  and this word was [xpoq rov ©eov] near to God; i.e. the immediate or first  emanation from God: and it was God Himself, developed or manifested in  that particular mode, and in action. And by that Word everything that is was  created."-And thus Tertullian says that God made the World out of nothing,  by means of His Word, Wisdom, or Power.

To Philo the Jew, as to the Gnostics, the Supreme Being was the Primitive 
Light, or Archetype of Light,—Source whence the rays emanate that illuminate 
Souls. He is the Soul of the World, and as such acts everywhere. He himself  fills and bounds his whole existence, and his forces fill and penetrate  everything. His Image is the WORD [LOGOS], a form more brilliant than  fire, which is not pure light. This WORD dwells in God; for it is within His 
Intelligence that the Supreme Being frames for Himself the  p. 281

[paragraph continues] Types of Ideas of all that is to assume reality in the Universe. 
The WORD is the Vehicle by which God acts on the Universe; the World of 
Ideas by means whereof God has created visible things; the more Ancient 
God, as compared with the Material World; Chief and General Representative  of all Intelligences; the Arch-angel, type and representative of all spirits, even  those of Mortals; the type of Man; the primitive man himself. These ideas are  borrowed from Plato. And this WORD is not only the Creator ["fey Him was  everything made that was made"], but acts in the place of God; and through  him act all the Powers and Attributes of God. And also, as first representative  of the human race, he is the protector of Men and their Shepherd, the "Ben 
H’Adam," or Son of Man.

The actual condition of Man is not his primitive condition, that in which he  was the image of the Word. His unruly passions have caused him to fall from  his original lofty estate. But he may rise again, by following the teachings of 
Heavenly Wisdom, and the Angels whom God commissions to aid him in  escaping from the entanglements of the body; and by fighting bravely against 
Evil, the existence of which God has allowed solely to furnish him with the  means of exercising his free will.

The Supreme Being of the Egyptians was Amun, a secret and concealed God,  the Unknown Father of the Gnostics, the Source of Divine Life, and of all  force, the Plenitude of all, comprehending all things in Himself, the original 
Light. He creates nothing; but everything emanates from Him: and all other 
Gods are but his manifestations. From Him, by the utterance of a Word,  emanated Neith, the Divine Mother of all things, the Primitive THOUGHT,  the FORCE that puts everything in movement, the SPIRIT everywhere  extended, the Deity of Light and Mother of the Sun.

Of this Supreme Being, Osiris was the image, Source of all Good in the  moral and physical world, and constant foe of Typhon, the Genius of Evil, the 
Satan of Gnosticism, brute matter, deemed to be always at feud with the spirit  that flowed from the Deity; and over whom Har-Geri, the Redeemer, Son of 
Isis and Osiris, is finally to prevail.

In the Zend-Avesta of the Persians the Supreme Being is Time without limit , 
ZERUANE AKHERENE.—No origin could be assigned to Him; for He was  enveloped in His own Glory, and  p. 282

His Nature and Attributes were so inaccessible to human Intelligence, that He  was but the object of a silent veneration. The commencement of Creation was  by emanation from Him. The first emanation was the Primitive Light, and  from this Light emerged Ormuzd, the King of Light, who, by the WORD,  created the World in its purity, is its Preserver and Judge, a Holy and Sacred 
Being, Intelligence and Knowledge, Himself Time without limit, and  wielding all the powers of the Supreme Being.

In this Persian faith, as taught many centuries before our era, and embodied in  the Zend-Avesta, there was in man a pure Principle, proceeding from the 
Supreme Being, produced by the Will and Word of Ormuzd. To that was  united an impure principle, proceeding from a foreign influence, that of 
Ahriman, the Dragon, or principle of Evil. Tempted by Ahriman, the first  man and woman had fallen; and for twelve thousand years there was to be  war between Ormuzd and the Good Spirits created by him, and Ahriman and  the Evil ones whom he had called into existence.

But pure souls are assisted by the Good Spirits, the Triumph of the Good 
Principle is determined upon in the decrees of the Supreme Being, and the  period of that triumph will infallibly arrive. At the moment when the earth  shall be most afflicted with the evils brought upon it by the Spirits of  perdition, three Prophets will appear to bring assistance to mortals. Sosiosch, 
Chief of the Three, will regenerate the world, and restore to it its primitive 
Beauty, Strength, and Purity. He will judge the good and the wicked. After  the universal resurrection of the Good, the pure Spirits will conduct them to  an abode of eternal happiness. Ahriman, his evil Demons, and all the world,  will be purified in a torrent of liquid burning metal. The Law of Ormuzd will  rule everywhere: all men will be happy: all, enjoying an unalterable bliss, will  unite with Sosiosch in singing the praises of the Supreme Being.

These doctrines, with some modifications, were adopted by the Kabalists and  afterward by the Gnostics.

Apollonius of Tyana says: "We shall render the most appropriate worship to  the Deity, when to that God whom we call the First, who is One, and separate  from all, and after whom we recognize the others, we present no offerings  whatever, kindle to Him no fire, dedicate to Him no sensible thing; for he  needs nothing, even of all that natures more exalted than ours could give. The  p. 283  earth produces no plant, the air nourishes no animal, there is in short nothing,  which would not be impure in his sight. In ad-dressing ourselves to Him, we  must use only the higher word, that, I mean, which is not expressed by the  mouth, the silent inner word of the spirit From the most Glorious of all 
Beings, we must seek for blessings, by that which is most glorious in  ourselves; and that is the spirit, which needs no organ."

Strabo says: "This one Supreme Essence is that which embraces us all, the  water and the land, that which we call the Heavens, the World, the Nature of  things. This Highest Being should be worshipped, without any visible image,  in sacred groves. In such retreats the devout should lay themselves down to  sleep, and expect signs from God in dreams."

Aristotle says: "It has been handed down in a mythical form, from the earliest  times to posterity, that there are Gods, and that The Divine compasses entire  nature. All besides this has been added, after the mythical style, for the  purpose of persuading the multitude, and for the interest of the laws and the  advantage of the State. Thus men have given to the Gods human forms, and  have even represented them under the figure of other beings, in the train of  which fictions followed many more of the same sort. But if, from all this, we  separate the original principle, and consider it alone, namely, that the first 
Essences are Gods, we shall find that this has been divinely said; and since it  is probable that philosophy and the arts have been several times, so far as that  is possible, found and lost, such doctrines may have been preserved to our  times as the remains of ancient wisdom."

Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients represented God  and his powers—by the visible they typified the invisible for those who had  learned to read, in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the Gods. We need  not wonder if the ignorant consider the images to be nothing more than wood  or stone; for just so, they who are ignorant of writing see nothing in  monuments but stone, nothing in tablets but wood, and in books but a tissue  of papyrus."

Apollonius of Tyana held, that birth and death are only in appearance; that  which separates itself from the one substance (the one Divine essence), and is  caught up by matter, seems to be bom; that, again, which releases itself from  the bonds of matter, and is reunited with the one Divine Essence, seems to  die. There is, at  p. 284  most, an alteration between becoming visible and becoming invisible. In all  there is, properly speaking, but the one essence, which alone acts and suffers,  by becoming all things to all; the Eternal God, whom men wrong, when they  deprive Him of what properly can be attributed to Him only, and transfer it to  other names and persons.

The New Platonists substituted the idea of the Absolute, for the Supreme 
Essence itself;-as the first, simplest principle, anterior to all existence; of  which nothing determinate can be predicated; to which no consciousness, no  self-contemplation can be ascribed; inasmuch as to do so, would immediately  imply a quality, a distinction of subject and object. This Supreme Entity can  be known only by an intellectual intuition of the Spirit, transcending itself,  and emancipating itself from its own limits.

This mere logical tendency, by means of which men thought to arrive at the  conception of such an absolute, the ov, was united with a certain mysticism,  which, by a transcendent state of feeling, communicated, as it were, to this  abstraction what the mind would receive as a reality. The absorption of the 
Spirit into that superexistence (to enEKStva irj^ ouaiou;), so as to be entirely  identified with it, or such a revelation of the latter to the spirit raised above  itself, was regarded as the highest end which the spiritual life could reach.

The New Platonists' idea of God, was that of One Simple Original Essence,  exalted above all plurality and all becoming; the only true Being;  unchangeable, eternal [Ek; (jbv evi Tin vuv to asi 7rE7rA,f|pcoK£ Kai povov eoti  to Kara toutov ovton; uiv.]: from whom all Existence in its several gradations  has emanated—the world of Gods, as nearest akin to Himself, being first, and  at the head of all. In these Gods, that perfection, which in the Supreme 
Essence was inclosed and unevolved, is expanded and becomes knowable. 
They serve to exhibit in different forms the image of that Supreme Essence,  to which no soul can rise, except by the loftiest flight of contemplation; and  after it has rid itself from all that pertains to sense—from all manifoldness.

They are the mediators between man (amazed and stupefied by manifoldness)  and the Supreme Unity.

Philo says: "He who disbelieves the miraculous, simply as the miraculous,  neither knows God, nor has he ever sought after Him; for otherwise he would  have understood, by looking at that truly  p. 285  great and awe-inspiring sight, the miracle of the Universe, that these miracles 
(in God's providential guidance of His people) are but child's play for the 
Divine Power. But the truly miraculous has become despised through  familiarity. The universal, on the contrary, although in itself insignificant,  yet, through our love of novelty, transports us with amazement."

In opposition to the anthropopathism of the Jewish Scriptures, the 
Alexandrian Jews endeavored to purify the idea of God from all admixture of  the Human. By the exclusion of every human passion, it was sublimated to a  something devoid of all attributes, and wholly transcendental; and the mere 
Being [ov], the Good, in and by itself, the Absolute of Platonism, was  substituted for the personal Deity [miT] of the Old Testament. By soaring  upward, beyond all created existence, the mind, disengaging itself from the 
Sensible, attains to the intellectual intuition of this Absolute Being; of whom,  however, it can predicate nothing but existence, and sets aside all other  determinations as not answering to the exalted nature of the Supreme 
Essence.

Thus Philo makes a distinction between those who are in the proper sense 
Sons of God, having by means of contemplation raised themselves to the  highest Being, or attained to a knowledge of Him, in His immediate self¬  manifestation, and those who know God only in his mediate revelation  through his operation—such as He declares Himself in creation—in the  revelation still veiled in the letter of Scripture—those, in short, who attach  themselves simply to the Logos, and consider this to be the Supreme God;  who are the sons of the Logos, rather than of the True Being, ov.

"God," says Pythagoras, "is neither the object of sense, nor subject to passion,  but invisible, only intelligible, and supremely intelligent. In His body He is  like the light , and in His soul He resembles truth. He is the universal spirit  that pervades and diffuseth itself over all nature. All beings receive their life  from Him. There is but one only God, who is not, as some are apt to imagine,  seated above the world, beyond the orb of the Universe; but being Himself all  in all. He sees all the beings that fill His immensity; the only Principle, the 
Light of Heaven, the Father of all. He produces everything ; He orders and  disposes everything; He is the REASON, the LIFE, and the MOTION of all  being."

"I am the LIGHT of the world; he that followeth Me shall not walk in 
DARKNESS, but shall have the LIGHT of LIFE." So said  p. 286  the Founder of the Christian Religion, as His words are reported by John the 
Apostle.

God, say the sacred writings of the Jews, appeared to Moses in a FLAME OF 
FIRE, in the midst of a bush, which was not consumed. He descended upon 
Mount Sinai, as the smoke of a furnace'. He went before the children of Israel,  by day, in a pillar of cloud, and, by night, in a pillar of fire, to give them light. 
"Call you on the name of your Gods," said Elijah the Prophet to the Priests of 
Baal, "and I will call upon the name of ADONAI; and the God that answereth  by fire, let him be God."

According to the Kabalah, as according to the doctrines of Zoroaster,  everything that exists has emanated from a source of infinite light. Before all  things, existed the Primitive Being, THE ANCIENT OF DAYS, the Ancient 
King of Light', a title the more remarkable, because it is frequently given to  the Creator in the Zend-Avesta, and in the Code of the Sabeans, and occurs in  the Jewish Scriptures.

The world was His Revelation, God revealed; and subsisted only in Him. His  attributes were there reproduced with various modifications and in different  degrees; so that the Universe was His Holy Splendor, His Mantle. He was to  be adored in silence; and perfection consisted in a nearer approach to Him.

Before the creation of worlds, the PRIMITIVE LIGHT filled all space, so that  there was no void. When the Supreme Being, existing in this Light, resolved  to display His perfections, or manifest them in worlds, He withdrew within 
Himself, formed around Him a void space, and shot forth His first emanation,  a ray of light; the cause and principle of everything that exists, uniting both  the generative and conceptive power, which penetrates everything, and  without which nothing could subsist for an instant.

Man fell, seduced by the Evil Spirits most remote from the Great King of 
Light; those of the fourth world of spirits, Asiah, whose chief was Belial. 
They wage incessant war against the pure Intelligences of the other worlds,  who, like the Amshaspands. Izeds, and Ferouers of the Persians are the  tutelary guardians of man. In the beginning, all was unison and harmony; full  of the same divine light and perfect purity. The Seven Kings of Evil fell, and  the Universe was troubled. Then the Creator took from the Seven Kings the  principles of Good and of Light, and divided them among the four worlds of 
Spirits, giving to the first three  p. 287  the Pure Intelligences, united in love and harmony, while to the fourth were  vouchsafed only some feeble glimmerings of light.

When the strife between these and the good angels shall have continued the  appointed time, and these Spirits enveloped in darkness shall long and in vain  have endeavored to absorb the Divine light and life, then will the Eternal 
Himself come to correct them. He will deliver them from the gross envelopes  of matter that hold them captive, will re-animate and strengthen the ray of  light or spiritual nature which they have preserved, and re-establish  throughout the Universe that primitive Harmony which was its bliss.

Marcion, the Gnostic, said, "The Soul of the True Christian, adopted as a  child by the Supreme Being, to whom it has long been a stranger, receives  from Him the Spirit and Divine life. It is led and confirmed, by this gift, in a  pure and holy life, like that of God; and if it so completes its earthly career, in  charity, chastity, and sanctity, it will one day be disengaged from its material  envelope, as the ripe grain is detached from the straw, and as the young bird  escapes from its shell. Like the angels, it will share in the bliss of the Good  and Perfect Father, re-clothed in an aerial body or organ, and made like unto  the Angels in Heaven."

You see, my brother, what is the meaning of Masonic "Light." You see why  the EAST of the Lodge, where the initial letter of the Name of the Deity  overhangs the Master, is the place of Light. Light, as contradistinguished  from darkness, is Good, as contradistinguished from Evil: and it is that Light,  the true knowledge of Deity, the Eternal Good, for which Masons in all ages  have sought. Still Masonry marches steadily onward toward that Light that  shines in the great distance, the Light of that day when Evil, overcome and  vanquished, shall fade away and disappear forever, and Life and Light be the  one law of the Universe, and its eternal Harmony.

The Degree of Rose * teaches three things;—the unity, immutability and  goodness of God; the immortality of the Soul; and the ultimate defeat and  extinction of evil and wrong and sorrow, by a Redeemer or Messiah, yet to  come, if he has not already appeared.

It replaces the three pillars of the old Temple, with three that have already  been explained to you,—Faith [in God, mankind, and man's self], Hope [in the  victory over evil, the advancement of  p. 288

[paragraph continues] Humanity, and a hereafter], and Charity [relieving the wants,  and tolerant of the errors and faults of others]. To be trustful, to be hopeful, to  be indulgent; these, in an age of selfishness, of it opinion of human nature, of  harsh and bitter judgment, are the most important Masonic Virtues, and the  true supports of every Masonic Temple. And they are the old pillars of the 
Temple under different names. For he only is wise who judges others  charitably; he only is strong who is hopeful; and there is no beauty like a firm  faith in God, our fellows and ourself.

The second apartment, clothed in mourning, the columns of the Temple  shattered and prostrate, and the brethren bowed down in the deepest  dejection, represents the world under the tyranny of the Principle of Evil;  where virtue is persecuted and vice rewarded; where the righteous starve for  bread, and the wicked live sumptuously and dress in purple and fine linen;  where insolent ignorance rules, and learning and genius serve; where King  and Priest trample on liberty and the rights of conscience; where freedom  hides in caves and mountains, and sycophancy and servility fawn and thrive;  where the cry of the widow and the orphan starving for want of food, and  shivering with cold, rises ever to Heaven, from a million miserable hovels;  where men, willing to labor, and starving, they and their children and the  wives of their bosoms, beg plaintively for work, when the pampered capitalist  stops his mills; where the law punishes her who, starving, steals a loaf, and  lets the seducer go free; where the success of a party justifies murder, and  violence and rapine go unpunished; and where he who with many years'  cheating and grinding the faces of the poor grows rich, receives office and  honor in life, and after death brave funeral and a splendid mausoleum:-this  world, where, since its making, war has never ceased, nor man paused in the  sad task of torturing and murdering his brother; and of which ambition,  avarice, envy, hatred, lust, and the rest of Ahriman's and Typhon's army make  a Pandemonium: this world, sunk in sin, reeking with baseness, clamorous  with sorrow and misery. If any see in it also a type of the sorrow of the Craft  for the death of Hiram, the grief of the Jews at the fall of Jerusalem, the  misery of the Templars at the ruin of their order and the death of De Molay,  or the world's agony and pangs of woe at the death of the Redeemer, it is the  right of each to do so.

The third apartment represents the consequences of sin and  p. 289  vice, and the hell made of the human heart, by its fiery passions. If any see in  it also a type of the Hades of the Greeks, the Gehenna of the Hebrews, the 
Tartarus of the Romans, or the Hell of the Christians, or only of the agonies  of remorse and the tortures of an upbraiding conscience, it is the right of each  to do so.

The fourth apartment represents the Universe, freed from the insolent  dominion and tyranny of the Principle of Evil, and brilliant with the true 
Light that flows from the Supreme Deity; when sin and wrong, and pain and  sorrow, remorse and misery shall be no more forever; when the great plans of 
Infinite Eternal Wisdom shall be fully developed; and all God's creatures,  seeing that all apparent evil and individual suffering and wrong were but the  drops that went to swell the great river of infinite goodness, shall know that  vast as is the power of Deity, His goodness and beneficence are infinite as 
His power. If any see in it a type of the peculiar mysteries of any faith or  creed, or an allusion to any past occurrences, it is their right to do so. Let each  apply its symbols as he pleases. To all of us they typify the universal rule of 
Masonry,-of its three chief virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity; of brotherly  love and universal benevolence. We labor here to no other end. These  symbols need no other interpretation.

The obligations of our Ancient Brethren of the Rose * were to fulfill all the  duties of friendship, cheerfulness, charity, peace, liberality, temperance and  chastity: and scrupulously to avoid impurity, haughtiness, hatred, anger, and  every other kind of vice. They took their philosophy from the old Theology  of the Egyptians, as Moses and Solomon had done, and borrowed its  hieroglyphics and the ciphers of the Hebrews. Their principal rules were, to  exercise the profession of medicine charitably and without fee, to advance the  cause of virtue, enlarge the sciences, and induce men to live as in the  primitive times of the world.

When this Degree had its origin, it is not important to inquire; nor with what  different rites it has been practised in different countries and at various times. 
It is of very high antiquity. Its ceremonies differ with the degrees of latitude  and longitude, and it receives variant inteipretations. If we were to examine  all the different ceremonials, their emblems, and their formulas, we should  see that all that belongs to the primitive and essential elements of the order, is  respected in every sanctuary. All alike practise virtue, that it may produce  fruit. All labor, like us, for the extirpation  p. 290  of vice, the purification of man, the development of the arts and sciences, and  the relief of humanity.

None admit an adept to their lofty philosophical knowledge, and mysterious  sciences, until he has been purified at the altar of the symbolic Degrees. Of  what importance are differences of opinion as to the age and genealogy of the 
Degree, or variance in the practice, ceremonial and liturgy, or the shade of  color of the banner under which each tribe of Israel marched, if all revere the 
Holy Arch of the symbolic Degrees, first and unalterable source of Free- 
Masonry; if all revere our conservative principles, and are with us in the great  purposes of our organization?

If, anywhere, brethren of a particular religious belief have been excluded  from this Degree, it merely shows how gravely the purposes and plan of 
Masonry may be misunderstood. For whenever the door of any Degree is  closed against him who believes in one God and the soul's immortality, on  account of the other tenets of his faith, that Degree is Masonry no longer. No 
Mason has the right to interpret the symbols of this Degree for another, or to  refuse him its mysteries, if he will not take them with the explanation and  commentary superadded.

Listen, my brother, to our explanation of the symbols of the Degree, and then  give them such further interpretation as you think fit.

The Cross has been a sacred symbol from the earliest Antiquity. It is found  upon all the enduring monuments of the world, in Egypt, in Assyria, in 
Hindostan, in Persia, and on the Buddhist towers of Ireland. Buddha was said  to have died upon it. The Druids cut an oak into its shape and held it sacred,  and built their temples in that form. Pointing to the four quarters of the world,  it was the symbol of universal nature. It was on a cruciform tree, that 
Chrishna was said to have expired, pierced with arrows. It was revered in 
Mexico.

But its peculiar meaning in this Degree, is that given to it by the Ancient 
Egyptians. Thoth or Phtha is represented on the oldest monuments carrying in  his hand the Crux Ansata, or Ankh , [a Tau cross, with a ring or circle over it]. 
He is so seen on the double tablet of Shufu and Noh Shufu, builders of the  greatest of the Pyramids, at Wady Meghara, in the peninsula of Sinai. It was  the hieroglyphic for life, and with a triangle prefixed meant life-giving. To us  therefore it is the symbol of Life— of that life  p. 291  that emanated from the Deity, and of that Eternal Life for which we all hope;  through our faith in God's infinite goodness.

The ROSE, was anciently sacred to Aurora and the Sun. It is a symbol of 
Dawn, of the resurrection of Light and the renewal of life, and therefore of  the dawn of the first day, and more particularly of the resurrection: and the 
Cross and Rose together are therefore hieroglyphically to be read, the Dawn  of Eternal Life which all Nations have hoped for by the advent of a 
Redeemer.

The Pelican feeding her young is an emblem of the large and bountiful  beneficence of Nature, of the Redeemer of fallen man, and of that humanity  and charity that ought to distinguish a Knight of this Degree.

The Eagle was the living Symbol of the Egyptian God Mendes or Menthra,  whom Sesostris-Ramses made one with Amun-Re, the God of Thebes and 
Upper Egypt, and the representative of the Sun, the word RE meaning Sun or 
King.

The Compass surmounted with a crown signifies that notwithstanding the  high rank attained in Masonry by a Knight of the Rose Croix, equity and  impartiality are invariably to govern his conduct.

To the word INRI, inscribed on the Crux Ansata over the Master's Seat, many  meanings have been assigned. The Christian Initiate reverentially sees in it  the initials of the inscription upon the cross on which Christ suffered— Jesus 
Nazarenus Rex Iudceorum. The sages of Antiquity connected it with one of  the greatest secrets of Nature, that of universal regeneration. They interpreted  it thus, Igne Natura renovator integra; [entire nature is renovated by fire]:

The Alchemical or Hermetic Masons framed for it this aphorism, Igne nitrum  roris invenitur. And the Jesuits are charged with having applied to it this  odious axiom, Justum necare reges impios. The four letters are the initials of  the Hebrew words that represent the four elements —lammim, the seas or  water; Now-, fire; Rouach, the air, and lebeschah , the dry earth. How we read  it, 1 need not repeat to you.

The Cross, x, was the Sign of the Creative Wisdom or Logos, the Son of 
God. Plato says, "He expressed him upon the Universe in the figure of the  letter X. The next Power to the Supreme God was decussated or figured in the  shape of a Cross on the Universe." Mithras signed his soldiers on the  forehead with a  p. 292

Cross. ^ is the mark of 600, the mysterious cycle of the Incarnations.

P

We constantly see the Tau and the Resh united thus • . These two letters,  in the old Samaritan, as found in Arius, stand, the first for 400, the second for 
200=600. This is the Staff of Osiris, also, and his monogram, and was  adopted by the Christians as a Sign. On a medal of Constantius is this 
inscription, "In hoc signo victor eris 'T' ."An inscription in the Duomo at 
Milan reads, " X 1 et Christi • Nomina • Sancta • Tenet."

The Egyptians used as a Sign of their God Canobus, a or a 'I*  indifferently. The Vaishnavas of India have also the same Sacred Tau, which  they also mark with Crosses, thus ' L , and with triangles, thus, V . The  vestments of the priests of Homs were covered with these Crosses So  was the dress of the Lama of Thibet. The Sectarian marks of the Jains are

PP

The distinctive badge of the Sect of Xac Japonicus is  the Sign of Fo, identical with the Cross of Christ.

It is

On the mins of Mandore, in India, among other mystic emblems, are the  mystic triangle, and the interlaced triangle, V , This is also found on  ancient coins and medals, excavated from the mins of Oojein and other  ancient cities of India.

You entered here amid gloom and into shadow, and are clad in the apparel of  sorrow. Lament, with us, the sad condition of the Human race, in this vale of  tears! the calamities of men and the agonies of nations! the darkness of the  bewildered soul, oppressed by doubt and apprehension!

There is no human soul that is not sad at times. There is no thoughtful soul  that does not at times despair. There is perhaps none, of all that think at all of  anything beyond the needs and interests of the body, that is not at times  startled and terrified by the awful questions which, feeling as though it were a  guilty thing for doing so, it whispers to itself in its inmost depths. Some 
Demon seems to torture it with doubts, and to cmsh it with despair, asking  whether, after all, it is certain that its convictions are true, and its faith well  founded: whether it is indeed sure that a God of Infinite Love and 
Beneficence rules the Universe, or only some great remorseless Fate and iron 
Necessity, hid in impenetrable gloom, and to which men and their sufferings  and sorrows, their hopes and joys, their ambitions and deeds, are of no more  interest or importance than the motes that dance in the sunshine; or a  p. 293

[paragraph continues] Being that amuses Himself with the incredible vanity and folly,  the writhings and contortions of the insignificant insects that compose 
Humanity, and idly imagine that they resemble the Omnipotent. "What are  we," the Tempter asks, "but puppets in a show-box? O Omnipotent destiny,  pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our miserable little stage!"

"Is it not," the Demon whispers, "merely the inordinate vanity of man that  causes him now to pretend to himself that he is like unto God in intellect,  sympathies and passions, as it was that which, at the beginning, made him  believe that he was, in his bodily shape and organs, the very image of the 
Deity? Is not his God merely his own shadow, projected in gigantic outlines  upon the clouds? Does he not create for himself a God out of himself, by  merely adding indefinite extension to his own faculties, powers, and  passions?"

"Who," the Voice that will not be always silent whispers, "has ever  thoroughly satisfied himself with his own arguments in respect to his own  nature? Who ever demonstrated to himself, with a conclusiveness that  elevated the belief to certainty, that he was an immortal spirit, dwelling only  temporarily in the house and envelope of the body, and to live on forever  after that shall have decayed? Who ever has demonstrated or ever can  demonstrate that the intellect of Man differs from that of the wiser animals,  otherwise than in degree? Who has ever done more than to utter nonsense and  incoherencies in regard to the difference between the instincts of the dog and  the reason of Man? The horse, the dog, the elephant, are as conscious of their  identity as we are. They think, dream, remember, argue with themselves,  devise, plan, and reason. What is the intellect and intelligence of the man but  the intellect of the animal in a higher degree or larger quantity?" In the real  explanation of a single thought of a dog, all metaphysics will be condensed.

And with still more terrible significance, the Voice asks, in what respect the  masses of men, the vast swarms of the human race, have proven themselves  either wiser or better than the animals in whose eyes a higher intelligence  shines than in their dull, unintellectual orbs; in what respect they have proven  themselves worthy of or suited for an immortal life. Would that be a prize of  any value to the vast majority? Do they show, here upon earth, any capacity  to improve, any fitness for a state of existence in which  p, 294  they could not crouch to power, like hounds dreading the lash, or tyrannize  over defenceless weakness; in which they could not hate, and persecute, and  torture, and exterminate; in which they could not trade, and speculate, and  over-reach, and entrap the unwary and cheat the confiding and gamble and  thrive, and sniff with self-righteousness at the short-comings of others, and  thank God that they were not like other men? What, to immense numbers of  men, would be the value of a Heaven where they could not lie and libel, and  ply base avocations for profitable returns?

Sadly we look around us, and read the gloomy and dreary records of the old  dead and rotten ages. More than eighteen centuries have staggered away into  the spectral realm of the Past, since Christ, teaching the Religion of Love,  was crucified, that it might become a Religion of Hate; and His Doctrines are  not yet even nominally accepted as true by a fourth of mankind. Since His  death, what incalculable swarms of human beings have lived and died in total  unbelief of all that we deem essential to Salvation! What multitudinous  myriads of souls, since the darkness of idolatrous superstition settled down,  thick and impenetrable, upon the earth, have flocked up toward the eternal 
Throne of God, to receive His judgment?

The Religion of Love proved to be, for seventeen long centuries, as much the 
Religion of Elate, and infinitely more the Religion of Persecution, than 
Mahometanism, its unconquerable rival. Heresies grew up before the 
Apostles died; and God hated the Nicolaitans, while John, at Patmos,  proclaimed His coming wrath. Sects wrangled, and each, as it gained the  power, persecuted the other, until the soil of the whole Christian world was  watered with the blood, and fattened on the flesh, and whitened with the  bones, of martyrs, and human ingenuity, was taxed to its utmost to invent  new modes by which tortures and agonies could be pro-longed and made  more exquisite.

"By what right," whispers the Voice, '"does this savage, merciless,  persecuting animal, to which the sufferings and writhings of others of its  wretched kind furnish the most pleasurable sensations, and the mass of which  care only to eat, sleep, be clothed, and wallow in sensual pleasures, and the  best of which wrangle, hate, envy, and, with few exceptions, regard their own  interests alone,—with what right does it endeavor to delude itself into the  conviction that it is not an animal, as the wolf, the hyena, and the tiger  p. 295  are, but a somewhat nobler, a spirit destined to be immortal, a spark of the  essential Light, Fire and Reason, which are God? What other immortality  than one of selfishness could this creature enjoy? Of what other is it capable? 
Must not immortality commence here and is not life a part of it? How shall  death change the base nature of the base soul? Why have not those other  animals that only faintly imitate the wanton, savage, human cruelty and thirst  for blood, the same right as man has, to expect a resurrection and an Eternity  of existence, or a Heaven of Love?

The world improves. Man ceases to persecute,—when the persecuted become  too numerous and strong, longer to submit to it. That source of pleasure  closed, men exercise the ingenuities of their cruelty on the animals and other  living things below them. To deprive other creatures of the life which God  gave them, and this not only that we may eat their flesh for food, but out of  mere savage wantonness, is the agreeable employment and amusement of  man, who prides himself on being the Lord of Creation, and a little lower  than the Angels. If he can no longer use the rack, the gibbet, the pincers, and  the stake, he can hate, and slander, and delight in the thought that he will,  hereafter, luxuriously enjoying the sensual beatitudes of Heaven, see with  pleasure the writhing agonies of those justly damned for daring to hold  opinions contrary to his own, upon subjects totally beyond the  comprehension both of them and him.

Where the armies of the despots cease to slay and ravage, the armies of 
"Freedom" take their place, and, the black and white commingled, slaughter  and burn and ravish. Each age re-enacts the crimes as well as the follies of its  predecessors, and still war licenses outrage and turns fruitful lands into  deserts, and God is thanked in the Churches for bloody butcheries, and the  remorseless devastators, even when swollen by plunder, are crowned with  laurels and receive ovations.

Of the whole of mankind, not one in ten thousand has any aspirations beyond  the daily needs of the gross animal life. In this age and in all others, all men  except a few, in most countries, are bom to be mere beasts of burden, co¬  laborers with the horse and the ox. Profoundly ignorant, even in "civilized"  lands, they think and reason like the animals by the side of which they toil. 
For them, God, Soul, Spirit, immortality, are mere words, without any real  meaning. The God of nineteen-twentieths of the Christian  p. 296  world is only Bel, Moloch, Zeus, or at best Osiris, Mithras, or Adona'i, under  another name, worshipped with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic  formulas, it is the Statue of Olympian Jove, worshipped as the Father, in the 
Christian Church that was a Pagan Temple; it is the Statue of Venus, become  the Virgin Mary. For the most part, men do not in their hearts believe that 
God is either just or merciful. They fear and shrink from His lightnings and  dread his wrath. For the most part, they only think they believe that there is  another life, a judgment, and a punishment for sin. Yet they will none the less  persecute as Infidels and Atheists those who do not believe what they  themselves imagine they believe, and which yet they do not believe, because  it is incomprehensible to them in their ignorance and want of intellect. To the  vast majority of mankind, God is but the reflected image, in infinite space, of  the earthly Tyrant on his Throne, only more powerful, more inscrutable, and  more implacable. To curse Flumanity, the Despot need only be, what the  popular mind has, in every age, imagined God.

In the great cities, the lower strata of the populace are equally without faith  and without hope. The others have, for the most part, a mere blind faith,  imposed by education and circumstances, and not as productive of moral  excellence or even common honesty as Mohammedanism. "Yourproperty  will be safe here," said the Moslem; "There are no Christians here." The  philosophical and scientific world becomes daily more and more unbelieving. 
Faith and Reason are not opposites, in equilibrium; but antagonistic and  hostile to each other; the result being the darkness and despair of scepticism,  avowed, or half-veiled as rationalism.

Over more than three-fourths of the habitable globe, humanity still kneels,  like the camels, to take upon itself the burthens to be tamely borne for its  tyrants. If a Republic occasionally rises like a Star, it hastens with all speed to  set in blood. The kings need not make war upon it, to crush it out of their  way. It is only necessary to let it alone, and it soon lays violent hands upon  itself. And when a people long enslaved shake off its fetters, it may well be  incredulously asked,

Shall the braggart shout 
For some blind glimpse of Freedom, link itself.

Through madness, hated by the wise, to law,

System and Empire?  p. 297

Everywhere in the world labor is, in some shape, the slave of capital;  generally, a slave to be fed only so long as he can work; or, rather, only so  long as his work is profitable to the owner of the human chattel. There are  famines in Ireland, strikes and starvation in England, pauperism and  tenement-dens in New York, misery, squalor, ignorance, destitution, the  brutality of vice and the insensibility to shame, of despairing beggary, in all  the human cesspools and sewers everywhere. Here, a sewing-woman  famishes and freezes; there, mothers murder their children, that those spared  may live upon the bread purchased with the burial allowances of the dead  starveling; and at the next door young girls prostitute themselves for food.

Moreover, the Voice says, this besotted race is not satisfied with seeing its  multitudes swept away by the great epidemics whose causes are unknown,  and of the justice or wisdom of which the human mind cannot conceive. It  must also be ever at war. There has not been a moment since men divided  into Tribes, when all the world was at peace. Always men have been engaged  in murdering each other somewhere. Always the armies have lived by the toil  of the husbandman, and war has exhausted the resources, wasted the energies,  and ended the prosperity of Nations. Now it loads unborn posterity with  crushing debt, mortgages all estates, and brings upon States the shame and  infamy of dishonest repudiation.

At times, the baleful fires of war light up half a Continent at once; as when all  the Thrones unite to compel a people to receive again a hated and detestable  dynasty, or States deny States the right to dissolve an irksome union and  create for themselves a separate government. Then again the flames flicker  and die away, and the fire smoulders in its ashes, to break out again, after a  time, with renewed and a more concentrated fury. At times, the storm,  revolving, howls over small areas only; at times its lights are seen, like the  old beacon-fires on the hills, belting the whole globe. No sea, but hears the  roar of cannon; no river, but runs red with blood; no plain, but shakes,  trampled by the hoofs of charging squadrons; no field, but is fertilized by the  blood of the dead; and everywhere man slays, the vulture gorges, and the  wolf howls in the ear of the dying soldier. No city is not tortured by shot and  shell; and no people fail to enact the horrid blasphemy of thanking a God of

Love for victories and carnage. Te  p. 298

[paragraph continues] Deums are still sung for the Eve of St. Bartholomew and the 
Sicilian Vespers. Man's ingenuity is racked, and all his inventive powers are  tasked, to fabricate the infernal enginery of destruction, by which human  bodies may be the more expeditiously and effectually crushed, shattered, torn,  and mangled; and yet hypocritical Humanity, drunk with blood and drenched  with gore, shrieks to Heaven at a single murder, perpetrated to gratify a  revenge not more unchristian, or to satisfy a cupidity not more ignoble, than  those which are the promptings of the Devil in the souls of Nations.

When we have fondly dreamed of Utopia and the Millennium, when we have  begun almost to believe that man is not, after all, a tiger half tamed, and that  the smell of blood will not wake the savage within him, we are of a sudden  startled from the delusive dream, to find the thin mask of civilization rent in  twain and thrown contemptuously away. We lie down to sleep, like the  peasant on the lava-slopes of Vesuvius. The mountain has been so long inert,  that we believe its fires extinguished. Round us hang the clustering grapes,  and the green leaves of the olive tremble in the soft night-air over us. Above  us shine the peaceful, patient stars. The crash of a new eruption wakes us, the  roar of the subterranean thunders, the stabs of the volcanic lightning into the  shrouded bosom of the sky; and we see, aghast, the tortured Titan hurling up  its fires among the pale stars, its great tree of smoke and cloud, the red  torrents pouring down its sides. The roar and the shriekings of Civil War are  all around us: the land is a pandemonium: man is again a Savage. The great  armies roll along their hideous waves, and leave behind them smoking and  depopulated deserts. The pillager is in every house, plucking even the morsel  of bread from the lips of the starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood,  and innocent girlhood shrieks in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, 
Constitutions, Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. God seems to have  abdicated, and Moloch to reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike  exult at universal murder, and urge the extermination of the Conquered, by  the sword and the flaming torch; and to plunder and murder entitles the  human beasts of prey to the thanks of Christian Senates.

Commercial greed deadens the nerves of sympathy of Nations, and makes  them deaf to the demands of honor, the impulses of generosity, the appeals of  those who suffer under injustice. Elsewhere, the universal pursuit of wealth  dethrones God and pays  p. 299  divine honors to Mammon and Baalzebub. Selfishness rules supreme: to win  wealth becomes the whole business of life. The villanies of legalized gaming  and speculation become epidemic; treachery is but evidence of shrewdness;  office becomes the prey of successful faction; the Country, like Actteon, is  tom by its own hounds, and the villains it has carefully educated to their  trade, most greedily plunder it, when it is in extremis.

By what right, the Voice demands, does a creature always engaged in the  work of mutual robbery and slaughter, and who makes his own interest his 
God, claim to be of a nature superior to the savage beasts of which he is the  prototype?

Then the shadows of a horrible doubt fall upon the soul that would fain love,  tmst and believe; a darkness, of which this that surrounded you was a  symbol. It doubts the truth of Revelation, its own spirituality, the very  existence of a beneficent God. It asks itself if it is not idle to hope for any  great progress of Humanity toward perfection, and whether, when it advances  in one respect, it does not retrogress in some other, by way of compensation:  whether advance in civilization is not increase of selfishness: whether  freedom does not necessarily lead to license and anarchy: whether the  destitution and debasement of the masses does not inevitably follow increase  of population and commercial and manufacturing prosperity. It asks itself  whether man is not the sport of a blind, merciless Fate: whether all  philosophies are not delusions, and all religions the fantastic creations of  human vanity and self-conceit; and, above all, whether, when Reason is  abandoned as a guide, the faith of Buddhist and Brahmin has not the same  claims to sovereignty and implicit, unreasoning credence, as any other.

He asks himself whether it is not, after all, the evident and palpable injustices  of this life, the success and prosperity of the Bad, the calamities, oppressions,  and miseries of the Good, that are the bases of all beliefs in a future state of  existence? Doubting man's capacity for indefinite progress here, he doubts  the possibility of it anywhere; and if he does not doubt whether God exists,  and is just and beneficent, he at least cannot silence the constantly recurring  whisper, that the miseries and calamities of men, their lives and deaths, their  pains and sorrows, their extermination by war and epidemics, are phenomena  of no higher dignity, significance, and importance, in the eye of God, than  what things of the same nature occur to other organisms of matter; and that  the fish of  p. 300  the ancient seas, destroyed by myriads to make room for other species, the  contorted shapes in which they are found as fossils testifying to their agonies;  the coral insects, the animals and birds and vermin slain by man, have as  much right as he to clamor at the injustice of the dispensations of God, and to  demand an immortality of life in a new universe, as compensation for their  pains and sufferings and untimely death in this world.

This is not a picture painted by the imagination. Many a thoughtful mind has  so doubted and despaired. How many of us can say that our own faith is so  well grounded and complete that we never hear those painful whisperings  within the soul? Thrice blessed are they who never doubt, who ruminate in  patient contentment like the kine, or doze under the opiate of a blind faith; on  whose souls never rests that Awful Shadow which is the absence of the 
Divine Light.

To explain to themselves the existence of Evil and Suffering, the Ancient 
Persians imagined that there were two Principles or Deities in the Universe,  the one of Good and the other of Evil, constantly in conflict with each other  in struggle for the mastery, and alternately overcoming and overcome. Over  both, for the SAGES, was the One Supreme; and for them Light was in the  end to prevail over Darkness, the Good over the Evil, and even Ahriman and  his Demons to part with their wicked and vicious natures and share the  universal Salvation. It did not occur to them that the existence of the Evil 
Principle, by the consent of the Omnipotent Supreme, presented the same  difficulty, and left the existence of Evil as unexplained as before. The human  mind is always content, if it can remove a difficulty a step further off. It  cannot believe that the world rests on nothing, but is devoutly content when  taught that it is borne on the back of an immense elephant, who himself  stands on the back of a tortoise. Given the tortoise, Faith is always satisfied;  and it has been a great source of happiness to multitudes that they could  believe in a Devil who could relieve God of the odium of being the Author of 
Sin.

But not to all is Faith sufficient to overcome this great difficulty. They say,  with the Suppliant, "Lord! I believe !"—but like him they are constrained to  add, "Help Thou my unbelief !"—Reason must, for these, co-operate and  coincide with Faith, or they remain still in the darkness of doubt,-most  miserable of all conditions of the human mind.  p. 301

Those, only, who care for nothing beyond the interests and pursuits of this  life, are uninterested in these great Problems. The animals, also, do not  consider them. It is the characteristic of an immortal Soul, that it should seek  to satisfy itself of its immortality, and to understand this great enigma, the 
Universe. If the Hottentot and the Papuan are not troubled and tortured by  these doubts and speculations, they are not, for that, to be regarded as either  wise or fortunate. The swine, also, are indifferent to the great riddles of the 
Universe, and are happy in being wholly unaware that it is the vast 
Revelation and Manifestation, in Time and Space, of a Single Thought of the 
Infinite God.

Exalt and magnify Faith as we will, and say that it begins where Reason ends,  it must, after all, have a foundation, either in Reason, Analogy, the 
Consciousness, or human testimony. The worshipper of Brahma also has  implicit Faith in what seems to us palpably false and absurd. His faith rests  neither in Reason, Analogy, or the Consciousness, but on the testimony of his 
Spiritual teachers, and of the Holy Books. The Moslem also believes, on the  positive testimony of the Prophet; and the Mormon also can say, "I believe  this, because it is impossible.” No faith, however absurd or degrading, has  ever wanted these foundations, testimony, and the books. Miracles, proven by  unimpeachable testimony have been used as a foundation for Faith, in every  age; and the modem miracles are better authenticated, a hundred times, than  the ancient ones.

So that, after all, Faith must flow out from some source within us, when the  evidence of that which we are to believe is not presented to our senses, or it  will in no case be the assurance of the truth of what is believed.

The Consciousness, or inhering and innate conviction, or the instinct divinely  implanted, of the verity of things, is the highest possible evidence, if not the  only real proof, of the verity of certain things, but only of truths of a limited  class.

What we call the Reason, that is, our imperfect human reason, not only may,  but assuredly will, lead us away from the Truth in regard to things invisible  and especially those of the Infinite, if we determine to believe nothing but  that which it can demonstrate, or not to believe that which it can by its  processes of logic prove to be contradictory, unreasonable, or absurd. Its  tape-line cannot measure the arcs of Infinity. For example, to the Fluman  reason,  p. 302  an Infinite Justice and an Infinite Mercy or Love, in the same Being, are  inconsistent and impossible. One, it can demonstrate, necessarily excludes the  other. So it can demonstrate that as the Creation had a beginning, it  necessarily follows that an Eternity had elapsed before the Deity began to  create, during which He was inactive.

When we gaze, of a moonless clear night, on the Heavens glittering with  stars, and know that each fixed star of all the myriads is a Sun, and each  probably possessing its retinue of worlds, all peopled with living beings, we  sensibly feel our own unimportance in the scale of Creation, and at once  reflect that much of what has in different ages been religious faith, could  never have been believed, if the nature, size, and distance of those Suns, and  of our own Sun, Moon, and Planets, had been known to the Ancients as they  are to us.

To them, all the lights of the firmament were created only to give light to the  earth, as its lamps or candles hung above it. The earth was supposed to be the  only inhabited portion of the Universe. The world and the Universe were  synonymous terms. Of the immense size and distance of the heavenly bodies,  men had no conception. The Sages had, in Chaldaea, Egypt, India, China, and  in Persia, and therefore the sages always had, an esoteric creed, taught only in  the mysteries and unknown to the vulgar. No Sage, in either country, or in 
Greece or Rome, believed the popular creed. To them the Gods and the Idols  of the Gods were symbols, and symbols of great and mysterious truths.

The Vulgar imagined the attention of the Gods to be continually centred upon  the earth and man. The Grecian Divinities inhabited Olympus, an  insignificant mountain of the Earth. There was the Court of Zeus, to which 
Neptune came from the Sea, and Pluto and Persephone from the glooms of 
Tartarus in the unfathomable depths of the Earth's bosom. God came down  from Heaven and on Sinai dictated laws for the Hebrews to His servant 
Moses. The Stars were the guardians of mortals whose fates and fortunes  were to be read in their movements, conjunctions, and oppositions. The Moon  was the Bride and Sister of the Sun, at the same distance above the Earth,  and, like the Sun, made for the service of mankind alone.

If, with the great telescope of Lord Rosse, we examine the vast nebula of 
Hercules, Orion, and Andromeda, and find them resolvable  p. 303  into Stars more numerous than the sands on the seashore; if we reflect that  each of these Stars is a Sun, like and even many times larger than ours,—each,  beyond a doubt, with its retinue of worlds swarming with life;—if we go  further in imagination, and endeavor to conceive of all the infinities of space,  filled with similar suns and worlds, we seem at once to shrink into an  incredible insignificance.

The Universe, which is the uttered Word of God, is infinite in extent. There is  no empty space beyond creation on any side. The Universe, which is the 
Thought of God pronounced, never was not, since God never was inert; nor 
WAS, without thinking and creating. The forms of creation change, the suns  and worlds live and die like the leaves and the insects, but the Universe itself  is infinite and eternal, because God Is, Was, and Will forever Be, and never  did not think and create.

Reason is fain to admit that a Supreme Intelligence, infinitely powerful and  wise, must have created this boundless Universe; but it also tells us that we  are as unimportant in it as the zoophytes and entozoa, or as the invisible  particles of animated life that float upon the air or swarm in the water-drop.

The foundations of our faith, resting upon the imagined interest of God in our  race, an interest easily supposable when man believed himself the only  intelligent created being, and therefore eminently worthy the especial care  and watchful anxiety of a God who had only this earth to look after, and its  house-keeping alone to superintend, and who was content to create, in all the  infinite Universe, only one single being, possessing a soul, and not a mere  animal, are rudely shaken as the Universe broadens and expands for us; and  the darkness of doubt and distrust settles heavy upon the Soul.

The modes in which it is ordinarily endeavored to satisfy our doubts, only  increase them. To demonstrate the necessity for a cause of the creation, is  equally to demonstrate the necessity of a cause for that cause. The argument  from plan and design only removes the difficulty a step further off. We rest  the world on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise  on-nothing.

To tell us that the animals possess instinct only and that Reason belongs to us  alone, in no way tends to satisfy us of the radical difference between us and  them. For if the mental phenomena  p. 304  exhibited by animals that think, dream, remember, argue from cause to effect,  plan, devise, combine, and communicate their thoughts to each other, so as to  act rationally in concert, if their love, hate, and revenge, can be conceived of  as results of the organization of matter, like color and perfume, the resort to  the hypothesis of an immaterial Soul to explain phenomena of the same kind,  only more perfect, manifested by the human being, is supremely absurd. That  organized matter can think or even feel , at all, is the great insoluble mystery. 
"Instinct" is but a word without a meaning, or else it means inspiration. It is  either the animal itself, or God in the animal, that thinks, remembers, and  reasons; and instinct, according to the common acceptation of the term,  would be the greatest and most wonderful of mysteries,—no less a thing than  the direct, immediate, and continual promptings of the Deity,-for the animals  are not machines, or automata moved by springs, and the ape is but a dumb 
Australian.

Must we always remain in this darkness of uncertainty, of doubt? Is there no  mode of escaping from the labyrinth except by means of a blind faith, which  explains nothing, and in many creeds, ancient and modem, sets Reason at  defiance, and leads to the belief either in a God without a Universe, a 
Universe without a God, or a Universe which is itself a God?

We read in the Hebrew Chronicles that Schlomoh the wise King caused to be  placed in front of the entrance to the Temple two huge columns of bronze,  one of which was called YAKAYIN and the other BAHAZ; and these words  are rendered in our version Strength and Establishment. The Masonry of the 
Blue Lodges gives no explanation of these symbolic columns; nor do the 
Hebrew Books advise us that they were symbolic. If not so intended as  symbols, they were subsequently understood to be such.

But as we are certain that everything within the Temple was symbolic, and  that the whole structure was intended to represent the Universe, we may  reasonably conclude that the columns of the portico also had a symbolic  signification. It would be tedious to repeat all the interpretations which fancy  or dullness has found for them.

The key to their true meaning is not undiscoverable. The perfect and eternal  distinction of the two primitive terms of the creative syllogism, in order to  attain to the demonstration of their  p. 305  harmony by the analogy of contraries, is the second grand principle of that  occult philosophy veiled under the name "Kabalah," and indicated by all the  sacred hieroglyphs of the Ancient Sanctuaries, and of the rites, so little  understood by the mass of the Initiates, of the Ancient and Modem Free- 
Masonry.

The Sohar declares that everything in the Universe proceeds by the mystery  of "the Balance," that is, of Equilibrium. Of the Sephiroth, or Divine 
Emanations, Wisdom and Understanding, Severity and Benignity, or Justice  and Mercy, and Victory and Glory, constitute pairs.

Wisdom, or the Intellectual Generative Energy , and Understanding, or the 
Capacity to be impregnated by the Active Energy and produce intellection or  thought, are represented symbolically in the Kabalah as male and female. So  also are Justice and Mercy. Strength is the intellectual Energy or Activity; 
Establishment or Stability is the intellectual Capacity to produce, a passivity. 
They are the POWER of generation and the CAPACITY of production. By 
WISDOM, it is said, God creates, and by UNDERSTANDING establishes. 
These are the two Columns of the Temple, contraries like the Man and 
Woman, like Reason and Faith, Omnipotence and Liberty, Infinite Justice  and Infinite Mercy, Absolute Power or Strength to do even what is most  unjust and unwise, and Absolute Wisdom that makes it impossible to do it; 
Right and Duty. They were the columns of the intellectual and moral world,  the monumental hieroglyph of the antinomy necessary to the grand law of  creation.

There must be for every Force a Resistance to support it, to every light a  shadow, for every Royalty a Realm to govern, for every affirmative a  negative.

For the Kabalists, Light represents the Active Principle, and Darkness or 
Shadow is analogous to the Passive Principle. Therefore it was that they  made of the Sun and Moon emblems of the two Divine Sexes and the two  creative forces; therefore, that they ascribed to woman the Temptation and  the first sin, and then the first labor, the maternal labor of the redemption,  because it is from the bosom of the darkness itself that we see the Light bom  again. The Void attracts the Full; and so it is that the abyss of poverty and  misery, the Seeming Evil, the seeming empty nothingness of life, the  temporary rebellion of the creatures, eternally attracts the overflowing ocean  of being, of riches, of pity, and of  p. 306  love. Christ completed the Atonement on the Cross by descending into Hell.

Justice and Mercy are contraries. If each be infinite, their co-existence seems  impossible, and being equal, one cannot even annihilate the other and reign  alone. The mysteries of the Divine Nature are beyond our finite  comprehension; but so indeed are the mysteries of our own finite nature; and  it is certain that in all nature harmony and movement are the result of the  equilibrium of opposing or contrary forces.

The analogy of contraries gives the solution of the most interesting and most  difficult problem of modem philosophy,—the definite and permanent accord  of Reason and Faith, of Authority and Liberty of examination, of Science and 
Belief, of Perfection in God and Imperfection in Man. If science or  knowledge is the Sun, Belief is the Man; it is a reflection of the day in the  night. Faith is the veiled Isis, the Supplement of Reason, in the shadows  which precede or follow Reason. It emanates from the Reason, but can never  confound it nor be confounded with it. The encroachments of Reason upon 
Faith, or of Faith on Reason, are eclipses of the Sun or Moon; when they  occur, they make useless both the Source of Light and its reflection, at once.

Science perishes by systems that are nothing but beliefs; and Faith succumbs  to reasoning. For the two Columns of the Temple to uphold the edifice, they  must remain separated and be parallel to each other. As soon as it is  attempted by violence to bring them together, as Samson did, they are  overturned, and the whole edifice falls upon the head of the rash blind man or  the revolutionist whore personal or national resentments have in advance  devoted to death.

Hannony is the result of an alternating preponderance of forces. Whenever  this is wanting in government, government is a failure, because it is either 
Despotism or Anarchy. All theoretical governments, however plausible the  theory, end in one or the other. Governments that are to endure are not made  in the closet of Locke or Shaftesbury, or in a Congress or a Convention. In a

Republic, forces that seem contraries, that indeed are contraries, alone give  movement and life. The Spheres are held in their orbits and made to revolve  harmoniously and unerringly, by the concurrence, which seems to be the  opposition, of two contrary forces. If the centripetal force should overcome  the centrifugal,  p. 307  and the equilibrium of forces cease, the rush of the Spheres to the Central Sun  would annihilate the system. Instead of consolidation, the whole would be  shattered into fragments.

Man is a free agent, though Omnipotence is above and all around him. To be  free to do good, he must be free to do evil. The Light necessitates, the 
Shadow. A State is free like an individual in any government worthy of the  name. The State is less potent than the Deity, and therefore the freedom of the  individual citizen is consistent with its Sovereignty. These are opposites, but  not antagonistic. So, in a union of States, the freedom of the States is  consistent with the Supremacy of the Nation. When either obtains the  permanent mastery over the other, and they cease to be in equilibria , the  encroachment continues with a velocity that is accelerated like that of a  falling body, until the feebler is annihilated, and then, there being no  resistance to support the stronger, it rushes into ruin.

So, when the equipoise of Reason and Faith, in the individual or the Nation,  and the alternating preponderance cease, the result is, according as one or the  other is permanent victor, Atheism or Superstition, disbelief or blind  credulity; and the Priests either of Unfaith or of Faith become despotic.

"Whomsoever God loveth, him he chasteneth" is an expression that  formulates a whole dogma. The trials of life are the blessings of life, to the  individual or the Nation, if either has a Soul that is truly worthy of salvation. 
"Light and darkness" said ZOROASTER, "are the world's eternal ways."

The Light and the Shadow are everywhere and always in proportion; the 
Light being the reason of being of the Shadow. It is by trials only, by the  agonies of sorrow and the sharp discipline of adversities, that men and 
Nations attain initiation. The agonies of the garden of Gethsemane and those  of the Cross on Calvary preceded the Resurrection and were the means of 
Redemption. It is with prosperity that God afflicts Humanity.

The Degree of Rose * is devoted to and symbolizes the final triumph of  truth over falsehood, of liberty over slavery, of light over darkness, of life  over death, and of good over evil. The great truth it inculcates is, that  notwithstanding the existence of Evil, God is infinitely wise, just, and good:  that though the affairs of the world proceed by no rule of right and wrong  known to us in the narrowness of our views, yet all is right, for it is the work  of  p. 308

[paragraph continues] God; and all evils, all miseries, all misfortunes, are but as drops  in the vast current that is sweeping onward, guided by Him, to a great and  magnificent result: that, at the appointed time, He will redeem and regenerate  the world, and the Principle, the Power, and the existence of Evil will then  cease; that this will be brought about by such means and instruments as He  chooses to employ; whether by the merits of a Redeemer that has already  appeared, or a Messiah that is yet waited for, by an incarnation of Himself, or  by an inspired prophet, it does not belong to us as Masons to decide. Let each  judge and believe for himself.

In the mean time, we labor to hasten the coming of that day. The morals of  antiquity, of the law of Moses and of Christianity, are ours. We recognize  every teacher of Morality, every Reformer, as a brother in this great work.

The Eagle is to us the symbol of Liberty, the Compasses of Equality, the 
Pelican of Humanity, and our order of Fraternity. Laboring for these, with 
Faith, Hope, and Charity as our armor, we will wait with patience for the final  triumph of Good and the complete manifestation of the Word of God.

No one Mason has the right to measure for another, within the walls of a 
Masonic Temple, the degree of veneration which he shall feel for any 
Reformer, or the Founder of any Religion. We teach a belief in no particular  creed, as we teach unbelief in none. Whatever higher attributes the Founder  of the Christian Faith may, in our belief, have had or not have had, none can  deny that He taught and practised a pure and elevated morality, even at the  risk and to the ultimate loss of His life. He was not only the benefactor of a  disinherited people, but a model for mankind. Devotedly He loved the  children of Israel. To them He came, and to them alone He preached that 
Gospel which His disciples afterward earned among foreigners. He would  fain have freed the chosen People from their spiritual bondage of ignorance  and degradation. As a lover of all mankind, laying down His life for the  emancipation of His Brethren, He should be to all, to Christian, to Jew, and to 
Mahometan, an object of gratitude and veneration.

The Roman world felt the pangs of approaching dissolution. Paganism, its 
Temples shattered by Socrates and Cicero, had spoken its last word. The God  of the Hebrews was unknown beyond the limits of Palestine. The old  religions had failed to give happiness and peace to the world. The babbling  and wrangling  p. 309  philosophers had confounded all men's ideas, until they doubted of  everything and had faith in nothing: neither in God nor in his goodness and  mercy, nor in the virtue of man, nor in themselves. Mankind was divided into  two great classes, the master and the slave; the powerful and the abject, the  high and the low, the tyrants and the mob; and even the former were satiated  with the servility of the latter, sunken by lassitude and despair to the lowest  depths of degradation.

When, lo, a voice, in the inconsiderable Roman Province of Judea proclaims  a new Gospel—a new "God's Word," to crushed, suffering, bleeding  humanity. Liberty of Thought, Equality of all men in the eye of God,  universal Fraternity! a new doctrine, a new religion; the old Primitive Truth  uttered once again!

Man is once more taught to look upward to his God. No longer to a God hid  in impenetrable mystery, and infinitely remote from human sympathy,  emerging only at intervals from the darkness to smite and crush humanity:  but a God, good, kind, beneficent, and merciful: a rather, loving the creatures 
He has made, with a love immeasurable and exhaustless; Who feels for us,  and sympathizes with us, and sends us pain and want and disaster only that  they may serve to develop in us the virtues and excellences that befit us to  live with Him hereafter.

Jesus of Nazareth, the "Son of man," is the expounder of the new Law of 
Love. He calls to Him the humble, the poor, the Pariahs of the world. The  first sentence that He pronounces blesses the world, and announces the new  gospel: "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted." He pours  the oil of consolation and peace upon every crushed and bleeding heart.

Every sufferer is His proselyte. He shares their sorrows, and sympathizes  with all their afflictions.

He raises up the sinner and the Samaritan woman, and teaches them to hope  for forgiveness. He pardons the woman taken in adultery. He selects his  disciples not among the Pharisees or the Philosophers, but among the low and  humble, even of the fishermen of Galilee. He heals the sick and feeds the  poor. He lives among the destitute and the friendless. "Suffer little children," 
He said, "to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven! Blessed are  the humble-minded, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven; the meek, for they  shall inherit the Earth; the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy; the pure in  heart, for they shall see  p. 310

[paragraph continues] God; the peace-maker, for they shall be called the children of 
God! First be reconciled to they brother, and then come and offer thy gift at  the altar. Give to him that asketh thee, and front him that would borrow of  thee turn not away! Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to  them that hate you; and pray for them which despitefully use you and  persecute you! All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do  ye also unto them; for this is the law and the Prophets! He that taketh not his  cross, and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me. A new commandment I  give unto you, that ye love one another: as 1 have loved you, that ye also love  one another: by this shall all know that ye are My disciples. Greater love hath  no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend."

The Gospel of Love He sealed with His life. The cruelty of the Jewish 
Priesthood, the ignorant ferocity of the mob, and the Roman indifference to  barbarian blood, nailed Him to the cross, and He expired uttering blessings  upon humanity.

Dying thus, He bequeathed His teachings to man as an inestimable  inheritance. Perverted and corrupted, they have served as a basis for many  creeds, and been even made the warrant for in-tolerance and persecution. We  here teach them in their purity. They are our Masonry; for to them good men  of all creeds can subscribe.

That God is good and merciful, and loves and sympathizes with the creatures 
He has made; that His finger is visible in all the movements of the moral,  intellectual, and material universe; that we are His children, the objects of His  paternal care and regard; that all men are our brothers, whose wants we are to  supply, their errors to pardon, their opinions to tolerate, their injuries to  forgive; that man has an immortal soul, a free will, a right to freedom of  thought and action; that all men are equal in God's sight; that we best serve 
God by humility, meekness, gentleness, kindness, and the other virtues which  the lowly can practise as well as the lofty; this is "the new Law," the 
"WORD," for which the world had waited and pined so long; and every true 
Knight of the Rose * will revere the memory of Him who taught it, and look  indulgently even on those who assign to Him a character far above his own  conceptions or belief, even to the extent of deeming Him Divine.

Hear Philo, the Greek Jew. "The contemplative soul, unequally  p. 311  guided, sometimes toward abundance and sometimes toward barrenness,  though ever advancing, is illuminated by the primitive ideas, the rays that  emanate from the Divine Intelligence, whenever it ascends toward the 
Sublime Treasures. When, on the contrary, it descends, and is barren, it falls  within the domain of those Intelligences that are termed Angels. . . for, when  the soul is deprived of the light of God, which leads it to the knowledge of  things, it no longer enjoys more than a feeble and secondary light, which  gives it, not the understanding of things, but that of words only, as in this  baser world. . . ."

. . Let the narrow-souled withdraw, having their ears sealed up! We  communicate the divine mysteries to those only who have received the sacred  initiation, to those who practise true piety, and who are not enslaved by the  empty pomp of words, or the doctrines of the pagans. . . .

. . O, ye Initiates, ye whose ears are purified, receive this in your souls, as a  mystery never to be lost! Reveal it to no Profane! Keep and contain it within  yourselves, as an incorruptible treasure, not like gold or silver, but more  precious than everything besides; for it is the knowledge of the Great Cause,  of Nature, and of that which is bom of both. And if you meet an Initiate, be¬  siege him with your prayers, that he conceal from you no new mysteries that  he may know, and rest not until you have obtained them! For me, although I  was initiated in the Great Mysteries by Moses, the Friend of God, yet, having  seen Jeremiah, I recognized him not only as an Initiate, but as a Hierophant;  and I follow his school."

We, like him, recognize all Initiates as our Brothers. We belong to no one  creed or school. In all religions there is a basis of Truth; in all there is pure 
Morality. All that teach the cardinal tenets of Masonry we respect; all  teachers and reformers of mankind we admire and revere.

Masonry also has her mission to perform. With her traditions .reaching back  to the earliest times, and her symbols dating further back than even the  monumental history of Egypt extends, she invites all men of all religions to  enlist under her banners and to war against evil, ignorance, and wrong. You  are now her knight, and to her service your sword is consecrated. May you  prove a worthy soldier in a worthy cause!

MORALS AND DOGMA. 
COUNCIL OF KADOSH.

XIX.

GRAND PONTIFF.

THE true Mason labors for the benefit of those who are to  come after him, and for the advancement and improvement of  his race. That is a poor ambition which contents itself within  the limits of a single life. All men who deserve to live, desire  to survive their funerals, and to live afterward in the good that  they have done mankind, rather than in the fading characters  written in men's memories. Most men desire to leave some  work behind them that may outlast their own day and brief  generation. That is an instinctive impulse, given by God, and  often found in the rudest human heart; the surest proof of the  soul's immortality, and of the fundamental difference between  man and the wisest brutes. To plant the trees that, after we are  dead, shall shelter our children, is as natural as to love the  shade of those our fathers planted. The rudest unlettered  husbandman, painfully conscious of his own inferiority, the  poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to those who  pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint  themselves to educate their child, that he may take a higher  station in the world than they;—and of such are the world's  greatest benefactors.

In his influences that survive him, man becomes immortal,  before the general resurrection. The Spartan mother, who,  giving her son his shield, said, "WITH IT, OR UPON IT!"  afterward shared the government of Lacedaemon with the  legislation of Lycurgus; for she too made a law, that lived  after her; and she inspired the Spartan soldiery that afterward  demolished the walls of Athens, and aided Alexander to  conquer the Orient. The widow who gave Marion the fiery  arrows to bum her own house, that it might no longer shelter  the enemies of her infant country, the house where she had  lain upon her husband's bosom, and where her children had  been born, legislated more effectually for her State than 
Locke or Shaftesbury, or than many a Legislature has done,  since that State won its freedom.

It was of slight importance to the Kings of Egypt and the  p. 313

[paragraph continues] Monarchs of Assyria and Phoenicia, that the son  of a Jewish woman, a foundling, adopted by the daughter of 
Sesostris Ramses, slew an Egyptian that oppressed a Hebrew  slave, and fled into the desert, to remain there forty years. But 
Moses, who might other-wise have become Regent of Lower 
Egypt, known to us only by a tablet on a tomb or monument,  became the deliverer of the Jews, and led them forth from 
Egypt to the frontiers of Palestine, and made for them a law,  out of which grew the Christian faith; and so has shaped the  destinies of the world. He and the old Roman lawyers, with 
Alfred of England, the Saxon Thanes and Norman Barons, the  old judges and chancellors, and the makers of the canons, lost  in the mists and shadows of the Past, these are our legislators;  and we obey the laws that they enacted.

Napoleon died upon the barren rock of his exile. His bones,  borne to France by the son of a King, rest in the Hopital des 
Invalides, in the great city on the Seine. His Thoughts still  govern France. He, and not the People, dethroned the 
Bourbon, and drove the last King of the House of Orleans into  exile. He, in his coffin, and not the People, voted the crown to  the Third Napoleon; and he, and not the Generals of France  and England, led their united forces against the grim Northern 
Despotism.

Mahomet announced to the Arabian idolaters the new creed, 
"There is but one God, and Mahomet, like Moses and Christ,  is His Apostle." For many years unaided, then with the help of  his family and a few friends, then with many disciples, and  last of all with an army, he taught and preached the Koran.

The religion of the wild Arabian enthusiast converting the  fiery Tribes of the Great Desert, spread over Asia, built up the 
Saracenic dynasties, conquered Persia and India, the Greek 
Empire, Northern Africa, and Spain, and dashed the surges of  its fierce soldiery against the battlements of Northern 
Christendom. The law of Mahomet still governs a fourth of  the human race; and Turk and Arab, Moor and Persian and 
Hindu, still obey the Prophet, and pray with their faces turned  toward Mecca; and he, and not the living, rules and reigns in  the fairest portions of the Orient.

Confucius still enacts the law for China; and the thoughts and  ideas of Peter the Great govern Russia. Plato and the other  great Sages of Antiquity still reign as the Kings of 
Philosophy, and have dominion over the human intellect. The  great Statesmen of the Past still preside in the Councils of 
Nations. Burke still  p. 314  lingers in the House of Commons; and Berryer's sonorous  tones will long ring in the Legislative Chambers of France. 
The influences of Webster and Calhoun, conflicting, rent  asunder the American States, and the doctrine of each is the  law and the oracle speaking from the Holy of Holies for his  own State and all consociated with it: a faith preached and  proclaimed by each at the cannon's mouth and consecrated by  rivers of blood.

It has been well said, that when Tamerlane had builded his  pyramid of fifty thousand human skulls, and wheeled away  with his vast armies from the gates of Damascus, to find new  conquests, and build other pyramids, a little boy was playing  in the streets of Mentz, son of a poor artisan, whose apparent  importance in the scale of beings was, compared with that of 
Tamerlane, as that of a grain of sand to the giant bulk of the  earth; but Tamerlane and all his shaggy legions, that swept  over the East like a hurricane, have passed away, and become  shadows; while printing, the wonderful invention of John 
Faust, the boy of Mentz, has exerted a greater influence on  man's destinies and overturned more thrones and dynasties  than all the victories of all the blood-stained conquerors from 
Nimrod to Napoleon.

Long ages ago, the Temple built by Solomon and our Ancient 
Brethren sank into ruin, when the Assyrian Armies sacked 
Jerusalem. The Holy City is a mass of hovels cowering under  the dominion of the Crescent; and the Holy Land is a desert. 
The Kings of Egypt and Assyria, who were contemporaries of 
Solomon, are forgotten, and their histories mere fables. The 
Ancient Orient is a shattered wreck, bleaching on the shores  of Time. The Wolf and the Jackal howl among the mins of 
Thebes and of Tyre, and the sculptured images of the Temples  and Palaces of Babylon and Nineveh are dug from their mins  and carried into strange lands. But the quiet and peaceful 
Order, of which the Son of a poor Phoenician Widow was one  of the Grand Masters, with the Kings of Israel and Tyre, has  continued to increase in stature and influence, defying the  angry waves of time and the storms of persecution. Age has  not weakened its wide foundations, nor shattered its columns,  nor marred the beauty of its harmonious proportions. Where  mde barbarians, in the time of Solomon, peopled inhospitable  howling wildernesses, in France and Britain, and in that New 
World, not known to Jew or Gentile, until the glories of the 
Orient had faded, that Order has builded  p. 315  new Temples, and teaches to its millions of Initiates those  lessons of peace, good-will, and toleration, of reliance on God  and confidence in man, which it learned when Hebrew and 
Giblemite worked side by side on the slopes of Lebanon, and  the Servant of Jehovah and the Phoenician Worshipper of Bel  sat with the humble artisan in Council at Jerusalem.

It is the Dead that govern. The Living only obey. And if the 
Soul sees, after death, what passes on this earth, and watches  over the welfare of those it loves, then must its greatest  happiness consist in seeing the current of its beneficent  influences widening out from age to age, as rivulets widen  into rivers, and aiding to shape the destinies of individuals,  families, States, the World; and its bitterest punishment, in  seeing its evil influences causing mischief and misery, and  cursing and afflicting men, long after the frame it dwelt in has  become dust, and when both name and memory are forgotten.

We know not who among the Dead control our destinies. The  universal human race is linked and bound together by those  influences and sympathies, which in the truest sense do make  men's fates. Humanity is the unit, of which the man is but a  fraction. What other men in the Past have done, said, thought,  makes the great iron network of circumstance that environs  and controls us all. We take our faith on trust. We think and  believe as the Old Lords of Thought command us; and Reason  is powerless before Authority.

We would make or annul a particular contract; but the

Thoughts of the dead Judges of England, living when their  ashes have been cold for centuries, stand between us and that  which we would do, and utterly forbid it. We would settle our  estate in a particular way; but the prohibition of the English 
Parliament, its uttered Thought when the first or second 
Edward reigned, comes echoing down the long avenues of  time, and tells us we shall not exercise the power .of  disposition as we wish. We would gain a particular advantage  of another; and the thought of the old Roman lawyer who died  before Justinian, or that of Rome's great orator Cicero,  annihilates the act, or makes the intention ineffectual. This  act, Moses forbids; that, Alfred. We would sell our land; but  certain marks on a perishable paper tell us that our father or  remote ancestor ordered otherwise; and the arm of the dead,  emerging from the grave, with peremptory gesture prohibits  p. 316  the alienation. About to sin or err, the thought or wish of our  dead mother, told us when we were children, by words that  died upon the air in the utterance, and many a long year were  forgotten, flashes on our memory, and holds us back with a  power that is resistless.

Thus we obey the dead; and thus shall the living, when we are  dead, for weal or woe, obey us. The Thoughts of the Past are  the Laws of the Present and the Future. That which we say  and do, if its effects last not beyond our lives, is unimportant. 
That which shall live when we are dead, as part of the great  body of law enacted by the dead, is the only act worth doing,  the only Thought worth speaking. The desire to do something  that shall benefit the world, when neither praise nor obloquy  will reach us where we sleep soundly in the grave, is the  noblest ambition entertained by man.

It is the ambition of a true and genuine Mason. Knowing the  slow processes by which the Deity brings about great results,  he does not expect to reap as well as sow, in a single lifetime. 
It is the inflexible fate and noblest destiny, with rare  exceptions, of the great and good, to work, and let others reap  the harvest of their labors. He who does good, only to be  repaid in kind, or in thanks and gratitude, or in reputation and  the world's praise, is like him who loans his money, that he  may, after certain months, receive it back with interest. To be  repaid for eminent services with slander, obloquy, or ridicule,  or at best with stupid indifference or cold ingratitude, as it is  common, so it is no misfortune, except to those who lack the  wit to see or sense to appreciate the service, or the nobility of  soul to thank and reward with eulogy, the benefactor of his  kind. His influences live, and the great Future will obey;  whether it recognize or disown the lawgiver..

Miltiades was fortunate that he was exiled; and Aristides that  he was ostracized, because men wearied of hearing him called 
"The Just." Not the Redeemer was unfortunate; but those only  who repaid Him for the inestimable gift He offered them, and  for a life passed in toiling for their good, by nailing Him upon  the cross, as though He had been a slave or malefactor. The  persecutor dies and rots, and Posterity utters his name with  execration: but his victim's memory he has unintentionally  made glorious and immortal.

If not for slander and persecution, the Mason who would  benefit  p. 317  his race must look for apathy and cold indifference in those  whose good he seeks, in those who ought to seek the good of  others. Except when the sluggish depths of the Human Mind  are broken up and tossed as with a storm, when at the  appointed time a great Reformer comes, and a new Faith  springs up and grows with supernatural energy, the progress  of Truth is slower than the growth of oaks; and he who plants  need not expect to gather. The Redeemer, at His death, had  twelve disciples, and one betrayed and one deserted and  denied Him. It is enough for us to know that the fruit will  come in its due season. When, or who shall gather it, it does  not in the least concern us to know. It is our business to plant  the seed. It is God's right to give the fruit to whom He  pleases; and if not to us, then is our action by so much the  more noble.

To sow, that others may reap; to work and plant for those who  are to occupy the earth when we are dead; to project our  influences far into the Iliture, and live beyond our time; to rule  as the Kings of Thought, over men who are yet unborn; to  bless with the glorious gifts of Truth and Light and Liberty  those who will neither know the name of the giver, nor care in  what grave his unregarded ashes repose, is the true office of a 
Mason and the proudest destiny of a man.

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are  produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work  of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid. The 
Volcano and the Earthquake, the Tornado and the Avalanche,  leap suddenly into full life and fearful energy, and smite with  an unexpected blow. Vesuvius buried Pompeii and 
Herculaneum in a night; and Lisbon fell prostrate before God  in a breath, when the earth rocked and shuddered; the Alpine  village vanishes and is erased at one bound of the avalanche;  and the ancient forests fall like grass before the mower, when  the tornado leaps upon them. Pestilence slays its thousands in  a day; and the storm in a night strews the sand with shattered  navies.

The Gourd of the Prophet Jonah grew up, and was withered,  in a night. But many years ago, before the Norman Conqueror  stamped his mailed foot on the neck of prostrate Saxon 
England, some wandering barbarian, of the continent then  unknown to the world, in mere idleness, with hand or foot,  covered an acorn with a little earth, and passed on regardless,  on his journey to the dim  p. 318

[paragraph continues] Past. He died and was forgotten; but the acorn  lay there still, the mighty force within it acting in the  darkness. A tender shoot stole gently up; and fed by the light  and air and frequent dews, put forth its little leaves, and lived,  because the elk or buffalo chanced not to place his foot upon  and crush it. The years marched onward, and the shoot  became a sapling, and its green leaves went and came with 
Spring and Autumn. And still the years came and passed  away again, and William, the Norman Bastard, parcelled 
England out among his Barons, and still the sapling grew, and  the dews fed its leaves, and the birds builded their nests  among its small limbs for many generations. And still the  years came and went, and the Indian hunter slept in the shade  of the sapling, and Richard Lion-Heart fought at Acre and 
Ascalon, and John's bold Barons wrested from him the Great 
Charter; and to! the sapling had become a tree; and still it  grew, and thrust its great arms wider abroad, and lifted its  head still higher toward the Heavens; strong-rooted, and  defiant of the storms that roared and eddied through its  branches; and when Columbus ploughed with his keels the  unknown Western Atlantic, and Cortez and Pizarro bathed the  cross in blood; and the Puritan, the Huguenot, the Cavalier,  and the follower of Penn sought a refuge and a resting-place  beyond the ocean, the Great Oak still stood, firm-rooted,  vigorous, stately, haughtily domineering over all the forest,  heedless of all the centuries that had hurried past since the  wild Indian planted the little acorn in the forest;—a stout and  hale old tree, with wide circumference shading many a rood  of ground; and fit to furnish timbers for a ship, to carry the  thunders of the Great Republic's guns around the world. And  yet, if one had sat and watched it every instant, from the  moment when the feeble shoot first pushed its way to the light  until the eagles built among its branches, he would never have  seen the tree or sapling grow.

Many long centuries ago, before the Chaldasan Shepherds  watched the Stars, or Shufu built the Pyramids, one could  have sailed in a seventy-four where now a thousand islands  gem the surface of the Indian Ocean; and the deep-sea lead  would nowhere have found any bottom. But below these  waves were myriads upon myriads, beyond the power of 
Arithmetic to number, of minute existences, each a perfect  living creature, made by the Almighty Creator, and fashioned  by Him for the work it had to do. There they toiled beneath  the waters, each doing its allotted work,  p. 319  and wholly ignorant of the result which God intended. They  lived and died, incalculable in numbers and almost infinite in  the succession of their generations, each adding his mite to  the gigantic work that went on there under God's direction. 
Thus hath He chosen to create great Continents and Islands;  and still the coral-insects live and work, as when they made  the rocks that underlie the valley of the Ohio.

Thus God hath chosen to create. Where now is firm land,  once chafed and thundered the great primeval ocean. For ages  upon ages the minute shields of infinite myriads of infusoria,  and the stony stems of encrinites sunk into its depths, and  there, under the vast pressure of its waters, hardened into  limestone. Raised slowly from the Profound by His hand, its  quarries underlie the soil of all the continents, hundreds of  feet in thickness; and we, of these remains of the countless  dead, build tombs and palaces, as the Egyptians, whom we  call ancient, built their pyramids.

On all the broad lakes and oceans the Great Sun looks  earnestly and lovingly, and the invisible vapors rise ever up to  meet him. No eye but God's beholds them as they rise. There,  in the upper atmosphere, they are condensed to mist, and  gather into clouds, and float and swim around in the ambient  air. They sail with its currents, and hover over the ocean, and  roll in huge masses round the stony shoulders of great  mountains. Condensed still more by change of temperature,  they drop upon the thirsty earth in gentle showers, or pour  upon it in heavy rains, or storm against its bosom at the angry 
Equinoctial. The shower, the rain, and the storm pass away,  the clouds vanish, and the bright stars again shine clearly  upon the glad earth. The rain-drops sink into the ground, and  gather in subterranean reservoirs, and run in subterranean  channels, and bubble up in springs and fountains; and from  the mountain-sides and heads of valleys the silver threads of  water begin their long journey to the ocean. Uniting, they  widen into brooks and rivulets, then into streams and rivers;  and, at last, a Nile, a Ganges, a Danube, an Amazon, or a 
Mississippi rolls between its banks, mighty, majestic, and  resistless, creating vast alluvial valleys to be the granaries of  the world, ploughed by the thousand keels of commerce and  serving as great highways, and as the impassable boundaries  of rival nations; ever returning to the ocean the drops that rose  from it in vapor, and descended in rain and snow and hail  upon the level plains and lofty mountains;  p. 320  and causing him to recoil for many a mile before the head¬  long rush of their great tide.

So it is with the aggregate of Human endeavor. As the  invisible particles of vapor combine and coalesce to form the  mists and clouds that fall in rain on thirsty continents, and  bless the great green forests and wide grassy prairies, the  waving meadows and the fields by which men live; as the  infinite myriads of drops that the glad earth drinks are  gathered into springs and rivulets and rivers, to aid in  levelling the mountains and elevating the plains, and to feed  the large lakes and restless oceans; so all Human Thought,  and Speech and Action, all that is done and said and thought  and suffered upon the Earth combine together, and flow  onward in one broad resistless current toward those great  results to which they are determined by the will of God.

We build slowly and destroy swiftly. Our Ancient Brethren  who built the Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows  felled, hewed, and squared the cedars, and quarried the stones,  and carved the intricate ornaments, which were to be the 
Temples. Stone after stone, by the combined effort and long  toil of Apprentice, Fellow-Craft, and Master, the walls arose;  slowly the roof was framed and fashioned; and many years  elapsed before, at length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and  ready for the Worship of God, gorgeous in the sunny  splendors of the atmosphere of Palestine. So they were built.

A single motion of the arm of a rude, barbarous Assyrian 
Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of Titus,  moved by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the  blazing brand; and, with no further human agency, a few short  hours sufficed to consume and melt each Temple to a  smoking mass of black unsightly ruin.

Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!

The issues are with God: To do, 
Of right belongs to us.

Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not  discouraged at men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies,  nor tired of their indifference! Care not for returns and results;  but see only what there is to do, and do it, leaving the results  to God! Soldier of the Cross! Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth,  and Toleration! Good Knight and True! be patient and work!

The Apocalypse, that sublime Kabalistic and prophetic 
Summary  p. 321  of all the occult figures, divides its images into three 
Septenaries, after each of which there is silence in Heaven. 
There are Seven Seals to be opened, that is to say, Seven  mysteries to know, and Seven difficulties to overcome, Seven  trumpets to sound, and Seven cups to empty.

The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth 
Degree, the Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to 
God alone, and despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. 
LUCIFER, the Light-bearer ! Strange and mysterious name to  give to the Spirit of Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the 
Morning! Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors  intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or selfish Souls? Doubt it  not! for traditions are frill of Divine Revelations and 
Inspirations: and Inspiration is not of one Age nor of one 
Creed. Plato and Philo, also, were inspired.

The Apocalypse, indeed, is a book as obscure as the Sohar.

It is written hieroglyphically with numbers and images; and  the Apostle often appeals to the intelligence of the Initiated. 
"Let him who hath knowledge, understand! let him who  understands, calculate!" he often says, after an allegory or the  mention of a number. Saint John, the favorite Apostle, and the 
Depositary of all the Secrets of the Saviour, therefore did not  write to be understood by the multitude.

The Sephar Yezirah, the Sohar, and the Apocalypse are the  completest embodiments of Occultism. They contain more  meanings than words; their expressions are figurative as  poetry and exact as numbers. The Apocalypse sums up,  completes, and surpasses all the Science of Abraham and of 
Solomon. The visions of Ezekiel, by the river Chebar, and of  the new Symbolic Temple, are equally mysterious  expressions, veiled by figures of the enigmatic dogmas of the

Kabalah, and their symbols are as little understood by the 
Commentators, as those of Free Masonry.

The Septenary is the Crown of the Numbers, because it unites  the Triangle of the Idea to the Square of the Form.

The more the great Hierophants were at pains to conceal then-  absolute Science, the more they sought to add grandeur to and  multiply its symbols. The huge pyramids, with then triangular  sides of elevation and square bases, represented their 
Metaphysics, founded upon the knowledge of Nature. That  knowledge of Nature had for its symbolic key the gigantic  form of that huge Sphinx, which has hollowed its deep bed in  the sand, while keeping  p. 322  watch at the feet of the Pyramids. The Seven grand  monuments called the Wonders of the World, were the  magnificent Commentaries on the Seven lines that composed  the Pyramids, and on the Seven mystic gates of Thebes.

The Septenary philosophy of Initiation among the Ancients  may be summed up thus:

Three Absolute Principles which are but One Principle: four  elementary forms which are but one; all forming a Single 
Whole, compounded of the Idea and the Fonn.

The three Principles were these:

1°. BEING IS BEING.

In Philosophy, identity of the Idea and of Being or Verity; in 
Religion, the first Principle, THE FATHER.

2°. BEING IS REAL.

In Philosophy, identity of Knowing and of Being or Reality;  in Religion, the Logos of Plato, the Demiourgos, the WORD.

3°. BEING IS LOGIC.

In Philosophy, identity of the Reason and Reality; in Religion, 
Providence, the Divine Action that makes real the Good, that  which in Christianity we call THE HOLY SPIRIT.

The union of all the Seven colors is the White, the analogous  symbol of the GOOD: the absence of all is the Black, the  analogous symbol of the EVIL. There are three primary  colors, Red, Yellow, and Blue', and four secondary, Orange, 
Green, Indigo, and Violet', and all these God displays to man  in the rainbow; and they have their analogies also in the moral  and intellectual world. The same number, Seven, continually  reappears in the Apocalypse, compounded of three and four,  and these numbers relate to the last Seven of the Sephiroth,  three answering to BENIGNITY or MERCY, SEVERITY or 
JUSTICE, and BEAUTY or HARMONY; and four to

Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malakoth, VICTORY, GLORY, 
STABILITY, and DOMINATION. The same numbers also  represent the first three Sephiroth, KETHER, KHOKMAH,  and BAINAH, or Will, Wisdom, and Understanding, which,  with DAATH or Intellection or Thought, are also four, 
DAATH not being regarded as a Sephirah, not as the Deity  acting, or as a potency, energy, or attribute, but as the Divine 
Action.

The Sephiroth are commonly figured in the Kabalah as  constituting a human form, the ADAM KADMON or 
MACROCOSM. Thus arranged, the universal law of 
Equipoise is three times exemplified.  p. 323

[paragraph continues] From that of the Divine Intellectual, Active, 
Masculine ENERGY, and the Passive CAPACITY to produce 
Thought, the action of THINKING results. From that of 
BENIGNITY and SEVERITY, HARMONY flows; and from  that of VICTORY or an Infinite overcoming, and GLORY,  which, being Infinite, would seem to forbid the existence of  obstacles or opposition, results STABILITY or 
PERMANENCE, which is the perfect DOMINION of the 
Infinite WILL.

The last nine Sephiroth are included in, at the same time that  they have flowed forth from, the first of all, KETHER, or the 
CROWN. Each also, in succession flowed from, and yet still  remains included in, the one preceding it. The Will of God  includes His Wisdom, and His Wisdom is His Will specially  developed and acting. This Wisdom is the Logos that creates,  mistaken and personified by Simon Magus and the succeeding 
Gnostics. By means of its utterance, the letter YOD, it creates  the worlds, first in the Divine Intellect as an Idea, which  invested with form became the fabricated World, the Universe  of material reality. YOD and HE, two letters of the Ineffable 
Name of the Manifested Deity, represent the Male and the 
Female, the Active and the Passive in Equilibrium, and the 
VAV completes the Trinity and the Triliteral Name W\ the 
Divine Triangle, which with the repetition of the He becomes  the Tetragrammaton.

Thus the ten Sephiroth contain all the Sacred Numbers, three,  five, seven, and nine, and the perfect Number Ten, and  correspond with the Tetractys of Pythagoras.

BEING Is BEING, rPHN ITON, Ahayah Asar Ahayah. This  is the Principle, the "BEGINNING."

In the Beginning was, that is to say, IS, WAS, and WILL BE,  the WORD, that is to say, the REASON that Speaks.

Ev apxfl n v O Aoyo<;!

The Word is the reason of belief, and in it also is the  expression of the Faith which makes. Science a living thing. 
The Word,. Aoyoc, is the Source of Logic. Jesus is the Word 
Incarnate. The accord of the Reason with Faith, of Knowledge  with Belief, of Authority, with Liberty, has become in modem  times the veritable enigma of the Sphinx.

It is WISDOM that, in the Kabalistic Books of the Proverbs  and Ecclesiasticus, is the Creative Agent of God. Elsewhere  in the Hebrew writings it is miT mi. Debar Iahavah, the 
Word of God.  p. 324

[paragraph continues] It is by His uttered Word that God reveals 
Himself to us; not alone in the visible and invisible but  intellectual creation, but also in our convictions,  consciousness, and instincts. Hence it is that certain beliefs  are universal. The conviction of all men that God is good led  to a belief in a Devil, the fallen Lucifer or Light-bearer, 
Shaitan the Adversary, Ahriman and Tuphon, as an attempt to  explain the existence of Evil, and make it consistent with the 
Infinite Power, Wisdom, and Benevolence of God.

Nothing surpasses and nothing equals, as a Summary of all  the doctrines of the Old World, those brief words engraven by 
HERMES on a Stone, and known under the name of "The 
Tablet of Emerald'." the Unity of Being and the Unity of the 
Harmonies, ascending and descending, the progressive and  proportional scale of the Word; the immutable law of the 
Equilibrium, and the proportioned progress of the universal  analogies; the relation of the Idea to the Word, giving the  measure of the relation between the Creator and the Created,  the necessary mathematics of the Infinite, proved by the  measures of a single comer of the Finite;—all this is expressed  by this single proposition of the Great Egyptian Hierophant:

" What is Superior is as that which is Inferior, and what is 
Below is as that which is Above, to form the Marvels of the 
Unity."

XX.

GRAND MASTER OF ALL SYMBOLIC LODGES.

THE true Mason is a practical Philosopher, who, under  religious emblems, in all ages adopted by wisdom, builds  upon plans traced by nature and reason the moral edifice of  knowledge. He ought to find, in the symmetrical relation of  all the parts of this rational edifice, the principle and rule of  all his duties, the source of all his pleasures. He improves his  moral nature, becomes a better man, and finds in the reunion  of virtuous men, assembled with pure views, the means of  multiplying his acts of beneficence. Masonry and Philosophy,  without being one and the same thing, have the same object,  and propose to themselves the same end, the worship of the 
Grand Architect of the Universe, acquaintance and familiarity  with the wonders of nature, and the happiness of humanity  attained by the constant practice of all the virtues.

As Grand Master of all Symbolic Lodges, it is your especial  duty to aid in restoring Masonry to its primitive purity. You  have become an instructor. Masonry long wandered in error. 
Instead of improving, it degenerated from its primitive  simplicity, and retrograded toward a system, distorted by  stupidity and ignorance, which, unable to construct a beautiful  machine, made a complicated one. Less than two hundred  years ago, its organization was simple, and altogether moral,  its emblems, allegories, and ceremonies easy to be  understood, and their purpose and object readily to be seen. It  was then confined to a very small number of Degrees. Its  constitutions were like those of a Society of Essenes, written  in the first century of our era. There could be seen the  primitive Christianity, organized into Masonry, the school of 
Pythagoras without incongruities or absurdities; a Masonry  simple and significant, in which it was not necessary to  torture the mind to discover reasonable interpretations; a 
Masonry at once religious and philosophical, worthy of a  good citizen and an enlightened philanthropist.

Innovators and inventors overturned that primitive simplicity.  p. 326

[paragraph continues] Ignorance engaged in the work of making 
Degrees, and trifles and gewgaws and pretended mysteries,  absurd or hideous, usurped the place of Masonic Truth. The  picture of a horrid vengeance, the poniard and the bloody  head, appeared in the peacelul Temple of Masonry, without  sufficient explanation of their symbolic meaning: Oaths out of  all proportion with their object, shocked the candidate, and  then became ridiculous, and were wholly disregarded. 
Acolytes were exposed to tests, and compelled to perform  acts, which, if real, would have been abominable; but being  mere chimeras, were preposterous, and excited contempt and  laughter only. Eight hundred Degrees of one kind and another  were invented: Infidelity and even Jesuitry were taught under  the mask of Masonry. The rituals even of the respectable 
Degrees, copied and mutilated by ignorant men, became  nonsensical and trivial; and the words so corrupted that it has  hitherto been found impossible to recover many of them at all. 
Candidates were made to degrade themselves, and to submit  to insults not tolerable to a man of spirit and honor.

Hence it was that, practically, the largest portion of the 
Degrees claimed by the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite,  and before it by the Rite of Perfection, fell into disuse, were  merely communicated, and their rituals became jejune and  insignificant. These Rites resembled those old palaces and  baronial castles, the different parts of which, built at different  periods remote from one another, upon plans and according to  tastes that greatly varied, formed a discordant and  incongruous whole. Judaism and chivalry, superstition and  philosophy, philanthropy and insane hatred and longing for  vengeance, a pure morality and unjust and illegal revenge,  were found strangely mated and standing hand in hand within  the Temples of Peace and Concord; and the whole system was  one grotesque commingling of incongruous things, of  contrasts and contradictions, of shocking and fantastic  extravagances, of parts repugnant to good taste, and fine  conceptions overlaid and disfigured by absurdities engendered  by ignorance, fanaticism, and a senseless mysticism.

An empty and sterile pomp, impossible indeed to be carried  out, and to which no meaning whatever was attached, with  far-fetched explanations that were either so many stupid  platitudes or themselves needed an interpreter; lofty titles,  arbitrarily assumed, and to which the inventors had not  condescended to attach any explanation  p. 327  that should acquit them of the folly of assuming temporal  rank, power, and titles of nobility, made the world laugh, and  the Initiate feel ashamed.

Some of these titles we retain; but they have with us meanings  entirely consistent with that Spirit of Equality which is the  foundation and peremptory law of its being of all Masonry. 
The Knight, with us, is he who devotes his hand, his heart, his  brain, to the Science of Masonry, and professes himself the 
Sworn Soldier of Truth: the Prince is he who aims to be 
Chief, [Princeps], first, leader, among his equals, in virtue  and good deeds: the Sovereign is he who, one of an order  whose members are all Sovereigns, is Supreme only because  the law and constitutions are so, which he administers, and by  which he, like every other brother, is governed. The titles, 
Puissant, Potent, Wise, and Venerable, indicate that power of 
Virtue, Intelligence, and Wisdom, which those ought to strive  to attain who are placed in high office by the suffrages of their  brethren: and all our other titles and designations have an  esoteric meaning, consistent with modesty and equality, and  which those who receive them should fully understand. As 
Master of a Lodge it is your duty to instruct your Brethren  that they are all so many constant lessons, teaching the lofty  qualifications which are required of those who claim them,  and not merely idle gewgaws worn in ridiculous imitation of  the times when the Nobles and Priests were masters and the  people slaves: and that, in all true Masonry, the Knight, the 
Pontiff, the Prince, and the Sovereign are but the first among  their equals: and the cordon, the clothing, and the jewel but  symbols and emblems of the virtues required of all good 
Masons.

The Mason kneels, no longer to present his petition for  admittance or to receive the answer, no longer to a man as his  superior, who is but his brother, but to his God; to whom he  appeals for the rectitude of his intentions, and whose aid he  asks to enable him to keep his vows. No one is degraded by  bending his knee to God at the altar, or to receive the honor of 
Knighthood as Bayard and Du Guesclin knelt. To kneel for  other purposes, Masonry does not require. God gave to man a  head to be borne erect, a port upright and majestic. We  assemble in our Temples to cherish and inculcate sentiments  that conform to that loftiness of bearing which the just and  upright man is entitled to maintain, and we do not require  those who desire to be admitted among us, ignominiously  p. 328  to bow the head. We respect man, because we respect  ourselves that he may conceive a lofty idea of his dignity as a  human being free and independent. If modesty is a virtue,  humility and obsequiousness to man are base: for there is a  noble pride which is the most real and solid basis of virtue. 
Man should humble himself before the Infinite God; but not  before his erring and imperfect brother.

As Master of a Lodge, you will therefore be exceedingly  careful that no Candidate, in any Degree, be. required to  submit to any degradation whatever; as has been too much the  custom in some of the Degrees: and take it as a certain and  inflexible rule, to which there is no exception, that real 
Masonry requires of no man anything to which a Knight and 
Gentleman cannot honorably, and without feeling outraged or  humiliated submit.

The Supreme Council for the Southern Jurisdiction of the 
United States at length undertook the indispensable and long-  delayed task of revising and reforming the work and rituals of  the thirty Degrees under its jurisdiction. Retaining the  essentials of the Degrees and all the means by which the  members recognize one another, it has sought out and  developed the leading idea of each Degree, rejected the  puerilities and absurdities with which many of them were  disfigured, and made of them a connected system of moral,  religious, and philosophical instruction. Sectarian of no creed,  it has yet thought it not improper to use the old allegories,  based on occurrences detailed in the Hebrew and Christian  books, and drawn from the Ancient Mysteries of Egypt, 
Persia, Greece, India, the Druids and the Essenes, as vehicles  to communicate the Great Masonic Truths; as it has used the  legends of the Crusades, and the ceremonies of the orders of 
Knighthood.

It no longer inculcates a criminal and wicked vengeance. It  has not allowed Masonry to play the assassin: to avenge the  death either of Hiram, of Charles the 1st, or of Jaques De 
Molay and the Templars. The Ancient and Accepted Scottish

Rite of Masonry has now become, what Masonry at first was  meant to be, a Teacher of Great Truths, inspired by an upright  and enlightened reason, a firm and constant wisdom, and an  affectionate and liberal philanthropy.

It is no longer a system, over the composition and  arrangement of the different parts of which, want of  reflection, chance, ignorance, and perhaps motives still more  ignoble presided; a system  p. 329  unsuited to our habits, our manners, our ideas, or the world¬  wide philanthropy and universal toleration of Masonry; or to  bodies small in number, whose revenues should be devoted to  the relief of the unfortunate, and not to empty show; no longer  a heterogeneous aggregate of Degrees, shocking by its  anachronisms and contradictions, powerless to disseminate  light, information, and moral and philosophical ideas.

As Master, you will teach those who are under you, and to  whom you will owe your office, that the decorations of many  of the Degrees are to be dispensed with, whenever the  expense would interfere with the duties of charity, relief, and  benevolence; and to be indulged in only by wealthy bodies  that will thereby do no wrong to those entitled to their  assistance. The essentials of all the Degrees may be procured  at slight expense; and it is at the option of every Brother to  procure or not to procure, as he pleases, the dress,  decorations, and jewels of any Degree other than the 14th,

18th, 30th, and 32d.

We teach the truth of none of the legends we recite. They are  to us but parables and allegories, involving and enveloping 
Masonic instruction; and vehicles of useful and interesting  information. They represent the different phases of the human  mind, its efforts and struggles to comprehend nature, God, the  government of the Universe, the permitted existence of  sorrow and evil. To teach us wisdom, and the folly of  endeavoring to explain to ourselves that which we are not  capable of understanding, we reproduce the speculations of  the Philosophers, the Kabalists, the Mystagogues and the 
Gnostics. Every one being at liberty to apply our symbols and  emblems as he thinks most consistent with truth and reason  and with his own faith, we give them such an interpretation  only as may be accepted by all. Our Degrees may be  conferred in France or Turkey, at Pekin, Ispahan, Rome, or 
Geneva, in the city of Penn or in Catholic Louisiana, upon the  subject of an absolute government or the citizen of a Free 
State, upon Sectarian or Theist. To honor the Deity, to regard  all men as our Brethren, as children, equally dear to Him, of  the Supreme Creator of the Universe, and to make himself  useful to society and himself by his labor, are its teachings to  its Initiates in all the Degrees.

Preacher of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, it desires them  to be attained by making men fit to receive them, and by the  moral power of an intelligent and enlightened People. It lays  no plots  p. 330  and conspiracies. It hatches no premature revolutions; it  encourages no people to revolt against the constituted  authorities; but recognizing the great truth that freedom  follows fitness for freedom as the corollary follows the axiom,  it strives to prepare men to govern themselves.

Where domestic slavery exists, it teaches the master humanity  and the alleviation of the condition of his slave, and moderate  correction and gentle discipline; as it teaches them to the  master of the apprentice: and as it teaches to the employers of  other men, in mines, manufactories, and workshops,  consideration and humanity for those who depend upon their  labor for their bread, and to whom want of employment is  starvation, and overwork is fever, consumption, and death.

As Master of a Lodge, you are to inculcate these duties on  your brethren. Teach the employed to be honest, punctual, and  faithful as well as respectful and obedient to all proper orders:  but also teach the employer that every man or woman who  desires to work, has a right to have work to do; and that they,  and those who from sickness or feebleness, loss of limb or of  bodily vigor, old age or infancy, are not able to work, have a  right to be fed, clothed, and sheltered from the inclement  elements: that he commits an awful sin against Masonry and  in the sight of God, if he closes his workshops or factories, or  ceases to work his mines, when they do not yield him what he  regards as sufficient profit, and so dismisses his workmen and  workwomen to starve; or when he reduces the wages of man  or woman to so low a standard that they and their families  cannot be clothed and fed and comfortably housed; or by  overwork must give him their blood and life in exchange for  the pittance of their wages: and that his duty as a Mason and 
Brother peremptorily requires him to continue to employ  those who else will be pinched with hunger and cold, or resort  to theft and vice: and to pay them fair wages, though it may  reduce or annul his profits or even eat into his capital; for God  hath but loaned him his wealth, and made him His almoner  and agent to invest it.

Except as mere symbols of the moral virtues and intellectual  qualities, the tools and implements of Masonry belong  exclusively to the fust three Degrees. They also, however,  serve to remind the Mason who has advanced further, that his  new rank is based upon the humble labors of the symbolic 
Degrees, as they are improperly termed, inasmuch as all the 
Degrees are symbolic.  p. 331

Thus the Initiates are inspired with a just idea of Masonry, to-  wit, that it is essentially WORK; both teaching and practising 
LABOR; and that it is altogether emblematic. Three kinds of  work are necessary to the preservation and protection of man  and society: manual labor, specially belonging to the three  blue Degrees; labor in arms, symbolized by the Knightly or  chivalric Degrees; and intellectual labor, belonging  particularly to the Philosophical Degrees.

We have preserved and multiplied such emblems as have a  true and profound meaning. We reject many of the old and  senseless explanations. We have not reduced Masonry to a  cold metaphysics that exiles everything belonging to the  domain of the imagination. The ignorant, and those half-wise  in reality, but over-wise in their own conceit, may assail our  symbols with sarcasms; but they are nevertheless ingenious  veils that cover the Truth, respected by all who know the  means by which the heart of man is reached and his feelings  enlisted. The Great Moralists often had recourse to allegories,  in order to instruct men without repelling them. But we have  been careful not to allow our emblems to be too obscure, so as  to require farfetched and forced interpretations. In our days,  and in the enlightened land in which we live, we do not need  to wrap ourselves in veils so strange and impenetrable, as to  prevent or hinder instruction instead of furthering it; or to  induce the suspicion that we have concealed meanings which  we communicate only to the most reliable adepts, because  they are contrary to good order or the well-being of society.

The Duties of the Class of Instructors, that is, the Masons of  the Degrees from the 4th to the 8th, inclusive, are,  particularly, to perfect the younger Masons in the words,  signs and tokens and other work of the Degrees they have  received; to explain to them the meaning of the different  emblems, and to expound the moral instruction which they  convey. And upon their report of proficiency alone can their  pupils be allowed to advance and receive an increase of  wages.

The Directors of the Work, or those of the 9 th, 10th, and 11th 
Degrees are to report to the Chapters upon the regularity,  activity and proper direction of the work of bodies in the  lower Degrees, and what is needed to be enacted for their  prosperity and usefulness. In the Symbolic Lodges, they are  particularly charged to stimulate the zeal of the workmen, to  induce them to engage in  p. 332  new labors and enterprises for the good of Masonry, their  country and mankind, and to give them fraternal advice when  they fall short of their duty; or, in cases that require it, to  invoke against them the rigor of Masonic law.

The Architects, or those of the 12th, 13th, and 14th, should be  selected from none but Brothers well instructed in the  preceding Degrees; zealous, and capable of discoursing upon  that Masonry; illustrating it, and discussing the simple  questions of moral philosophy. And one of them, at every  communication, should be prepared with a lecture,  communicating useful knowledge or giving good advice to  the Brethren.

The Knights, of the 15th and 16th Degrees, wear the sword. 
They are bound to prevent and repair, as far as may be in their  power, all injustice, both in the world and in Masonry; to  protect the weak and to bring oppressors to justice. Then-  works and lectures must be in this spirit. They should inquire  whether Masonry fulfills, as far as it ought and can, its  principal purpose, which is to succor the unfortunate. That it  may do so, they should prepare propositions to be offered in  the Blue Lodges calculated to attain that end, to put an end to  abuses, and to prevent or correct negligence. Those in the 
Lodges who have attained the rank of Knights, are most fit to  be appointed Almoners, and charged to ascertain and make  known who need and are entitled to the charity of the Order.

In the higher Degrees those only should be received who have  sufficient reading and information to discuss the great  questions of philosophy. From them the Orators of the Lodges  should be selected, as well as those of the Councils and 
Chapters. They are charged to suggest such measures as are  necessary to make Masonry entirely faithful to the spirit of its  institution, both as to its charitable purposes, and the diffusion  of light and knowledge; such as are needed to correct abuses  that have crept in, and offences against the rules and general  spirit of the Order; and such as will tend to make it, as it was  meant to be, the great Teacher of Mankind.

As Master of a Lodge, Council, or Chapter, it will be your  duty to impress upon the minds of your Brethren these views  of the general plan and separate parts of the Ancient and 
Accepted Scottish Rite; of its spirit and design; its harmony  and regularity; of the duties of the officers and members; and  of the particular lessons intended to be taught by each Degree.  p. 333

Especially you are not to allow any assembly of the body over  which you may preside, to close, without recalling to the  minds of the Brethren the Masonic virtues and duties which  are represented upon the Tracing Board of this Degree. That  is an imperative duty. Forget not that, more than three  thousand years ago, ZOROASTER said: "Be good, be kind,  be humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the  afflicted; pardon those who have done you wrong." Nor that  more than two thousand three hundred years ago 
CONFUCIUS repeated, also quoting the language of those  who had lived before himself: " Love thy neighbor as thyself: 
Do not to others what thou wouldst not wish should be done  to thyself: Forgive injuries. Forgive your enemy, be  reconciled to him, give him assistance, invoke God in his  behalf!"

Let not the morality of your Lodge be inferior to that of the 
Persian or the Chinese Philosopher.

Urge upon your Brethren the teaching and the unostentatious  practice of the morality of the Lodge, without regard to times,  places, religions, or peoples.

Urge them to love one another, to be devoted to one another,  to be faithful to the country, the government, and the laws: for  to serve the country is to pay a dear and sacred debt:

To respect all forms of worship, to tolerate all political and  religious opinions; not to blame, and still less to condemn the  religion of others: not to seek to make converts; but to be  content if they have the religion of Socrates; a veneration for  the Creator, the religion of good works, and grateful  acknowledgment of God's blessings:

To fraternize with all men; to assist all who are unfortunate;  and to cheerfully postpone their own interests to that of the 
Order:

To make it the constant rule of their lives, to think well, to  speak well, and to act well:

To place the sage above the soldier, the noble, or the prince:  and take the wise and good as their models:

To see that their professions and practice, their teachings and  conduct, do always agree:

To make this also their motto: Do that which thou oughtest to  do; let the result be what it will.

Such, my Brother, are some of the duties of that office which  you have sought to be qualified to exercise. May you perform  them well; and in so doing gain honor for yourself, and  advance the great cause of Masonry, Humanity, and Progress.

XXI.

NOACHITE, OR PRUSSIAN KNIGHT.

You are especially charged in this Degree to be modest and  humble, and not vain-glorious nor fdled with self-conceit. Be  not wiser in your own opinion than the Deity, nor find fault  with His works, nor endeavor to improve upon what He has  done. Be modest also in your intercourse with your fellows,  and slow to entertain evil thoughts of them, and reluctant to  ascribe to them evil intentions. A thousand presses, flooding  the country with their evanescent leaves, are busily and  incessantly engaged in maligning the motives and conduct of  men and parties, and in making one man think worse of  another; while, alas, scarcely one is found that ever, even  accidentally, labors to make man think better of his fellow.

Slander and calumny were never so insolently licentious in  any country as they are this day in ours. The most retiring  disposition, the most unobtrusive demeanor, is no shield  against their poisoned arrows. The most eminent public  service only makes their vituperation and invective more  eager and more unscrupulous, when he who has done such  service presents himself as a candidate for the people's  suffrages.

The evil is wide-spread and universal. No man, no woman, no  household, is sacred or safe from this new Inquisition. No act  is so pure or so praiseworthy, that the unscrupulous vender of  lies who lives by pandering to a corrupt and morbid public  appetite will not proclaim it as a crime. No motive is so  innocent or so laudable, that he will not hold it up as villainy. 
Journalism pries into the interior of private houses, gloats  over the details of domestic tragedies of sin and shame, and  deliberately invents and industriously circulates the most  unmitigated and baseless falsehoods, to coin money for those  who pursue it as a trade, or to effect a temporary result in the  wars of faction.

We need not enlarge upon these evils. They are apparent to all  and lamented over by all, and it is the duty of a Mason to do  all  p. 335  in his power to lessen, if not to remove them. With the errors  and even sins of other men, that do not personally affect us or  ours, and need not our condemnation to be odious, we have  nothing to do; and the journalist has no patent that makes him  the Censor of Morals. There is no obligation resting on us to  trumpet forth our disapproval of every wrongful or  injudicious or improper act that every other man commits.

One would be ashamed to stand on the street comers and  retail them orally for pennies.

One ought, in truth, to write or speak against no other one in  this world. Each man in it has enough to do, to watch and  keep guard over himself. Each of us is sick enough in this  great Lazaretto: and journalism and polemical writing  constantly re-mind us of a scene once witnessed in a little  hospital; where it was horrible to hear how the patients  mockingly reproached each other with their disorders and  infirmities: how one, who was wasted by consumption, jeered  at another who was bloated by dropsy: how one laughed at  another's cancer of the face; and this one again at his  neighbor's lock-jaw or squint; until at last the delirious fever-  patient sprang out of his bed, and tore away the coverings  from the wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was  to be seen but hideous misery and mutilation. Such is the  revolting work in which journalism and political partisanship,  and half the world outside of Masonry, are engaged.

Very generally, the censure bestowed upon men's acts, by  those who have appointed and commissioned themselves 
Keepers of the Public Morals, is undeserved. Often it is not  only undeserved, but praise is deserved instead of censure,  and, when the latter is not undeserved, it is always  extravagant, and therefore unjust.

A Mason will wonder what spirit they are endowed withal,  that can basely libel at a man, even, that is fallen. If they had  any nobility of soul, they would with him condole his  disasters, and drop some tears in pity of his folly and  wretchedness: and if they were merely human and not brutal, 
Nature did grievous wrong to human bodies, to curse them  with souls so cruel as to strive to add to a wretchedness  already intolerable. When a Mason hears of any man that hath  fallen into public disgrace, he should have a mind to  commiserate his mishap, and not to make him more  disconsolate. To envenom a name by libels, that already is  openly tainted, is to add stripes with an iron rod to one that is  flayed with  p. 336  whipping; and to every well-tempered mind will seem most  in-human and unmanly.

Even the man who does wrong and commits errors often has a  quiet home, a fireside of his own, a gentle, loving wife and  innocent children, who perhaps do not know of his past errors  and lapses-past and long repented of; or if they do, they love  him the better, because, being mortal, he hath erred, and being  in the image of God, he hath repented. That every blow at this  husband and father lacerates the pure and tender bosoms of  that wife and those daughters, is a consideration that doth not  stay the hand of the brutal journalist and partisan: but he  strikes home at these shrinking, quivering, innocent, tender  bosoms; and then goes out upon the great arteries of cities,  where the current of life pulsates, and holds his head erect,  and calls on his fellows to laud him and admire him, for the  chivalric act he hath done, in striking his dagger through one  heart into another tender and trusting one.

If you seek for high and strained carriages, you shall, for the  most part, meet with them in low men. Arrogance is a weed  that ever grows on a dunghill. It is from the rankness of that  soil that she hath her height and spreadings. To be modest and  unaffected with our superiors is duty; with our equals,  courtesy; with our inferiors, nobleness. There is no arrogance  so great as the proclaiming of other men's errors and faults, by  those who understand nothing but the dregs of actions, and  who make it their business to besmear deserving fames.

Public reproof is like striking a deer in the herd: it not only  wounds him, to the loss of blood, but betrays him to the  hound, his enemy.

The occupation of the spy hath ever been held' dishonorable,  and it is none the less so, now that with rare exceptions  editors and partisans have become perpetual spies upon the  actions of other men. Their malice makes them nimble-eyed,  apt to note a fault and publish it, and, with a strained  construction, to deprave even those things in which the doer's  intents were honest. Like the crocodile, they slime the way of  others, to make them fall; and when that has happened, they  feed their insulting envy on the life-blood of the prostrate. 
They set the vices of other men on high, for the gaze of the  world, and place their virtues under-ground, that none may  note them. If they cannot wound upon proofs, they will do it  upon likelihoods: and if not upon them, they  p. 337  manufacture lies, as God created the world, out of nothing;  and so corrupt the fair tempter of men's reputations; knowing  that the multitude will believe them, because affirmations are  apter to win belief, than negatives to uncredit them; and that a  lie travels faster than an eagle flies, while the contradiction  limps after it at a snail's pace, and, halting, never overtakes it. 
Nay, it is contrary to the morality of journalism, to allow a lie  to be contradicted in the place that spawned it. And even if  that great favor is conceded, a slander once raised will scarce  ever die, or fail of finding many that will allow it both a  harbor and trust.

This is, beyond any other, the age of falsehood. Once, to be  suspected of equivocation was enough to soil a gentleman's  escutcheon; but now it has become a strange merit in a  partisan or statesman, always and scrupulously to tell the  truth. Lies are part of the regular ammunition of all campaigns  and controversies, valued according as they are profitable and  effective; and are stored up and have a; market price, like  saltpetre and sulphur; being even more deadly than they.

If men weighed the imperfections of humanity, they would  breathe less condemnation. Ignorance gives disparagement a  louder tongue than knowledge does. Wise men had rather  know, than tell. Frequent dispraises are but the faults of  uncharitable wit: and it is from where there is no judgment,  that the heaviest judgment comes; for self-examination would  make all judgments charitable. If we even do know vices in  men, we can scarce show ourselves in a nobler virtue than in  the charity of concealing them: if that be not a flattery  persuading to continuance. And it is the basest office man can  fall into, to make his tongue the defamer of the worthy man..

There is but one rule for the Mason in this matter. If there be  virtues, and he is called upon to speak of him who owns them,  let him tell them forth impartially. And if there be vices mixed  with them, let him be content the world shall know them by  some other tongue than his. For if the evil-doer deserve no  pity, his wife, his parents, or his children, or other innocent  persons who love him may; and the bravo's trade, practised by  him who stabs the defenceless for a price paid by individual  or party, is really no more respectable now than it was a  hundred years ago, in Venice. Where we want experience, 
Charity bids us think the best, and leave what we know not to  the Searcher of Hearts; for mistakes,  p. 338  suspicions, and envy often injure a clear fame; and there is  least danger in a charitable construction.

And, finally, the Mason should be humble and modest toward  the Grand Architect of the Universe, and not impugn His 
Wisdom, nor set up his own imperfect sense of Right against 
His Providence and dispensations, nor attempt too rashly to  explore the Mysteries of God's Infinite Essence and  inscrutable plans, and of that Great Nature which we are not  made capable to understand.

Let him steer far away from all those vain philosophies,  which endeavor to account for all that is, without admitting  that there is a God, separate and apart from the Universe  which is his work: which erect Universal Nature into a God,  and worship it alone: which annihilate Spirit, and believe no  testimony except that of the bodily senses: which, by logical  formulas and dextrous collocation of words, make the actual,  living, guiding, and protecting God fade into the dim  mistiness of a mere abstraction and unreality, itself a mere  logical formula.

Nor let him have any alliance with those theorists who chide  the delays of Providence and busy themselves to hasten the  slow march which it has imposed upon events: who neglect  the practical, to struggle after impossibilities: who are wiser  than Heaven; know the aims and purposes of the Deity, and  can see a short and more direct means of attaining them, than  it pleases Him to employ: who would have no discords in the  great harmony of the Universe of things; but equal  distribution of property, no subjection of one man to the will  of another, no compulsory labor, and still no starvation, nor  destitution, nor pauperism.

Let him not spend his life, as they do, in building a new 
Tower of Babel; in attempting to change that which is fixed  by an in-flexible law of God's enactment: but let him, yielding  to the Superior Wisdom of Providence, content to believe that  the march of events is rightly ordered by an Infinite Wisdom,  and leads, though we cannot see it, to a great and perfect  result,—let him be satisfied to follow the path pointed out by  that Providence, and to labor for the good of the human race  in that mode in which God has chosen to enact that that good  shall be effected: and above all, let him build no Tower of 
Babel, under the belief that by ascending he will mount so  high that God will disappear or be superseded by a great  monstrous aggregate of material forces, or mere glittering,  logical formula; but, evermore, standing humbly  p. 339  and reverently upon the earth and looking with awe and  confidence toward Heaven, let him be satisfied that there is a  real God; a person, and not a fonnula; a Father and a  protector, who loves, and sympathizes, and compassionates;  and that the eternal ways by which He rules the world are  infinitely wise, no matter how far they may be above the  feeble comprehension and limited vision of man.  c

XXII.

KNIGHT OF THE ROYAL AXE OR PRINCE OF 
LIB ANUS.

SYMPATHY with the great laboring classes, respect for labor  itself, and resolution to do some good work in our day and  generation, these are the lessons of this Degree, and they are  purely Masonic. Masonry has made a working-man and his  associates the Heroes of her principal legend, and himself the  companion of Kings. The idea is as simple and true as it is  sublime. From first to last, Masonry is work. It venerates the 
Grand Architect of the Universe. It commemorates the  building of a Temple. Its principal emblems are the working  tools of Masons and Artisans. It preserves the name of the  first worker in brass and iron as one of its pass-words. When  the Brethren meet together, they are at labor. The Master is  the overseer who sets the craft to work and gives them proper  instruction. Masonry is the apotheosis of WORK.

It is the hands of brave, forgotten men that have made this  great, populous, cultivated world a world for us. It is all work,  and forgotten work. The real conquerors, creators, and eternal  proprietors of every great and civilized land are all the heroic  souls that ever were in it, each in his degree: all the men that  ever felled a forest-tree or drained a marsh, or contrived a  wise scheme, or did or said a true or valiant thing therein. 
Genuine work alone, done faithfully, is eternal, even as the 
Almighty Founder and World-builder Himself. All work is  noble: a life of ease is not for any man, nor for any God. The 
Almighty Maker is not like one who, in old immemorial ages,  having made his machine of a Universe, sits ever since, and  sees it go. Out of that belief comes Atheism. The faith in an 
Invisible, Unnamable, Directing Deity, present everywhere in  all that we see, and work, and suffer, is the essence of all faith  whatsoever.

The life of all Gods figures itself to us as a Sublime 
Earnestness,—of  p. 341

[paragraph continues] Infinite battle against Infinite labor Our highest  religion is named the Worship of Sorrow. For the Son of Man  there is no noble crown, well-worn, or even ill-worn, but is a  crown of thorns. Man's highest destiny is not to be happy, to  love pleasant things and find them. His only true unhappiness  should be that he cannot work, and get his destiny as a man  fulfilled. The day passes swiftly over, our life passes swiftly  over, and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. That  night once come, our happiness and unhappiness are  vanished, and become as things that never were. But our work  is not abolished, and has not vanished. It remains, or the want  of it remains, for endless Times and Eternities.

Whatsoever of morality and intelligence; what of patience ,  perseverance, faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity,  energy; in a word, whatsoever of STRENGTH a man has in  him, will lie written in the WORK he does. To work is to try 
himself against Nature and her unerring, everlasting laws: and  they will return true verdict as to him. The noblest Epic is a  mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty series of heroic  deeds, a mighty conquest over chaos. Deeds are greater than  words. They have a life, mute, but undeniable; and grow.

They people the vacuity of Time, and make it green and  worthy.

Labor is the truest emblem of God, the Architect and Eternal 
Maker; noble Labor, which is yet to be the King of this Earth,  and sit on the highest Throne. Men without duties to do, are  like trees planted on precipices; from the roots of which all  the earth has crumbled. Nature owns no man who is not also a 
Martyr. She scorns the man who sits screened from all work,  from want, danger, hardship, the victory over which is work;  and has all his work and battling done by other men; and yet  there are men who pride themselves that they and theirs have  done no work time out of mind. So neither have the swine.

The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men, fronting  the peril which frightens back all others, and if not  vanquished would devour them. Hercules was worshipped for  twelve labors. The Czar of Russia became a toiling  shipwright, and worked with his axe in the docks of Saardam;  and something came of that. Cromwell worked, and 
Napoleon; and effected somewhat.

There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work. 
Be he never so benighted and forgetful of his high calling,  there is  p. 342  always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works: in 
Idleness alone is there perpetual Despair. Man perfects  himself by working. Jungles are cleared away. Fair seed-fields  rise instead, and stately cities; and withal, the man himself  first ceases to be a foul unwholesome jungle and desert  thereby. Even in the meanest sort of labor, the whole soul of  man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the moment he  begins to work. Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation,  and even Despair shrink murmuring far off into their caves,  whenever the man bends himself resolutely against his task. 
Labor is life. From the inmost heart of the worker rises his 
God-given Force, the Sacred Celestial Life-essence, breathed  into him by Almighty God; and awakens him to all nobleness,  as soon as work fitly begins. By it man learns Patience, 
Courage, Perseverance, Openness to light, readiness to own  himself mistaken, resolution to do better and improve. Only  by labor will man continually learn the virtues. There is no 
Religion in stagnation and inaction; but only in activity and  exertion. There was the deepest tiuth in that saying of the old  monks, "laborare est orare." "He prayeth best who loveth  best all things both great and small;" and can man love except  by working earnestly to benefit that being whom he loves?

"Work; and therein have well-being," is the oldest of Gospels;  unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, and enduring  forever. To make Disorder, wherever found, an eternal  enemy; to attack and subdue him, and make order of him, the  subject not of Chaos, but of Intelligence and Divinity, and of  ourselves; to attack ignorance, stupidity and brute¬  mindedness, wherever found, to smite it wisely and  unweariedly, to rest not while we live and it lives, in the name  of God, this is our duty as Masons; commanded us by the 
Highest God. Even He, with his unspoken voice, more awful  than the thunders of Sinai, or the syllabled speech of the 
Hurricane, speaks to us. The Unborn Ages; the old Graves,  with their long-moldering dust speak to us. The deep Death- 
Kingdoms, the Stars in their never-resting course, all Space  and all Time, silently and continually admonish us that we too  must work while it is called to-day. Labor, wide as the Earth,  has its summit in Heaven. To toil, whether with the sweat of  the brow, or of the brain or heart, is worship,—the noblest  thing yet discovered beneath the Stars. Let the weary cease to  think that labor is a curse and doom pronounced by Deity, 
Without it there could be no true  p. 343  excellence in human nature. Without it, and pain, and sorrow,  where would be the human virtues? Where Patience, 
Perseverance, Submission, Energy, Endurance, Fortitude, 
Bravery, Disinterestedness, Self-Sacrifice, the noblest  excellencies of the Soul?

Let him who toils complain not, nor feel humiliated! Let him  look up, and see his fellow-workmen there, in God's Eternity;  they alone surviving there. Even in the weak human memory  they long survive, as Saints, as Heroes, and as Gods: they  alone survive, and people the unmeasured solitudes of Time.

To the primeval man, whatsoever good came, descended on  him (as in mere fact, it ever does) direct from God;  whatsoever duty lay visible for him, this a Supreme God had  prescribed. For the primeval man, in whom dwelt Thought,  this Universe was all a Temple, life everywhere a Worship.

Duty is with us ever; and evermore forbids us to be idle. To  work with the hands or brain, according to our requirements  and our capacities, to do that which lies before us to do, is  more honorable than rank and title. Ploughers, spinners and  builders, inventors, and men of science, poets, advocates, and  writers, all stand upon one common level, and form one  grand, innumerable host, marching ever onward since the  beginning of the world: each entitled to our sympathy and  respect, each a man and our brother.

It was well to give the earth to man as a dark mass, whereon  to labor. It was well to provide rude and unsightly materials in  the ore-bed and the forest, for him to fashion into splendor  and beauty. It was well, not because of that splendor and  beauty; but because the act creating them is better than the  things themselves; because exertion is nobler than enjoyment;  because the laborer is greater and more worthy of honor than  the idler. Masonry stands up for the nobility of labor. It is 
Heaven's great ordinance for human improvement. It has been  broken down for ages; and Masonry desires to build it up  again. It has been broken down, because men toil only  because they must, submitting to it as, in some sort, a  degrading necessity; and desiring nothing so much on earth as  to escape from it. They fulfill the great law of labor in the  letter, but break it in the spirit,: they fulfill it with the muscles,  but break it with the mind.

Masonry teaches that every idler ought to hasten to some field  of labor, manual or mental, as a chosen and coveted theatre of  improvement; but he is not impelled to do so, under the  teachings  p. 344  of an imperfect civilization. On the contrary, he sits down,  folds his hands, and blesses and glorifies himself in his  idleness. It is time that this opprobrium of toil were done  away. To be ashamed of toil; of the dingy workshop and dusty  labor-field; of the hard hand, stained with service more  honorable than that of war; of the soiled and weather-stained  gannents, on which Mother Nature has stamped, midst sun  and rain, midst fire and steam, her own heraldic honors; to be  ashamed of these tokens and titles, and envious of the  flaunting robes of imbecile idleness and vanity, is treason to 
Nature, impiety to Heaven, a breach of Heaven's great 
Ordinance. TOIL, of brain, heart, or hand, is the only true  man-hood and genuine nobility.

Labor is a more beneficent ministration than man's ignorance  comprehends, or his complainings will admit. Even when its  end is hidden from him, it is not mere blind drudgery. It is all  a training, a discipline, a development of energies, a nurse of  virtues, a school of improvement. From the poor boy who  gathers a few sticks for his mother's hearth, to the strong man  who fells the oak or guides the ship or the steam-car, every  human toiler, with every weary step and every urgent task, is  obeying a wisdom far above his own wisdom, and fulfilling a  design far beyond his own design.

The great law of human industry is this: that industry,  working either with the hand or the mind, the application of  our powers to some task, to the achievement of some result,  lies at the foundation of all human improvement. We are not  sent into the world like animals, to crop the spontaneous  herbage of the field, and then to lie down in indolent repose:  but we are sent to dig the soil and plough the sea; to do the  business of cities and the work of manufactories. The world is  the great and appointed school of industry. In an artificial  state of society, mankind is divided into the idle and the  laboring classes; but such was not the design of Providence.

Labor is man's great function, his peculiar distinction and his  privilege. From being an animal, that eats and drinks and  sleeps only, to become a worker, and with the hand of  ingenuity to pour his own thoughts into the moulds of Nature,  fashioning them into forms of grace and fabrics of  convenience, and converting them to purposes of  improvement and happiness, is the greatest possible step in  privilege.

The Earth and the Atmosphere are man's laboratory. With  p. 345  spade and plough, with mining-shafts and furnaces and  forges, with fire and steam; midst the noise and whirl of swift  and bright machinery, and abroad in the silent fields, man was  made to be ever working, ever experimenting. And while he  and all his dwellings of care and toil are borne onward with  the circling skies, and the splendors of Heaven are around  him, and their infinite depths image and invite his thought,  still in all the worlds of philosophy, in the universe of  intellect, man must be a worker. He is nothing, he can be  nothing, can achieve nothing, fulfill nothing, without  working. Without it, he can gain neither lofty improvement  nor tolerable happiness. The idle must hunt down the hours as  their prey. To them Time is an enemy, clothed with armor;  and they must kill him, or themselves die. It never yet did  answer, and it never will answer, for any man to do nothing,  to be exempt from all care and effort, to lounge, to walk, to  ride, and to feast alone. No man can live in that way. God  made a law against it: which no human power can annul, no  human ingenuity evade.

The idea that a property is to be acquired in the course of ten  or twenty years, which shall suffice for the rest of life; that by  some prosperous traffic or grand speculation, all the labor of a  whole life is to be accomplished in a brief portion of it; that  by dexterous management, a large part of the term of human  existence is to be exonerated from the cares of industry and  self-denial, is founded upon a grave mistake, upon a  misconception of the true nature and design of business, and  of the conditions of human well-being. The desire of  accumulation for the sake of securing a life of ease and  gratification, of escaping from exertion and self-denial, is  wholly wrong, though very common.

It is better for the Mason to live while he lives, and enjoy life  as it passes: to live richer and die poorer. It is best of all for  him to banish from the mind that empty dream of future  indolence and indulgence; to address himself to the business  of life, as the school of his earthly education; to settle it with  himself now that independence, if he gains it, is not to give  him exemption from employment. It is best for him to know,  that, in order to be a happy man, he must always be a laborer,  with the mind or the body, or with both: and that the  reasonable exertion of his powers, bodily and mental, is not to  be regarded as mere drudgery, but as a good discipline, a wise  ordination, a training in this primary school of our being, for  nobler endeavors, and spheres of higher activity hereafter.  p. 346

There are reasons why a Mason may lawfully and even  earnestly desire a fortune. If he can fill some fine palace, itself  a work of art, with the productions of lofty genius; if he can  be the friend and helper of humble worth; if he can seek it out,  where failing health or adverse fortune presses it hard, and  soften or stay the bitter hours that are hastening it to madness  or to the grave; if he can stand between the oppressor and his  prey, and bid the fetter and the dungeon give up their victim;  if he can build up great institutions of learning, and academies  of art; if he can open fountains of knowledge for the people,  and conduct its streams in the right channels; if he can do  better for the poor than to bestow alms upon them—even to  think of them, and devise plans for their elevation in  knowledge and virtue, instead of forever opening the old  reservoirs and resources for their improvidence; if he has  sufficient heart and soul to do all this, or part of it; if wealth  would be to him the handmaid of exertion, facilitating effort,  and giving success to endeavor; then may he lawfully, and yet  warily and modestly, desire it. But if it is to do nothing for  him, but to minister ease and indulgence, and to place his  children in the same bad school, then there is no reason why  he should desire it.

What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of  labor, either of the body or of the mind? What is history, but  its record? What are the treasures of genius and art, but its  work? What are cultivated fields, but its toil? The busy marts,  the rising cities, the enriched empires of the world are but the  great treasure-houses of labor. The pyramids of Egypt, the  castles and towers and temples of Europe, the buried cities of 
Italy and Mexico, the canals and railroads of Christendom, are  but tracks, all round the world, of the mighty footsteps of  labor. Without it antiquity would not have been. Without it,  there would be no memory of the past, and no hope for the  future.

Even utter indolence reposes on treasures that labor at some  time gained and gathered. He that does nothing, and yet does  not starve, has still his significance; for he is a standing proof  that somebody has at some time worked. But not to such does 
Masonry do honor. It honors the Worker, the Toiler; him who  produces and not alone consumes; him who puts forth his  hand to add to the treasury of human comforts, and not alone  to take away. It honors him who goes forth amid the  struggling elements to fight his battle, and who shrinks not,  with cowardly effeminacy, behind  p. 347  pillows of ease. It honors the strong muscle, and the manly  nerve, and the resolute and brave heart, the sweating brow,  and the toiling brain. It honors the great and beautiful offices  of humanity, manhood's toil and woman's task; paternal  industry and maternal watching and weariness; wisdom  teaching and patience learning; the brow of care that presides  over the State, and many-handed labor that toils in workshop,  field, and study, beneath its mild and beneficent sway.

God has not made a world of rich men; but rather a world of  poor men; or of men, at least, who must toil for a subsistence. 
That is, then, the best condition for man, and the grand sphere  of human improvement. If the whole world could acquire  wealth, (and one man is as much entitled to it as another,  when he is bom); if the present generation could lay up a  complete provision for the next, as some men desire to do for  their children; the world would be destroyed at a single blow.

All industry would cease with the necessity for it; all  improvement would stop with the demand for exertion; the  dissipation of fortunes, the mischiefs of which are now  countervailed by the healthful tone of society, would breed  universal disease, and break out into universal license; and the  world would sink, rotten as Herod, into the grave of its own  loathsome vices.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the  world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor  professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers,  poets, and men of genius. A certain staidness and sobriety, a  certain moderation and restraint, a certain pressure of  circumstances, are good for man. His body was not made for  luxuries. It sickens, sinks, and dies under them. His mind was  not made for indulgence. It grows weak, effeminate, and  dwarfish, under that condition. And he who pampers his body  with luxuries and his mind with indulgence, bequeaths the  consequences to the minds and bodies of his descendants,  without the wealth which was their cause. For wealth, without  a law of entail to help it, has always lacked the energy even to  keep its own treasures. They drop from its imbecile hand. The  third generation almost inevitably goes down the rolling  wheel of fortune, and there learns the energy necessary to rise  again, if it rises at all; heir, as it is, to the bodily diseases, and  mental weaknesses, and the soul's vices of its ancestors, and  not heir to their wealth. And yet we are, almost all of  p. 348  us, anxious to put our children, or to insure that our  grandchildren shall be put, on this road to indulgence, luxury,  vice, degradation, and min; this heirship of hereditary disease,  soul malady, and mental leprosy.

If wealth were employed in promoting mental culture at home  and works of philanthropy abroad; if it were multiplying  studies of art, and building up institutions of learning around  us; if it were in every way raising the intellectual character of  the world, there could scarcely be too much of it. But if the  utmost aim, effort, and ambition of wealth be, to procure rich  furniture, and provide costly entertainments, and build  luxurious houses, and minister to vanity, extravagance, and  ostentation, there could scarcely be too little of it. To a certain  extent it may laudably be the minister of elegancies and  luxuries, and the servitor of hospitality and physical  enjoyment: but just in proportion as its tendencies, divested of  all higher aims and tastes, are running that way, they are  running to peril and evil.

Nor does that peril attach to individuals and families alone. It  stands, a fearful beacon, in the experience of Cities,

Republics, and Empires. The lessons of past times, on this  subject, are emphatic and solemn. The history of wealth has  always been a history of corruption and downfall. The people  never existed that could stand the trial. Boundless profusion is  too little likely to spread for any people the theatre of manly  energy, rigid self-denial, and lofty virtue. You do not look for  the bone and sinew and strength of a country, its loftiest  talents and virtues, its martyrs to patriotism or religion, its  men to meet the days of peril and disaster, among the children  of ease, indulgence, and luxury.

In the great march of the races of men over the earth, we have  always seen opulence and luxury sinking before poverty and  toil and hardy nurture. That is the law which .has presided  over the great processions of empire. Sidon and Tyre, whose  merchants possessed the wealth of princes; Babylon and 
Palmyra, the seats of Asiatic luxury; Rome, laden with the  spoils of a world, overwhelmed by her own vices more than  by the hosts of her enemies; all these, and many more, are  examples of the destructive tendencies of immense and  unnatural accumulation: and men must become more  generous and benevolent, not more selfish and effeminate, as  they become more rich, or the history of modem wealth will  follow in the sad train of all past examples.  p. 349

All men desire distinction, and feel the need of some  ennobling object in life. Those persons are usually most  happy and satisfied in their pursuits, who have the loftiest  ends in view. Artists, mechanicians, and inventors, all who  seek to find principles or develop beauty in their work, seem  most to enjoy it. The farmer who labors for the beautifying  and scientific cultivation of his estate, is more happy in his  labors than one who tills his own land for a mere subsistence. 
This is one of the signal testimonies which all human  employments give to the high demands of our nature. To  gather wealth never gives such satisfaction as to bring the  humblest piece of machinery to perfection: at least, when  wealth is sought for display and ostentation, or mere luxury,  and ease, and pleasure; and not for ends of philanthropy, the  relief of kindred, or the payment of just debts, or as a means  to attain some other great and noble object.

With the pursuits of multitudes is connected a painful  conviction that they neither supply a sufficient object, nor  confer any satisfactory honor. Why work, if the world is soon  not to know that such a being ever existed; and when one can  perpetuate his name neither on canvas nor on marble, nor in  books, nor by lofty eloquence, nor statesmanship?

The answer is, that every man has a work to do in himself,  greater and sublimer than any work of genius; and works  upon a nobler material than wood or marble—upon his own  soul and intellect, and may so attain the highest nobleness and  grandeur known on earth or in Heaven; may so be the greatest  of artists, and of authors, and his life, which is far more than  speech, may be eloquent.

The great author or artist only portrays what every man  should be. He conceives, what we should do. He conceives,  and represents moral beauty, magnanimity, fortitude, love,  devotion, forgiveness, the soul's greatness. He portrays  virtues, commended to our admiration and imitation. To  embody these portraitures in our lives is the practical  realization of those great ideals of art. The magnanimity of

Heroes, celebrated on the historic or poetic page; the  constancy and faith of Truth's martyrs; the beauty of love and  piety glowing on the canvas; the delineations of Truth and 
Right, that flash from the lips of the Eloquent, are, in their  essence only that which every man may feel and practise in  the daily walks of life. The work of virtue is nobler than any  work of genius; for it is a nobler thing to be a hero than to  describe one,  p. 350  to endure martyrdom than to paint it, to do right than to plead  for it. Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler  object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two  things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written;  and to write what is worthy of being read; and the greater of  these is the doing.

Every man has to do the noblest thing that any man can do or  describe. There is a wide field for the courage, cheerfulness,  energy, and dignity of human existence. Let therefore no 
Mason deem his life doomed to mediocrity or meanness, to  vanity or unprofitable toil, or to any ends less than immortal. 
No one can truly say that the grand prizes of life are for  others, and he can do nothing. No matter how magnificent and  noble an act the author can describe or the artist paint, it will  be still nobler for you to go and do that which one describes,  or be the model which the other draws.

The loftiest action that ever was described is not more  magnanimous than that which we may find occasion to do, in  the daily walks of life; in temptation, in distress, in  bereavement, in the solemn approach to death. In the great 
Providence of God, in the great ordinances of our being, there  is opened to every man a sphere for the noblest action. It is  not even in extraordinary situations, where all eyes are upon  us, where all our energy is aroused, and all our vigilance is  awake, that the highest efforts of virtue are usually demanded  of us; but rather in silence and seclusion, amidst our  occupations and our homes; in wearing sickness, that makes  no complaint; in sorely-tried honesty, that asks no praise; in  simple disinterestedness, hiding the hand that resigns its  advantage to another.

Masonry seeks to ennoble common life. Its work is to go  down into the obscure and unsearched records of daily  conduct and feeling; and to portray, not the ordinary virtue of  an extraordinary life; but the more extraordinary virtue of  ordinary life. What is done and borne in the shades of privacy,  in the hard and beaten path of daily care and toil, full of  uncelebrated sacrifices; in the suffering, and sometimes  insulted suffering, that wears to the world a cheerful brow; in  the long strife of the spirit, resisting pain, penury, and neglect,  carried on in the inmost depths of the heart;—what is done,  and borne, and wrought, and won there, is a higher glory, and  shall inherit a brighter crown.

On the volume of Masonic life one bright word is written,  from  p. 351  which on every side blazes an ineffable splendor. That word  is DUTY.

To aid in securing to all labor permanent employment and its  just reward: to help to hasten the coming of that time when no  one shall stiffer from hunger or destitution, because, though  willing and able to work, he can find no employment, or  because he has been overtaken by sickness in the midst of his  labor, are part of your duties as a Knight of the Royal Axe. 
And if we can succeed in making some small nook of God's  creation a little more fruitful and cheerful, a little better and  more worthy of Him,—or in making some one or two human  hearts a little wiser, and more manful and hopeful and happy,  we shall have done work, worthy of Masons, and acceptable  to our Father in Heaven.

XXIII.

CHIEF OF THE TABERNACFE.

AMONG most of the Ancient Nations there was, in addition  to their public worship, a private one styled the Mysteries; to  which those only were admitted who had been prepared by  certain ceremonies called initiations.

The most widely disseminated of the ancient worships were  those of Isis, Orpheus, Dionusos, Ceres and Mithras. Many  barbarous nations received the knowledge of the Mysteries in  honor of these divinities from the Egyptians, before they  arrived in Greece; and even in the British Isles the Druids  celebrated those of Dionusos, learned by them from the 
Egyptians.

The Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated at Athens in honor of 
Ceres, swallowed up, as it were, all the others. All the  neighboring nations neglected their own, to celebrate those of 
Eleusis; and in a little while all Greece and Asia Minor were  filled with the Initiates. They spread into the Roman Empire,  and even beyond its limits, "those holy and august Eleusinian 
Mysteries," said Cicero, "in which the people of the remotest  lands are initiated." Zosimus says that they embraced the  whole human race; and Aristides termed them the common  temple of the whole world.

There were, in the Eleusinian feasts, two sorts of Mysteries,  the great, and the little. The latter were a kind of preparation  for the former; and everybody was admitted to them. 
Ordinarily there was a novitiate of three, and sometimes of  four years.

Clemens of Alexandria says that what was taught in the great 
Mysteries concerned the Universe, and was the completion  and perfection of all instruction; wherein things were seen as  they were, and nature and her works were made known.

The ancients said that the Initiates would be more happy after  death than other mortals; and that, while the souls of the 
Profane on leaving their bodies, would be plunged in the mire,  and remain buried in darkness, those of the Initiates would fly  to the Fortunate Isles, the abode of the Gods.  p. 353

Plato said that the object of the Mysteries was to re-establish  the soul in its primitive purity, and in that state of perfection  which it had lost. Epictetus said, "whatever is met with  therein has been instituted by our Masters, for the instruction  of man and the correction of morals."

Proclus held that initiation elevated the soul, from a material,  sensual, and purely human life, to a communion and celestial  intercourse with the Gods; and that a variety of things, forms,  and species were shown Initiates, representing the first  generation of the Gods.

Purity of morals and elevation of soul were required of the 
Initiates. Candidates were required to be of spotless reputation  and irreproachable virtue. Nero, after murdering his mother,  did not dare to be present at the celebration of the Mysteries:  and Antony presented himself to be initiated, as the most  infallible mode of proving his innocence of the death of 
Avidius Cassius.

The Initiates were regarded as the only fortunate men. "It is  upon us alone," says Aristophanes, "shineth the beneficent  day-star. We alone receive pleasure from the influence of his  rays; we, who are initiated, and who practise toward citizen  and stranger every possible act of justice and piety." And it is  therefore not surprising that, in time, initiation came to be  considered as necessary as baptism afterward was to the 
Christians; and that not to have been admitted to the 
Mysteries was held a dishonor.

"It seems to me," says the great orator, philosopher, and  moralist, Cicero, "that Athens, among many excellent  inventions, divine and very useful to the human family, has  produced none comparable to the Mysteries, which for a wild  and ferocious life have substituted humanity and urbanity of  manners. It is with good reason they use the term initiation',  for it is through them that we in reality have learned the first  principles of life; and they not only teach us to live in a  manner more consoling and agreeable, but they soften the  pains of death by the hope of a better life hereafter."

Where the Mysteries originated is not known. It is supposed  that they came from India, by the way of Chaldaea, into Egypt,  and thence were carried into Greece. Wherever they arose,  they were practised among all the ancient nations; and, as was  usual, the Thracians, Cretans, and Athenians each claimed the  honor of  p. 354  invention, and each insisted that they had borrowed nothing  from any other people.

In Egypt and the East, all religion, even in its most poetical  forms, was more or less a mystery; and the chief reason why,  in Greece, a distinct name and office were assigned to the 
Mysteries, was because the superficial popular theology left a  want unsatisfied, which religion in a wider sense alone could  supply. They were practical acknowledgments of the  insufficiency of the popular religion to satisfy the deeper  thoughts and aspirations of the mind. The vagueness of  symbolism might perhaps reach what a more palpable and  conventional creed could not. The former, by its  indefiniteness, acknowledged the abstruseness of its subject; it  treated a mysterious subject mystically; it endeavored to  illustrate what it could not explain; to excite an appropriate  feeling, if it could not develop an adequate idea; and made the  image a mere subordinate conveyance for the conception,  which itself never became too obvious or familiar.

The instruction now conveyed by books and letters was of old  conveyed by symbols; and the priest had to invent or to  perpetuate a display of rites and exhibitions, which were not  only more attractive to the eye than words, but often to the  mind more suggestive and pregnant with meaning.

Afterward, the institution became rather moral and political,  than religious. The civil magistrates shaped the ceremonies to  political ends in Egypt; the sages who carried them from that  country to Asia, Greece, and the North of Europe, were all  kings or legislators. The chief magistrate presided at those of 
Eleusis, represented by an officer styled King: and the Priest  played but a subordinate part.

The Powers revered in the Mysteries were all in reality 
Nature-Gods; none of whom could be consistently addressed  as mere heroes, because their nature was confessedly super¬  heroic. The Mysteries, only in fact a more solemn expression  of the religion of the ancient poetry, taught that doctrine of the 
Theocracia or Divine Oneness, which even poetry does not  entirely conceal. They were not in any open hostility with the  popular religion,, but only a more solemn exhibition of its  symbols; or rather a part of itself in a more impressive form. 
The essence of all Mysteries, as of all polytheism, consists in  this, that the conception of an unapproachable Being, single,  eternal, and unchanging, and, that  p. 355  of a God of Nature, whose manifold power is immediately  revealed to the senses in the incessant round of movement,  life, and death, fell asunder in the treatment, and were  separately symbolized. They offered a perpetual problem to  excite curiosity, and contributed to satisfy the all-pervading  religious sentiment, which if it obtain no nourishment among  the simple and intelligible, finds compensating excitement in  a reverential contemplation of the obscure.

Nature is as free from dogmatism as from tyranny; and the  earliest instructors of mankind not only adopted her lessons,  but as far as possible adhered to her method of imparting  them. They attempted to reach the understanding through the  eye; and the greater part of all religious teaching was  conveyed through this ancient and most impressive mode of 
"exhibition" or demonstration. The Mysteries were a sacred  drama, exhibiting some legend significant of Nature's change,  of the visible Universe in which the divinity is revealed, and  whose import was in many respects as open to the Pagan, as  to the Christian. Beyond the current traditions or sacred  recitals of the temple, few explanations were given to the  spectators, who were left, as in the school of nature, to make  inferences for themselves.

The method of indirect suggestion, by allegory or symbol, is a  more efficacious instrument of instruction than plain didactic  language; since we are habitually indifferent to that which is  acquired without effort: "The initiated are few, though many  bear the thyrsus." And it would have been impossible to  provide a lesson suited to every degree of cultivation and  capacity, unless it were one framed after Nature's example, or  rather a representation of Nature herself, employing her  universal symbolism instead of technicalities of language,  inviting endless research, yet rewarding the humblest inquirer,  and disclosing its secrets to every one in proportion to his  preparatory training and power to comprehend them.

Even if destitute of any formal or official enunciation of those  important truths, which even in a cultivated age it was often  found inexpedient to assert except under a veil of allegory,  and which moreover lose their dignity and value in proportion  as they are learned mechanically as dogmas, the shows of the 
Mysteries certainly contained suggestions if not lessons,  which in the opinion not of one competent witness only, but  of many, were adapted to elevate the character of the  spectators, enabling them to augur  p. 356  something of the purposes of existence, as well as of the  means of improving it, to live better and to die happier.

Unlike the religion of books or creeds, these mystic shows  and performances were not the reading of a lecture, but the  opening of a problem, implying neither exemption from  research, nor hostility to philosophy: for, on the contrary,  philosophy is the great Mystagogue or Arch-Expounder of  symbolism: though the interpretations by the Grecian 
Philosophy of the old myths and symbols were in many  instances as ill-founded, as in others they are correct.

No better means could be devised to rouse a dormant intellect,  than those impressive exhibitions, which addressed it through  the imagination: which, instead of condemning it to a  prescribed routine of creed, invited it to seek, compare, and  judge. The alteration from symbol to dogma is as fatal to  beauty of expression, as that from faith to dogma is to truth  and wholesomeness of thought.

The first philosophy often reverted to the natural mode of  teaching; and Socrates, in particular, is said to have eschewed  dogmas, endeavoring, like the Mysteries, rather to awaken  and develop in the minds of his hearers the ideas with which  they were already endowed or pregnant, than to fill them with  ready-made adventitious opinions.

So Masonry still follows the ancient manner of teaching. Her  symbols are the instruction she gives; and the lectures are but  often partial and insufficient one-sided endeavors to interpret  those symbols. He who would become an accomplished 
Mason, must not be content merely to hear or even to  understand the lectures, but must, aided by them, and they  having as it were marked out the way for him, study, interpret,  and develop the symbols for himself.

The earliest speculation endeavored to express far more than  it could distinctly comprehend; and the vague impressions of  the mind found in the mysterious analogies of phenomena  their most apt and energetic representations. The Mysteries,  like the symbols of Masonry, were but an image of the  eloquent analogies of Nature; both those and these revealing  no new secret to such as were or are unprepared, or incapable  of interpreting their significance.

Everywhere in the old Mysteries, and in all the symbolisms  and ceremonial of the Hierophant was found the same  mythical personage, who, like Hermes, or Zoroaster, unites 
Human Attributes  p. 357  with Divine, and is himself the God whose worship he  introduced, teaching rude men the commencements of  civilization through the influence of song, and connecting  with the symbol of his death, emblematic of that of Nature,  the most essential consolations of religion.

The Mysteries embraced the three great doctrines of Ancient 
Theosophy. They treated of God, Man, and Nature. Dionusos,  whose Mysteries Orpheus is said to have founded, was the 
God of Nature, or of the moisture which is the life of Nature,  who prepares in darkness the return of life and vegetation, or  who is himself the Light and Change evolving their varieties. 
He was theologically one with Hermes, Prometheus, and 
Poseidon. In the Egean Islands he is Butes, Dardanus, 
Himeros, or Imbros. In Crete he appears as Iasius or Zeus,  whose worship remaining unveiled by the usual forms of  mystery, betrayed to profane curiosity the symbols, which, if  irreverently contemplated, were sure to be misunderstood. In 
Asia he is the long-stoled Bassareus coalescing with the

Sabazius of the Phrygian Corybantes: the same with the  mystic Iacchus, nursling or son of Ceres, and with the  dismembered Zagreus, son of Persephone.

In symbolical forms the Mysteries exhibited THE ONE, of  which THE MANIFOLD is an infinite illustration, containing  a moral lesson, calculated to guide the soul through life, and  to cheer it in death. The story of Dionusos was profoundly  significant. He was not only creator of the world, but  guardian, liberator, and Savior of the soul. God of the many-  colored mantle, he was the resulting manifestation  personified, the all in the many, the varied year, life passing  into innumerable forms.

The spiritual regeneration of man was typified in the 
Mysteries by the second birth of Dionusos as offspring of the 
Highest; and the agents and symbols of that regeneration were  the elements that affected Nature's periodical purification—the  air, indicated by the mystic fan or winnow; the fire, signified  by the torch; and the baptismal water, for water is not only  cleanser of all things, but the genesis or source of all.

These notions, clothed in ritual, suggested the soul's  reformation and training, the moral purity formally  proclaimed at Eleusis. He only was invited to approach, who  was "of clean hands and ingenuous speech, free from all  pollution, and with a clear conscience." "Happy the man," say  the initiated in Euripides and  p. 358

[paragraph continues] Aristophanes, "who purifies his life, and who  reverently consecrates his soul in the thiasos of the God. Let  him take heed to his lips that he utter no profane word; let him  be just and kind to the stranger, and to his neighbor; let him  give way to no vicious excess, lest he make dull and heavy  the organs of the spirit. Far from the mystic dance of the  thiasos be the impure, the evil speaker, the seditious citizen,  the selfish hunter after gain, the traitor; all those, in short,  whose practices are more akin to the riot of Titans than to the  regulated life of the Orphic i, or the Curetan order of the 
Priests of Idasan Zeus."

The votary, elevated beyond the sphere of his ordinary  faculties, and unable to account for the agitation which  overpowered him, seemed to become divine in proportion as  he ceased to be human; to be a daemon or god. Already, in  imagination, the initiated were numbered among the beatified. 
They alone enjoyed the true life, the Sun's true lustre, while  they hymned their God beneath the mystic groves of a mimic 
Elysium, and were really renovated or regenerated under the  genial influence of their dances.

"They whom Proserpina guides in her mysteries," it was said, 
"who imbibed her instruction and spiritual nourishment, rest  from their labors and know strife no more. Happy they who  witness and comprehend these sacred ceremonies! They are  made to know the meaning of the riddle of existence by  observing its aim and termination as appointed by Zeus; they  partake a benefit more valuable and enduring than the grain  bestowed by Ceres; for they are exalted in the scale of  intellectual existence, and obtain sweet hopes to console them  at their death."

No doubt the ceremonies of initiation were originally few and  simple. As the great truths of the primitive revelation faded  out of the memories of the masses of the People, and  wickedness became rife upon the earth, it became necessary  to discriminate, to require longer probation and satisfactory  tests of the candidates, and by spreading around what at first  were rather schools of instruction than mysteries, the veil of  secrecy, and the pomp of ceremony, to heighten the opinion  of their value and importance.

Whatever pictures later and especially Christian writers may  draw of the Mysteries, they must, not only originally, but for  many ages, have continued pure; and the doctrines of natural  religion and morals there taught, have been of the highest  importance;  p. 359  because both the most virtuous as well as the most learned  and philosophic of the ancients speak of them in the loftiest  terms. That they ultimately became degraded from their high  estate, and corrupted, we know.

The rites of initiation became progressively more  complicated. Signs and tokens were invented by which the 
Children of Light could with facility make themselves known  to each other. Different Degrees were invented, as the number  of Initiates enlarged, in order that there might be in the inner  apartment of the Temple a favored few, to whom alone the  more valuable secrets were entrusted, and who could wield  effectually the influence and power of the Order.

Originally the Mysteries were meant to be the beginning of a  new life of reason and virtue. The initiated or esoteric  companions were taught the doctrine of the One Supreme 
God, the theory of death and eternity, the hidden mysteries of 
Nature, the prospect of the ultimate restoration of the soul to  that state of perfection from which it had fallen, its  immortality, and the states of reward and punishment after  death. The uninitiated were deemed Profane, unworthy of  public employment or private confidence, sometimes  proscribed as Atheists, and certain of ever-lasting punishment  beyond the grave.

All persons were initiated into the lesser Mysteries; but few  attained the greater, in which the true spirit of them, and most  of their secret doctrines were hidden. The veil of secrecy was  impenetrable, sealed by oaths and penalties the most  tremendous and appalling. It was by initiation only, that a  knowledge of the Hieroglyphics could be obtained, with  which the walls, columns, and ceilings of the Temples were  decorated, and which, believed to have been communicated to  the Priests by revelation from the celestial deities, the youth  of all ranks were laudably ambitious of deciphering.

The ceremonies were performed at dead of night, generally in  apartments under-ground, but sometimes in the centre of a  vast pyramid, with every appliance that could alarm and  excite the candidate. Innumerable ceremonies, wild and  romantic, dreadful and appalling, had by degrees been added  to the few expressive symbols of primitive observances, under  which there were instances in which the terrified aspirant  actually expired with fear. The pyramids were probably used  for the purposes of initiation,  p. 360  as were caverns, pagodas, and labyrinths; for the ceremonies  required many apartments and cells, long passages and wells. 
In Egypt a principal place for the Mysteries was the island of 
Phi he on the Nile, where a magnificent Temple of Osiris  stood, and his relics were said to be preserved.

With their natural proclivities, the Priesthood, that select and  exclusive class, in Egypt, India, Phoenicia, Judea and Greece,  as well as in Britain and Rome, and wherever else the 
Mysteries were known, made use of them to build wider and  higher the fabric of their own power. The purity of no religion  continues long. Rank and dignities succeed to the primitive  simplicity. Unprincipled, vain, insolent, corrupt, and venal  men put on God's livery to serve the Devil withal; and luxury,  vice, intolerance, and pride depose frugality, virtue,  gentleness, and humility, and change the altar where they  should be servants, to a throne on which they reign.

But the Kings, Philosophers, and Statesmen, the wise and  great and good who were admitted to the Mysteries, long  postponed their ultimate self-destruction, and restrained the  natural tendencies of the Priesthood. And accordingly 
Zosimus thought that the neglect of the Mysteries after 
Diocletian abdicated, was the chief cause of the decline of the 
Roman Empire; and in the year 364, the Proconsul of Greece  would not close the Mysteries, notwithstanding a law of the 
Emperor Valentinian, lest the people should be driven to  desperation, if prevented from performing them; upon which,  as they believed, the welfare of mankind wholly depended. 
They were practised in Athens until the 8th century, in Greece  and Rome for several centuries after Christ; and in Wales and 
Scotland down to the 12th century.

The inhabitants of India originally practised the Patriarchal  religion. Even the later worship of Vishnu was cheerful and  social; accompanied with the festive song, the sprightly  dance, and the resounding cymbal, with libations of milk and  honey, garlands, and perfumes from aromatic woods and  gums.

There perhaps the Mysteries commenced; and in them, under  allegories, were taught the primitive truths. We cannot, within  the limits of this lecture, detail the ceremonies of initiation;  and shall use general language, except where something from  those old Mysteries still remains in Masonry.

The Initiate was invested with a cord of three threads, so  twined  p. 361  as to make three times three, and called zennar. Hence comes  our cable-tow. It was an emblem of their tri-une Deity, the  remembrance of whom we also preserve in the three chief  officers of our Lodges, presiding in the three quarters of that 
Universe which our Lodges represent; in our three greater and  three lesser lights, our three movable and three immovable  jewels, and the three pillars that support our Lodges.

The Indian Mysteries were celebrated in subterranean caverns  and grottos hewn in the solid rock; and the Initiates adored the 
Deity, symbolized by the solar fire. The candidate, long  wandering in darkness, truly wanted Light, and the worship  taught him was the worship of God, the Source of Light. The  vast Temple of Elephanta, perhaps the oldest in the world,  hewn out of the rock, and 135 feet square, was used for  initiations; as were the still vaster caverns of Salsette, with  their 300 apartments.

The periods of initiation were regulated by the increase and  decrease of the moon. The Mysteries were divided into four  steps or Degrees. The candidate might receive the first at  eight years of age, when he was invested with the zennar.

Each Degree dispensed something of perfection. "Let the  wretched man," says the Hitopadesa, "practise virtue,  whenever he enjoys one of the three or four religious Degrees;  let him be even-minded with all created things, and that  disposition will be the source of virtue."

After various ceremonies, chiefly relating to the unity and  trinity of the Godhead, the candidate was clothed in a linen  garment without a seam, and remained under the care of a 
Brahmin until he was twenty years of age, constantly studying  and practising the most rigid virtue. Then he underwent the  severest probation for the second Degree, in which he was  sanctified by the sign of the cross, which, pointing to the four  quarters of the compass, was honored as a striking symbol of  the Universe by many nations of antiquity, and was imitated  by the Indians in the shape of their temples.

Then he was admitted to the Holy Cavern, blazing with light,  where, in costly robes, sat, in the East, West, and South, the  three chief Hierophants, representing the Indian tri-une Deity. 
The ceremonies there commenced with an anthem to the 
Great God of Nature; and then followed this apostrophe: "O  mighty Being! greater than Brahma! we bow down before 
Thee as the  p. 362  primal Creator! Eternal God of Gods! The World's Mansion! 
Thou art the Incorruptible Being, distinct from all things  transient! Thou art before all Gods, the Ancient Absolute 
Existence, and the Supreme Supporter of the Universe! Thou  art the Supreme Mansion; and by Thee, O Infinite Form, the 
Universe was spread abroad."

The candidate, thus taught the first great primitive truth, was  called upon to make a formal declaration, that he would be  tract-able and obedient to his superiors; that he would keep  his body pure; govern his tongue, and observe a passive  obedience in receiving the doctrines and traditions of the 
Order; and the firmest secrecy in maintaining inviolable its  hidden and abstruse mysteries. Then he was sprinkled with  water (whence our baptism); certain words, now unknown,  were whispered in his ear; and he was divested of his shoes,  and made to go three times around the cavern. Hence our  three circuits; hence we were neither barefoot nor shod: and  the words were the Pass-words of that Indian Degree.

The Gymnosophist Priests came from the banks of the 
Euphrates into Ethiopia, and brought with them their sciences  and their doctrines. Their principal College was at Meroe, and  their Mysteries were celebrated in the Temple of Amun,  renowned for his oracle. Ethiopia was then a powerful State,  which preceded Egypt in civilization, and had a theocratic  government. Above the King was the Priest, who could put  him to death in the name of the Deity. Egypt was then  composed of the Thebaid only. Middle Egypt and the Delta  were a gulf of the Mediterranean. The Nile by degrees formed  an immense marsh, which, afterward drained by the labor of  man, formed Lower Egypt; and was for many centuries  governed by the Ethiopian Sacerdotal Caste, of Arabic origin;  afterward displaced by a dynasty of warriors. The magnificent  mins of Axoum, with its obelisks and hieroglyphics , temples,  vast tombs and pyramids, around ancient Meroe, are far older  than the pyramids near Memphis.

The Priests, taught by Hermes, embodied in books the occult  and hermetic sciences, with their own discoveries and the  revelations of the Sibyls. They studied particularly the most  abstract sciences, discovered the famous geometrical  theorems which Pythagoras afterward learned from them,  calculated eclipses, and regulated, nineteen centuries before 
Caesar, the Julian year. They  p. 363  descended to practical investigations as to the necessities of  life, and made known their discoveries to the people; they  cultivated the fine arts, and inspired the people with that  enthusiasm which produced the avenues of Thebes, the 
Labyrinth, the Temples of Kamac, Denderah, Edfou, and 
Phi he, the monolithic obelisks, and the great Lake Moeris, the  fertilizer of the country.

The wisdom of the Egyptian Initiates, the high sciences and  lofty morality which they taught, and their immense  knowledge, excited the emulation of the most eminent men,  whatever their rank and fortune; and led them, despite the  complicated and terrible trials to be undergone, to seek  admission into the Mysteries of Osiris and Isis.

From Egypt, the Mysteries went to Phoenicia, and were  celebrated at Tyre. Osiris changed his name, and become 
Adoni or Dionusos, still the representative of the Sun; and  afterward these Mysteries were introduced successively into 
Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Sicily, and Italy. In Greece  and Sicily, Osiris took the name of Bacchus, and Isis that of 
Ceres, Cybele, Rhea and Venus.

Bar Hebraeus says: "Enoch was the first who invented books  and different sorts of writing. The ancient Greeks declare that 
Enoch is the same as Mercury Trismegistus [Hermes], and  that he taught the sons of men the art of building cities, and  enacted some admirable laws. . . He discovered the  knowledge of the Zodiac, and the course of the Planets; and  he pointed out to the sons of men, that they should worship 
God, that they should fast, that they should pray, that they  should give alms, votive offerings, and tenths. He reprobated  abominable foods and drunkenness, and appointed festivals  for sacrifices to the Sun, at each of the Zodiacal Signs."

Manetho extracted his history from certain pillars which he  discovered in Egypt, whereon inscriptions had been made by 
Thoth, or the first Mercury [or Hermes], in the sacred letters  and dialect: but which were after the flood translated from  that dialect into the Greek tongue, and laid up in the private  recesses of the Egyptian Temples. These pillars were found in  subterranean caverns, near Thebes and beyond the Nile, not  far from the sounding statue of Memnon, in a place called 
Syringes; which are described to be certain winding  apartments underground; made, it is said, by those who were  skilled in ancient rites; who, foreseeing the coming of the 
Deluge, and fearing lest the memory of their ceremonies  p. 364  should be obliterated, built and contrived vaults, dug with vast  labor, in several places.

From the bosom of Egypt sprang a man of consummate  wisdom, initiated in the secret knowledge of India, of Persia,  and of Ethiopia, named Thoth or Phtha by his compatriots, 
Taut by the Phoenicians, Hermes Trismegistus by the Greeks,  and Adris by the Rabbins. Nature seemed to have chosen him  for her favorite, and to have lavished on him all the qualities  necessary to enable him to study her and to know her  thoroughly. The Deity had, so to say, infused into him the  sciences and the arts, in order that he might instruct the whole  world.

He invented many things necessary for the uses of life, and  gave them suitable names; he taught men how to write down  their thoughts and arrange their speech; he instituted the  ceremonies to be observed in the worship of each of the Gods;  he observed the course of the stars; he invented music, the  different bodily exercises, arithmetic, medicine, the art of  working in metals, the lyre with three strings; he regulated the  three tones of the voice, the sharp, taken from autumn, the  grave from winter, and the middle from spring, there being  then but three seasons. It was he who taught the Greeks the  mode of interpreting terms and things, whence they gave him  the name of Eppqc [Hermes], which signifies Interpreter.

In Egypt he instituted hieroglyphics: he selected a certain  number of persons whom he judged fitted to be the  depositaries of his secrets, of such only as were capable of  attaining the throne and the first offices in the Mysteries; he  united them in a body, created them Priests of the Living God,  instructed them in the sciences and arts, and explained to  them the symbols by which they were veiled. Egypt, 1500  years before the time of Moses, revered in the Mysteries ONE 
SUPREME GOD, called the ONLY UNCREATED. Under 
Him it paid homage to seven principal deities. It is to Hermes,  who lived at that period, that we must attribute the  concealment or veiling [velation] of the Indian worship,  which Moses unveiled or revealed, changing nothing of the  laws of Hermes, except the plurality of his mystic Gods.

The Egyptian Priests related that Hermes, dying, said: 
"Hitherto I have lived an exile from my true country: now I  return thither. Do not weep for me: I return to that celestial  country whither each goes in his turn. There is God. This life  is but a  p. 365  death." This is precisely the creed of the old Buddhists of 
Samaneans, who believed that from time to time God sent 
Buddhas on earth, to reform men, to wean them from their  vices, and lead them back into the paths of virtue.

Among the sciences taught by Hermes, there were secrets  which he communicated to the Initiates only upon condition  that they should bind themselves, by a terrible oath, never to  divulge them, except to those who, after long trial, should be  found worthy to succeed them. The Kings even prohibited the  revelation of them on pain of death. This secret was styled the 
Sacerdotal Art, and included alchemy, astrology, magism 
[magic], the science of spirits, etc. He gave them the key to  the Hieroglyphics of all these secret sciences, which were  regarded as sacred, and kept concealed in the most secret  places of the Temple.

The great secrecy observed by the initiated Priests, for many  years, and the lofty sciences which they professed, caused  them to be honored and respected throughout all Egypt, which  was regarded by other nations as the college, the sanctuary, of  the sciences and arts. The mystery which surrounded them  strongly excited curiosity. Orpheus metamorphosed himself,  so to say, into an Egyptian. He was initiated into Theology  and Physics. And he so completely made the ideas and  reasonings of his teachers his own, that his Hymns rather  bespeak an Egyptian Priest than a Grecian Poet: and the was  the first who carried into Greece the Egyptian fables.

Pythagoras, ever thirsty for learning, consented even to be  circumcised, in order to become one of the Initiates: and the  occult sciences were revealed to him in the innermost part of  the sanctuary.

The Initiates in a particular science, having been instructed by  fables, enigmas, allegories, and hieroglyphics, wrote  mysteriously whenever in their works they touched the  subject of the Mysteries, and continued to conceal science  under a veil of fictions.

When the destruction by Cambyses of many cities, and the  ruin of nearly all Egypt, in the year 528 before our era,  dispersed most of the Priests into Greece and elsewhere, they  bore with them their sciences, which they continued to teach  enigmatically, that is to say, ever enveloped in the obscurities  of fables and hieroglyphics; to the end that the vulgar herd,  seeing, might see nothing, and hearing, might comprehend  nothing. All the writers  p. 366  drew from this source: but these Mysteries, concealed under  so many unexplained envelopes, ended in giving birth to a  swann of absurdities, which, from Greece, spread over the  whole earth.

In the Grecian Mysteries, as established by Pythagoras, there  were three Degrees. A preparation of five years' abstinence  and silence was required. If the candidate was found to be  passionate or intemperate, contentious, or ambitious of  worldly honors and distinctions, he was rejected.

In his lectures, Pythagoras taught the mathematics, as a  medium whereby to prove the existence of God from  observation and by means of reason; grammar, rhetoric, and  logic, to cultivate and improve that reason, arithmetic,  because he conceived that the ultimate benefit of man  consisted in the science of numbers, and geometry, music, and  astronomy, because he conceived that man is indebted to them  for a knowledge of what is really good and useful.

He taught the true method of obtaining a knowledge of the 
Divine laws of purifying the soul from its imperfections, of  searching for truth, and of practising virtue; thus imitating the  perfections of God. He thought his system vain, if it did not  contribute to expel vice and introduce virtue into the mind. He  taught that the two most excellent things were, to speak the  truth, and to render benefits to one another. Particularly he  inculcated Silence, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, and 
Justice. He taught the immortality of the soul, the 
Omnipotence of God, and the necessity of personal holiness  to qualify a man for admission into the Society of the Gods.

Thus we owe the particular mode of instruction in the Degree  of Fellow-Craft to Pythagoras; and that Degree is but an  imperfect reproduction of his lectures. From him, too, we  have many of our explanations of the symbols. He arranged  his assemblies due East and West, because he held that 
Motion began in the East and proceeded to the West. Our 
Lodges are said to be due East and West, because the Master  represents the rising Sun, and of course must be in the East. 
The pyramids, too, were built precisely by the four cardinal  points. And our expression, that our Lodges extend upward to  the Heavens, comes from the Persian and Druidic custom of  having to their Temples no roofs but the sky.

Plato developed and spiritualized the philosophy of 
Pythagoras.  p. 367

[paragraph continues] Even Eusebius the Christian admits, that he  reached to the vestibule of Truth, and stood upon its  threshold.

The Dmidical ceremonies undoubtedly came from India; and  the Druids were originally Buddhists. The word Druidh, like  the word Magi, signifies wise or learned men; and they were  at once philosophers, magistrates, and divines.

There was a surprising uniformity in the Temples, Priests,  doctrines, and worship of the Persian Magi and British 
Druids. The Gods of Britain were the same as the Cabiri of 
Samothrace. Osiris and Isis appeared in their Mysteries, under  the names of Hu and Ceridwen; and like those of the primitive 
Persians, their Temples were enclosures of huge unhewn  stones, some of which still remain, and are regarded by the  common people with fear and veneration. They were  generally either circular or oval. Some were in the shape of a  circle to which a vast serpent was attached. The circle was an 
Eastern symbol of the Universe, governed by an Omnipotent 
Deity whose centre is everywhere, and his circumference  nowhere: and the egg was an universal symbol of the world. 
Some of the Temples were winged, and some in the shape of  a cross; the winged ones referring to Kneph, the winged 
Serpent-Deity of Egypt; whence the name of Navestock,  where one of them stood. Temples in the shape of a cross  were also found in Ireland and Scotland. The length of one of  these vast structures, in the shape of a serpent, was nearly  three miles.

The grand periods for initiation into the Druidical Mysteries,  were quarterly; at the equinoxes and solstices. In the remote  times when they originated, these were the times  corresponding with the 13th of February, 1st of May, 19th of 
August, and 1st of November. The time of annual celebration  was May-Eve, and the ceremonial preparations commenced at  midnight, on the 29th of April. When the initiations were  over, on May-Eve, fires were kindled on all the cairns and  cromlechs in the island, which burned all night to introduce  the sports of May-day. The festival was in honor of the Sun. 
The initiations were perfonned at midnight; and there were  three Degrees.

The Gothic Mysteries were carried Northward from the East,  by Odin; who, being a great warrior, modelled and varied  them to suit his purposes and the genius of his people. He  placed over their celebration twelve Hierophants, who were  alike Priests, Counsellors of State, and Judges from whose  decision there was no appeal.  p. 368

He held the numbers three and nine in peculiar veneration,  and was probably himself the Indian Buddha. Every thrice-  three months, thrice-three victims were sacrificed to the tri-  une God.

The Goths had three great festivals; the most magnificent of  which commenced at the winter solstice, and was celebrated  in honor of Thor, the Prince of the Power of the Air. That  being the longest night in the year, and the one after which the 
Sun comes Northward, it was commemorative of the 
Creation; and they termed it mother-night, as the one in which  the creation of the world and light from the primitive darkness  took place. This was the Yule, Juul, or Yeol feast, which  afterward became Christmas. At this feast the initiations were  celebrated. Thor was the Sun, the Egyptian Osiris and Kneph,  the Phoenician Bel or Baal. The initiations were had in huge  intricate caverns, terminating, as all the Mithriac caverns did,  in a spacious vault, where the candidate was brought to light.

Joseph was undoubtedly initiated. After he had interpreted 
Pharaoh's dream, that Monarch made him his Prime Minister,  let him ride in his second chariot, while they proclaimed  before him, ABRECH! 1 and set him over the land of Egypt.

In addition to this, the King gave him a new name, Tsapanat- 
Paanakh, and married him to Asanat, daughter of Potai 
Parang, a Priest of An or Hieropolis, where was the Temple of 
Athom-Re, the Great God of Egypt; thus completely  naturalizing him. He could not have contracted this marriage,  nor have exercised that high dignity, without being first  initiated in the Mysteries. When his Brethren came to Egypt  the second time, the Egyptians of his court could not eat with  them, as that would have been abomination, though they ate  with Joseph; who was therefore regarded not as a foreigner,  but as one of themselves: and when he sent and brought his  brethren back, and charged them with taking his cup, he said, 
"Know ye not that a man like me practises divination?" thus  assuming the Egyptian of high rank initiated into the 
Mysteries, and as such conversant with the occult sciences.

So also must Moses have been initiated: for he was not only  brought up in the court of the King, as the adopted son of the 
King's daughter, until he was forty years of age; but he was  instructed in all the learning of the Egyptians, and married  afterward  p. 369  the daughter of Yethru, a Priest of An likewise. Strabo and 
Diodorus both assert that he was himself a Priest of 
Heliopolis. Before he went into the Desert, there were  intimate relations between him and the Priesthood; and he had  successfully commanded, Josephus informs us, an army sent  by the King against the Ethiopians. Simplicius asserts that 
Moses received from the Egyptians, in the Mysteries, the  doctrines which he taught to the Hebrews: and Clemens of 
Alexandria and Philo say that he was a Theologian and 
Prophet, and interpreter of the Sacred Laws. Manetho, cited  by Josephus, says he was a Priest of Heliopolis, and that his  true and original (Egyptian) name was Asersaph or Osarsiph.

And in the institution of the Hebrew Priesthood, in the powers  and privileges, as well as the immunities and sanctity which  he conferred upon them, he closely imitated the Egyptian  institutions; making public the worship of that Deity whom  the Egyptian Initiates worshipped in private; and strenuously  endeavoring to keep the people from relapsing into their old  mixture of Chaldaic and Egyptian superstition and idol-  worship, as they were ever ready and inclined to do; even 
Aharun, upon their first clamorous discontent, restoring the  worship of Apis; as an image of which Egyptian God he made  the golden calf.

The Egyptian Priests taught in their great Mysteries, that there  was one God, Supreme and Unapproachable, who had  conceived the Universe by His Intelligence, before He created  it by His Power and Will. They were no Materialists nor 
Pantheists; but taught that Matter was not eternal or co¬  existent with the great First Cause, but created by Him.

The early Christians, taught by the founder of their Religion,  but in greater perfection, those primitive truths that from the 
Egyptians had passed to the Jews, and been preserved among  the latter by the Essenes, received also the institution of the 
Mysteries; adopting as their object the building of the  symbolic Temple, preserving the old Scriptures of the Jews as  their sacred book, and as the fundamental law, which  furnished the new veil of initiation with the Hebraic words  and formulas, that, corrupted and disfigured by time and  ignorance, appear in many of our Degrees.

Such, my Brother, is the doctrine of the first Degree of, the

Mysteries, or that of Chief of the Tabernacle, to which you  have  p. 370  now been admitted, and the moral lesson of which is,  devotion to the service of God, and disinterested zeal and  constant endeavor for the welfare of men. You have here  received only hints of the true objects and purposes of the 
Mysteries. Hereafter, if you are permitted to advance, you will  arrive at a more complete understanding of them and of the  sublime doctrines which they teach. Be content, therefore,  with that which you have seer and heard, and await patiently  the advent of the greater light.

Footnotes

368:1 An Egyptian word, meaning, "Bow down.

XXIV.

PRINCE OF THE TABERNACLE.

SYMBOLS were the almost universal language of ancient  theology. They were the most obvious method of instruction;  for, like nature herself, they addressed the understanding  through the eye; and the most ancient expressions denoting  communication of religious knowledge, signify ocular  exhibition. The first teachers of mankind borrowed this  method of instruction; and it comprised an endless store of  pregnant hieroglyphics. These lessons of the olden time were  the riddles of the Sphynx, tempting the curious by their  quaintness, but involving the personal risk of the adventurous  interpreter. "The Gods themselves," it was said, "disclose  their intentions to the wise, but to fools their teaching is  unintelligible;" and the King of the Delphic Oracle was said  not to declare, nor on the other hand to conceal ; but  emphatically to "intimate or signify."

The Ancient Sages, both barbarian and Greek, involved their  meaning in similar indirections and enigmas; their lessons  were conveyed either in visible symbols, or in those "parables  and dark sayings of old," which the Israelites considered it a  sacred duty to hand down unchanged to successive  generations. The explanatory tokens employed by man,  whether emblematical objects or actions, symbol's or mystic  ceremonies, were like the mystic signs and portents either in  dreams or by the wayside, supposed to be significant of the  intentions of the Gods; both required the aid of anxious  thought and skillful interpretation. It was only by a correct  appreciation of analogous problems of nature, that the will of 
Heaven could be understood by the Diviner, or the lessons of 
Wisdom become manifest to the Sage.

The Mysteries were a series of symbols; and what was spoken  there consisted wholly of accessory explanations of the act or  image; sacred commentaries, explanatory of established  symbols; with little of those independent traditions  embodying physical or moral speculation, in which the  elements or planets were the  p. 372  actors, and the creation and revolutions of the world were  intermingled with recollections of ancient events: and yet with  so much of that also, that nature became her own expositor  through the medium of an arbitrary symbolical instruction;  and the ancient views of the relation between the human and  divine received dramatic forms.

There has ever been an intimate alliance between the two  systems, the symbolic and the philosophical, in the allegories  of the monuments of all ages, in the symbolic writings of the  priests of all nations, in the rituals of all secret and mysterious  societies; there has been a constant series, an invariable  uniformity of principles, which come from an aggregate, vast,  imposing, and true, composed of parts that fit harmoniously  only there.

Symbolical instruction is recommended by the constant and  uniform usage of antiquity; and it has retained its influence  throughout all ages, as a system of mysterious  communication. The Deity, in his revelations to man, adopted  the use of material images for the purpose of enforcing  sublime truths; and Christ taught by symbols and parables. 
The mysterious knowledge of the Druids was embodied in  signs and symbols. Taliesin, describing his initiation, says: 
"The secrets were imparted to me by the old Giantess 
( Ceridwen , or Isis), without the use of audible language." And  again he says, "I am a silent proficient."

Initiation was a school, in which were taught the truths of  primitive revelation, the existence and attributes of one God,  the immortality of the Soul, rewards and punishments in a  future life, the phenomena of Nature, the arts, the sciences,  morality, legislation, philosophy, and philanthropy, and what  we now style psychology and metaphysics, with animal  magnetism, and the other occult sciences.

All the ideas of the Priests of Hindostan, Persia, Syria, Arabia, 
Chaldaea, Phoenicia, were known to the Egyptian Priests. The  rational Indian philosophy, after penetrating Persia and 
Chaldaea, gave birth to the Egyptian Mysteries. We find that  the use of Hieroglyphics was preceded in Egypt by that of the  easily understood symbols and figures, from the mineral,  animal, and vegetable kingdoms, used by the Indians,

Persians, and Chalchcans to express their thoughts; and this  primitive philosophy was the basis of the modem philosophy  of Pythagoras and Plato.  p. 373

All the philosophers and legislators that made Antiquity  illustrious, were pupils of the initiation; and all the beneficent  modifications in the religions of the different people  instructed by them were owing to their institution and  extension of the Mysteries. In the chaos of popular  superstitions, those Mysteries alone kept man from lapsing  into absolute brutishness. Zoroaster and Confucius drew their  doctrines from the Mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria,  speaking of the Great Mysteries, says: "Here ends all  instruction. Nature and all things are seen and known." Had  moral truths alone been taught the Initiate, the Mysteries  could never have deserved nor received the magnificent  eulogiums of the most enlightened men of Antiquity,—of 
Pindar, Plutarch, Isocrates, Diodoius, Plato, Euripides, 
Socrates, Aristophanes, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius,  and others;-philosophers hostile to the Sacerdotal Spirit, or  historians devoted to the investigation of Tiuth. No: all the  sciences were taught there; and those oral or written traditions  briefly communicated, which reached back to the fust age of  the world.

Socrates said, in the Phasdo of Plato: "It well appears that  those who established the Mysteries, or secret assemblies of  the initiated, were no contemptible personages, but men of  great genius, who in the early ages strove to teach us, under  enigmas, that he who shall go to the invisible regions without  being purified, will be precipitated into the abyss; while he  who arrives there, purged of the stains of this world, and  accomplished in virtue, will be admitted to the dwelling-place  of the Deity.. . The initiated are certain to attain the company  of the Gods."

Pretextatus, Proconsul of Achaia, a man endowed with all the  virtues, said, in the 4th century, that to deprive the Greeks of  those Sacred Mysteries which bound together the whole  human race, would make life insupportable.

Initiation was considered to be a mystical death; a descent  into the infernal regions, where every pollution, and the stains  and imperfections of a corrupt and evil life were purged away  by fire and water; and the perfect Epopt was then said to be  regenerated, new-born, restored to a renovated existence of  life, light, and purity, and placed under the Divine Protection.

A new language was adapted to these celebrations, and also a  language of hieroglyphics, unknown to any but those who had  received the highest Degree. And to them ultimately were  confined the learning, the morality, and the political power of  every people  p. 374  among which the Mysteries were practised. So effectually  was the knowledge of the hieroglyphics of the highest Degree  hidden from all but a favored few, that in process of time their  meaning was entirely lost, and none could interpret them. If  the same hieroglyphics were employed in the higher as in the  lower Degrees, they had a different and more abstruse and  figurative meaning. It was pretended, in later times, that the  sacred hieroglyphics and language were the same that were  used by the Celestial Deities. Everything that could heighten  the mystery of initiation was added, until the very name of the  ceremony possessed a strange charm, and yet conjured up the  wildest fears. The greatest rapture came to be expressed by  the word that signified to pass through the Mysteries.

The Priesthood possessed one third of Egypt. They gained  much of their influence by means of the Mysteries, and spared  no means to impress the people with a full sense of their  importance. They represented them as the beginning of a new  life of reason and virtue: the initiated, or esoteric companions  were said to entertain the most agreeable anticipations  respecting death and eternity, to comprehend all the hidden  mysteries of Nature, to have their souls restored to the  original perfection from which man had fallen; and at their  death to be borne to the celestial mansions of the Gods. The  doctrines of a future state of rewards and punishments formed  a prominent feature in the Mysteries; and they were also  believed to assure much temporal happiness and good-  fortune, and afford absolute security against the most  imminent dangers by land and sea. Public odium was cast on  those who refused to be initiated. They were considered  profane, unworthy of public employment or private  confidence; and held to be doomed to eternal punishment as  impious. To betray the secrets of the Mysteries, to wear on the  stage the dress of an Initiate, or to hold the Mysteries up to  derision, was to incur death at the hands of public vengeance.

It is certain that up to the time of Cicero, the Mysteries still  retained much of their original character of sanctity and  purity. And at a later day, as we know, Nero, after committing  a horrible crime, did not dare, even in Greece, to aid in the  celebration of the Mysteries; nor at a still later day was 
Constantine, the Christian Emperor, allowed to do so, after his  murder of his relatives.

Everywhere, and in all their forms, the Mysteries were  p. 375  funereal; and celebrated the mystical death and restoration to  life of some divine or heroic personage: and the details of the  legend and the mode of the death varied in the different 
Countries where the Mysteries were practised.

Their explanation belongs both to astronomy and mythology;  and the Legend of the Master's Degree is but another form of  that of the Mysteries, reaching back, in one shape or other, to  the remotest antiquity.

Whether Egypt originated the legend, or borrowed it from 
India or Chaldaea, it is now impossible to know. But the 
Hebrews received the Mysteries from the Egyptians; and of  course were familiar with their legend ,—known as it was to  those Egyptian Initiates, Joseph and Moses. It was the fable

(or rather the truth clothed in allegory and figures) of OSIRIS,  the Sun, Source of Light and Principle of Good, and 
TYPHON, the Principle of Darkness and Evil. In all the  histories of the Gods and Heroes lay couched and hidden  astronomical details and the history of the operations of  visible Nature; and those in their turn were also symbols of  higher and profounder truths. None but rude uncultivated  intellects could long consider the Sun and Stars and the 
Powers of Nature as Divine, or as fit objects of Human 
Worship; and they will consider them so while the world lasts;  and ever remain ignorant of the great Spiritual Truths of  which these are the hieroglyphics and expressions.

A brief summary of the Egyptian legend will serve to show  the leading idea on which the Mysteries among the Hebrews  were based.

Osiris, said to have been an ancient King of Egypt, was the 
Sun; and Isis, his wife, the Moon: and his history recounts, in  poetical and figurative style, the annual journey of the Great 
Luminary of Heaven through the different Signs of the 
Zodiac.

In the absence of Osiris, Typhon, his brother, filled with envy  and malice, sought to usurp his throne; but his plans were  frustrated by Isis. Then he resolved to kill Osiris. This he did,  by persuading him to enter a coffin or sarcophagus, which he  then flung into the Nile. After a long search, Isis found the  body, and concealed it in the depths of a forest; but Typhon,  finding it there, cut it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them  hither and thither. After tedious search, Isis found thirteen  pieces, the fishes having eaten the other (the privates), which  she replaced of wood, and  p. 376  buried the body at Phils; where a temple of surpassing  magnificence was erected in honor of Osiris.

Isis, aided by her son Orus, Horns or Har-oeri, warred against 
Typhon, slew him, reigned gloriously, and at her death was  re-united to her husband, in the same tomb.

Typhon was represented as bom of the earth; the upper part of  his body covered with feathers, in stature reaching the clouds,  his arms and legs covered with scales, serpents darting from  him on every side, and fire flashing from his mouth. Homs,  who aided in slaying him, became the God of the Sun,  answering to the Grecian Apollo; and Typhon is but the  anagram of Python, the great serpent slain by Apollo.

The word Typhon, like Eve, signifies a serpent, and life. \ By  its form the serpent symbolizes life, which circulates through  all nature. When, toward the end of autumn, the Woman 
(Virgo), in the constellations seems (upon the Chaldasan  sphere) to crush with her heel the head of the serpent, this  figure foretells the coming of winter, during which life seems  to retire from all beings, and no longer to circulate through  nature. This is why Typhon signifies also a serpent, the  symbol of winter, which, in the Catholic Temples, is  represented surrounding the Terrestrial Globe, which  surmounts the heavenly cross, emblem of redemption. If the  word Typhon is derived from Tupoul, it signifies a tree which  produces apples (mala, evils), the Jewish origin of the fall of  man. Typhon means also one who supplants, and signifies the  human passions, which expel from our hearts the lessons of  wisdom. In the Egyptian Fable, Isis wrote the sacred word for  the instruction of men, and Typhon effaced it as fast as she  wrote it. In morals, his name signifies Pride, Ignorance, and 
Falsehood.

When Isis first found the body, where it had floated ashore  near Byblos, a shrub of erica or tamarisk near it had, by the  virtue of the body, shot up into a tree around it, and protected  it; and hence our sprig of acacia. Isis was also aided in her  search by Anubis, in the shape of a dog. He was Sirius or the 
Dog-Star, the friend and counsellor of Osiris, and the inventor  of language, grammar, astronomy, surveying, arithmetic,  music, and medical science; the first maker of laws; and who  taught the worship of the Gods, and the building of Temples.  p. 377

In the Mysteries, the nailing up of the body of Osiris in the  chest or ark was tenned the aphanism, or disappearance [of  the Sun at the Winter Solstice, below the Tropic of 
Capricorn], and the recovery of the different parts of his body  by Isis, the Euresis, or finding. The candidate went through a  ceremony representing this, in all the Mysteries everywhere.

The main facts in the fable were the same in all countries; and  the prominent Deities were everywhere a male and a female.

In Egypt they were Osiris and Isis: in India, Mahadeva and 
Bhavani: in Phoenicia, Thammuz (or Adonis) and Astarte: in 
Phrygia, Atys and Cybele: in Persia, Mithras and Asis: in 
Samothrace and Greece, Dionusos or Sabazeus and Rhea: in 
Britain, Hu and Ceridwen: and in Scandinavia, Woden and 
Frea: and in every instance these Divinities represented the 
Sun and the Moon.

The mysteries of Osiris, Isis, and Horns, seem to have been  the model of all other ceremonies of initiation subsequently  established among the different peoples of the world. Those  of Atys and Cybele, celebrated in Phrygia; those of Ceres and 
Proserpine, at Eleusis and many other places in Greece, were  but copies of them. This we learn from Plutarch, Diodorus 
Siculus, Lactantius, and other writers; and in the absence of  direct testimony should necessarily infer it from the similarity  of the adventures of these Deities; for the ancients held that  the Ceres of the Greeks was the same as the Isis of the 
Egyptians; and Dionusos or Bacchus as Osiris.

In the legend of Osiris and Isis, as given by Plutarch, are  many details and circumstances other than those that we have  briefly mentioned; and all of which we need not repeat here. 
Osiris married his sister Isis; and labored publicly with her to  ameliorate the lot of men. He taught them agriculture, while 
Isis invented laws. He built temples to the Gods, and  established their worship. Both were the patrons of artists and  their useful inventions; and introduced the use of iron for  defensive weapons and implements of agriculture, and of gold  to adorn the temples of the Gods. He went forth with an army  to conquer men to civilization, teaching the people whom he  overcame to plant the vine and sow grain for food.

Typhon, his brother, slew him when the sun was in the sign of  the Scorpion, that is to say, at the Autumnal Equinox. They  had  p. 378  been rival claimants, says Synesius, for the throne of Egypt,  as Light and Darkness contend ever for the empire of the  world. Plutarch adds, that at the time when Osiris was slain,  the moon was at its full; and therefore it was in the sign  opposite the Scorpion, that is, the Bull, the sign of the Vernal 
Equinox.

Plutarch assures us that it was to represent these events and  details that Isis established the Mysteries, in which they were  re-produced by images, symbols, and a religious ceremonial,  whereby they were imitated: and in which lessons of piety  were given, and consolations under the misfortunes that afflict  us here below. Those who instituted these Mysteries meant to  strengthen religion and console men in their sorrows by the  lofty hopes found in a religious faith, whose principles were  represented to them covered by a pompous ceremonial, and  under the sacred veil of allegory.

Diodorus speaks of the famous columns erected near Nysa, in 
Arabia, where, it was said, were two of the tombs of Osiris  and Isis. On one was this inscription: "I am Isis, Queen of this  country. I was instructed by Mercury. No one can destroy the  laws which I have established. I am the eldest daughter of 
Saturn, most ancient of the Gods. I am the wife and sister of 
Osiris the King. I first made known to mortals the use of  wheat. I am the mother of Oms the King. In my honor was the  city of Bubaste built. Rejoice, O Egypt, rejoice, land that gave  me birth!"... And on the other was this: "I am Osiris the 
King, who led my armies into all parts of the world, to the  most thickly inhabited countries of India, the North, the 
Danube, and the Ocean. I am the eldest son of Saturn: I was  bom of the brilliant and magnificent egg, and my substance is  of the same nature as that which composes light. There is no  place in the Universe where I have not appeared, to bestow  my benefits and make known my discoveries." The rest was  illegible.

To aid her in the search for the body of Osiris, and to nurse  her infant child Homs, Isis sought out and took with her 
Anubis, son of Osiris, and his sister Nephte. He, as we have  said, was Sirius, the brightest star in the Heavens. After  finding him, she went to Byblos, and seated herself near a  fountain, where she had learned that the sacred chest had  stopped which contained the body of Osiris. There she sat, sad  and silent, shedding a torrent of tears. Thither came the  women of the Court of Queen Astarte, and she spoke to them,  and dressed their hair, pouring upon it deliciously  p. 379  perfumed ambrosia. This known to the Queen, Isis was  engaged as nurse for her child, in the palace, one of the  columns of which was made of the erica or tamarisk, that had  grown up over the chest containing Osiris, cut down by the 
King, and unknown to him, still enclosing the chest: which  column Isis afterward demanded, and from it extracted the  chest and the body, which, the latter wrapped in thin drapery  and perfumed, she carried away with her.

Blue Masonry, ignorant of its import, still retains among its  emblems one of a woman weeping over a broken column,  holding in her hand a branch of acacia, myrtle, or tamarisk,  while Time, we are told, stands behind her combing out the  ringlets of her hair. We need not repeat the vapid and trivial  explanation there given, of this representation of Isis, weeping  at Byblos, over the column tom from the palace of the King,  that contained the body of Osiris, while Homs, the God of 
Time, pours ambrosia on her hair.

Nothing of this recital was historical; but the whole was an  allegory or sacred fable, containing a meaning known only to  those who were initiated into the Mysteries. All the incidents  were astronomical, with a meaning still deeper lying behind  that explanation, and so hidden by a double veil. The 
Mysteries, in which these incidents were represented and  explained, were like those of Eleusis in their object, of which 
Pausanias, who was initiated, says that the Greeks, from the  remotest antiquity, regarded them as the best calculated of all  things to lead men to piety: and Aristotle says they were the  most valuable of all religious institutions, and thus were  called mysteries par excellence; and the Temple of Eleusis  was regarded as, in some sort, the common sanctuary of the  whole earth, where religion had brought together all that was  most imposing and most august.

The object of all the Mysteries was to inspire men with piety,  and to console them in the miseries of life. That consolation,  so afforded, was the hope of a happier future, and of passing,  after death, to a state of eternal felicity.

Cicero says that the Initiates not only received lessons which  made life more agreeable, but drew from the ceremonies  happy hopes for the moment of death. Socrates says that those  who were so fortunate as to be admitted to the Mysteries,  possessed, when dying, the most glorious hopes for eternity. 
Aristides says  p. 380  that they not only procure the Initiates consolations' in the  present life, and means of deliverance from the great weight  of their evils, but also the precious advantage of passing after  death to a happier state.

Isis was the Goddess of Sais; and the famous Feast of Lights  was celebrated there in her honor.' There were celebrated the 
Mysteries, in which were represented the death and  subsequent restoration to life of the God Osiris, in a secret  ceremony and scenic representation of his sufferings, called  the Mysteries of Night.

The Kings of Egypt often exercised the functions of the 
Priest-hood; and they were initiated into the sacred science as  soon as they attained the throne. So at Athens, the First 
Magistrate, or Archon-King, superintended the Mysteries. 
This was an image of the union that existed between the 
Priesthood and Royalty, in those early times when legislators  and kings sought in religion a potent political instrument.

Herodotus says, speaking of the reasons why animals were  deified in Egypt: "If I were to explain these reasons, I should  be led to the disclosure of those holy matters which I  particularly wish to avoid, and which, but from necessity, I  should not have discussed at all." So he says, "The Egyptians  have at Sais the tomb of a certain personage, whom I do not  think myself permitted to specify. It is behind the Temple of 
Minerva." [The latter, so called by the Greeks, was really Isis,  whose was the often-cited enigmatical inscription, "I am what  was and is and is to come. No mortal hath yet unveiled me."] 
So again he says: "Upon this lake are represented by night the  accidents which happened to him whom I dare not name. The 
Egyptians call them their Mysteries. Concerning these, at the  same time that I confess myself sufficiently informed, I feel  myself compelled to be silent. Of the ceremonies also in  honor of Ceres, I may not venture to speak, farther than the  obligations of religion will allow me."

It is easy to see what was the great object of initiation and the 
Mysteries; whose first and greatest fruit was, as all the  ancients testily, to civilize savage hordes, to soften their  ferocious manners, to introduce among them social  intercourse, and lead them into a way of life more worthy of  men. Cicero considers the establishment of the Eleusinian 
Mysteries to be the greatest of all the benefits conferred by 
Athens on other commonwealths; their effects  p. 381  having been, he says, to civilize men, soften their savage and  ferocious manners, and teach them the true principles of  morals, which initiate man into the only kind of life worthy of  him. The same philosophic orator, in a passage where he  apostrophizes Ceres and Proserpine, says that mankind owes  these Goddesses the first elements of moral life, as well as the  first means of sustenance of physical life; knowledge of the  laws, regulation of morals, and those examples of civilization  which have improved the manners of men and cities.

Bacchus in Euripides says to Pentheus, that leis new  institution (the Dionysiac Mysteries) deserved to be known,  and that one of its great advantages was, that it proscribed all  impurity: that these were the Mysteries of Wisdom, of which  it would be imprudent to speak to persons not initiated: that  they were established among the Barbarians, who in that  showed greater wisdom than the Greeks, who had not yet  received them.

This double object, political and religious,-one teaching our  duty to men, and the other what we owe to the Gods; or  rather, respect for the Gods calculated to maintain that which  we owe the laws, is found in that well-known verse of Virgil,  borrowed by him from the ceremonies of initiation: "Teach  me to respect justice and the Gods." This great lesson, which  the Hierophant impressed on the Initiates, after they had  witnessed a representation of the Infernal regions, the Poet  places after his description of the different punishments  suffered by the wicked in Tartarus, and immediately after the  description of that of Sisyphus.

Pausanias, likewise, at the close of the representation of the  punishments of Sisyphus and the daughters of Danaus, in the 
Temple at Delphi, makes this reflection; that the crime or  impiety which in them had chiefly merited this punishment,  was the contempt which they had shown for the Mysteries of 
Eleusis. From this reflection of Pausanias, who was an 
Initiate, it is easy to see that the Priests of Eleusis, who taught  the dogma of punishment in Tartarus, included among the  great crimes deserving these punishments, contempt for and  disregard of the Holy Mysteries; whose object was to lead  men to piety, and thereby to respect for justice and the laws,  chief object of their institution, if not the only one, and to  which the needs and interest of religion itself were  subordinate; since the latter was but a means to lead more  surely to the former; for the whole force of religious opinions  p. 382  being in the hands of the legislators to be wielded, they were  sure of being better obeyed.

The Mysteries were not merely simple lustrations and the  observation of some arbitrary formulas and ceremonies; nor a  means of reminding men of the ancient condition of the race  prior to civilization: but they led men to piety by instruction  in morals and as to a future life; which at a very early day, if  not originally, formed the chief portion of the ceremonial.

Symbols were used in the ceremonies, which referred to  agriculture, as Masonry has preserved the ear of wheat in a  symbol and in one of her words; but their principal reference  was to astronomical phenomena. Much was no doubt said as  to the condition of brutality and degradation in which man  was sunk before the institution of the Mysteries; but the  allusion was rather meta-physical, to the ignorance of the  uninitiated, than to the wild life of the earliest men.

The great object of the Mysteries of Isis, and in general of all  the Mysteries, was a great and truly politic one. It was to  ameliorate our race, to perfect its manners and morals, and to  restrain society by stronger bonds than those that human laws  impose. They were the invention of that ancient science and  wisdom which exhausted all its resources to make legislation  perfect; and of that philosophy which has ever sought to  secure the happiness of man, by purifying his soul from the  passions which can trouble it, and as a necessary consequence  introduce social disorder. And that they were the work of  genius is evident from their employment of all the sciences, a  profound knowledge of the human heart, and the means of  subduing it.

It is a still greater mistake to imagine that they were the  inventions of charlatanism, and means of deception. They  may in the lapse of time have degenerated into imposture and  schools of false ideas; but they were not so at the beginning;  or else the wisest and best men of antiquity have uttered the  most willful falsehoods. In process of time the very allegories  of the Mysteries themselves, Tartarus and its punishments, 
Minos and the other judges of the dead, came to be  misunderstood, and to be false because they were so; while at  fust they were true, because they were recognized as merely  the arbitrary forms in which truths were enveloped.

The object of the Mysteries was to procure for man a real  felicity on earth by the means of virtue; and to that end he was  p. 383  taught that his soul was immortal; and that error, sin, and vice  must needs, by an inflexible law, produce their consequences. 
The rude representation of physical torture in Tartarus was  but an image of the certain, unavoidable, eternal  consequences that flow by the law of God's enactment from  the sin committed and the vice indulged in. The poets and  mystagogues labored to propagate these doctrines of the soul's  immortality and the certain punishment of sin and vice, and to  accredit them with the people, by teaching them the former in  their poems, and the latter in the sanctuaries; and they clothed  them with the charms, the one of poetry, and the other of  spectacles and magic illusions.

They painted, aided by all the resources of art, the virtuous  man's happy life after death, and the horrors of the frightful  prisons destined to punish the vicious. In the shades of the  sanctuaries, these delights and horrors were exhibited as  spectacles, and the Initiates witnessed religious dramas, under  the name of initiation and mysteries. Curiosity was excited by  secrecy, by the difficulty experienced in obtaining admission,  and by the tests to be undergone. The candidate was amused  by the variety of the scenery, the pomp of the decorations, the  appliances of machinery. Respect was inspired by the gravity  and dignity of the actors and the majesty of the ceremonial;  and fear and hope, sadness and delight, were in turns excited.

The Hierophants, men of intellect, and well understanding the  disposition of the people and the art of controlling them, used  every appliance to attain that object, and give importance and  impressiveness to their ceremonies. As they covered those  ceremonies with the veil of Secrecy, so they preferred that 
Night should cover them with its wings. Obscurity adds to  impressiveness, and assists illusion; and they used it to  produce an effect upon the astonished Initiate. The  ceremonies were conducted in caverns dimly lighted: thick  groves were planted around the Temples, to produce that  gloom that impresses the mind with a religious awe.

The very word mystery, according to Demetrius Phalereus,  was a metaphorical expression that denoted the secret awe  which darkness and gloom inspired. The night was almost  always the time fixed for their celebration; and they were  ordinarily termed nocturnal ceremonies. Initiations into the 
Mysteries of Samothrace took place at night; as did those of 
Isis, of which Apuleius speaks.  p. 384

[paragraph continues] Euripides makes Bacchus say, that his 
Mysteries were celebrated at night, because there is in night  something august and imposing.

Nothing excites men's curiosity so much as Mystery,  concealing things which they desire to know: and nothing so  much increases curiosity as obstacles that interpose to prevent  them from indulging in the gratification of their desires. Of  this the Legislators and Hierophants took advantage, to attract  the people to their sanctuaries, and to induce them to seek to  obtain lessons from which they would perhaps have turned  away with indifference, if they had been pressed upon them. 
In this spirit of mystery they professed to imitate the Deity,  who hides Himself from our senses, and conceals from us the  springs by which He moves the Universe. They admitted that  they concealed the highest truths under the veil of allegory,  the more to excite the curiosity of men, and to urge them to  investigation. The secrecy in which they buried their 
Mysteries, had that end. Those to whom they were confided,  bound themselves, by the most fearful oaths, never to reveal  them. They were not allowed even to speak of these important  secrets with any others than the initiated; and the penalty of  death was pronounced against any one indiscreet enough to  reveal them, or found in the Temple without being an Initiate;  and any one who had betrayed those secrets, was avoided by  all, as excommunicated.

Aristotle was accused of impiety, by the Hierophant 
Eurymedon, for having sacrificed to the manes of his wife,  according to the rite used in the worship of Ceres. He was  compelled to flee to Chalcis; and to purge his memory from  this stain, he directed, by his will, the erection of a Statue to  that Goddess. Socrates, dying, sacrificed to Esculapius, to  exculpate himself from the suspicion of Atheism. A price was  set on the head of Diagoras, because he had divulged the 
Secret of the Mysteries. Andocides was accused of the same  crime, as was Alcibiades, and both were cited to answer the  charge before the inquisition at Athens, where the People  were the Judges. /Eschykis the Tragedian was accused of  having represented the Mysteries on the stage; and was  acquitted only on proving that he had never been initiated.

Seneca, comparing Philosophy to initiation, says that the most  sacred ceremonies could be known to the adepts alone: but  that many of their precepts were known even to the Profane. 
Such  p. 385  was the case with the doctrine of a future life, and a state of  rewards and punishments beyond the grave. The ancient  legislators clothed this doctrine, in the pomp of a mysterious  ceremony, in mystic words and magical representations, to  impress upon the mind the truths they taught, by the strong  influence of such scenic displays upon the senses and  imagination.

In the same way they taught the origin of the soul, its fall to  the earth past the spheres and through the elements, and its  final return to the place of its origin, when, during the  continuance of its union with earthly matter, the sacred fire,  which formed its essence, had contracted no stains, and its  brightness had not been marred by foreign particles, which,  denaturalizing it, weighed it down and delayed its return. 
These metaphysical ideas, with difficulty comprehended by  the mass of the Initiates, were represented by figures, by  symbols, and by allegorical analogies; no idea being so  abstract that men do not seek to give it expression by, and  translate it into, sensible images.

The attraction of Secrecy was enhanced by the difficulty of  obtaining admission. Obstacles and suspense redoubled  curiosity. Those who aspired to the initiation of the Sun and  in the Mysteries of Mithras in Persia, underwent many trials. 
They commenced by easy tests and arrived by degrees at  those that were most cruel, in which the life of the candidate  was often endangered. Gregory Nazianzen terms them  tortures and mystic punishments. No one can be initiated,  says Suidas, until after he has proven, by the most terrible  trials, that he possesses a virtuous soul, exempt from the sway  of every passion, and at it were impassible. There were twelve  principal tests; and some make the number larger.

The trials of the Eleusinian initiations were not so terrible; but  they were severe; and the suspense, above all, in which the  aspirant was kept for several years [the memory of which is  retained in Masonry by the ages of those of the different 
Degrees], or the interval between admission to the inferior  and initiation in the great Mysteries, was a species of torture  to the curiosity which it was desired to excite. Thus the 
Egyptian Priests tried Pythagoras before admitting him to  know the secrets of the sacred science. He succeeded, by his  incredible patience and the courage with which he  surmounted all obstacles, in obtaining admission to their  society and receiving their lessons. Among the Jews the 
Essenes  p. 386  admitted none among them, until they had passed the tests or  several Degrees.

By initiation, those who before were fellow-citizens only,  became brothers, connected by a closer bond than before, by  means of a religious fraternity, which, bringing men nearer  together, united them more strongly: and the weak and the  poor could more readily appeal for assistance to the powerful  and the wealthy, with whom religious association gave them a  closer fellowship.

The Initiate was regarded as the favorite of the Gods. For him  alone Heaven opened its treasures. Fortunate during life, he  could, by virtue and the favor of Heaven, promise himself  after death an eternal felicity.

The Priests of the Island of Samothrace promised favorable  winds and prosperous voyages to those who were initiated. It  was promised them that the CABIRI, and Castor and Pollux,  the DIOSCURI, should appear to them when the storm raged,  and give them calms and smooth seas: and the Scholiast of 
Aristophanes says that those initiated in the Mysteries there  were just men, who were privileged to escape from great evils  and tempests.

The Initiate in the Mysteries of Orpheus, after he was  purified, was considered as released from the empire of evil,  and transferred to a condition of life which gave him the  happiest hopes. "I have emerged from evil," he was made to  say, "and have attained good." Those initiated in the 
Mysteries of Eleusis believed that the Sun blazed with a pure  splendor for them alone. And, as we see in the case of 
Pericles, they flattered themselves that Ceres and Proserpine  inspired them and gave them wisdom and counsel.

Initiation dissipated errors and banished misfortune: and after  having filled the heart of man with joy during life, it gave him  the most blissful hopes at the moment of death. We owe it to  the Goddesses of Eleusis, says Socrates, that we do not lead  the wild life of the earliest men: and to them are due the  flattering hopes which initiation gives us for the moment of  death and for all eternity. The benefit which we reap from  these august ceremonies, says Aristides, is not only present  joy, a deliverance and enfranchisement from the old ills; but  also the sweet hope which we have in death of passing to a  more fortunate state. And Theon says that participation of the 
Mysteries is the finest of all things, and the source of the  greatest blessings. The happiness promised there was not  limited to this mortal life; but it extended  p. 387  beyond the grave. There a new life was to commence, during  which the Initiate was to enjoy a bliss without alloy and  without limit. The Corybantes promised eternal life to the 
Initiates of the Mysteries of Cybele and Atys.

Apuleius represents Lucius, while still in the form of an ass,  as addressing his prayers to Isis, whom he speaks of as the  same as Ceres, Venus, Diana, and Proserpine, and as  illuminating the walls of many cities simultaneously with her  feminine lustre, and substituting her quivering light for the  bright rays of the Sun. She appears to him in his vision as a  beautiful female, "over whose divine neck her long thick hair-  hung in graceful ringlets." Addressing him, she says, "The  parent of Universal nature attends thy call. The mistress of the 
Elements, initiative germ of generations, Supreme of Deities, 
Queen of departed spirits, first inhabitant of Heaven, and  uniform type of all the Gods and Goddesses, propitiated by  thy prayers, is with thee. She governs with her nod the  luminous heights of the firmament, the salubrious breezes of  the ocean; the silent deplorable depths of the shades below;  one Sole Divinity under many forms, worshipped by the  different nations of the Earth under many titles, and with  various religious rites."

Directing him how to proceed, at her festival, to re-obtain his  human shape, she says: "Throughout the entire course of the  remainder of thy life, until the very last breath has vanished  from thy lips, thou art devoted to my service. ... Under my  protection will thy life be happy and glorious: and when, thy  days being spent, thou shalt descend to the shades below, and  inhabit the Elysian fields, there also, even in the subterranean  hemisphere, shalt thou pay frequent worship to me, thy  propitious patron: and yet further: if through sedulous  obedience, religious devotion to my ministry, and inviolable  chastity, thou shalt prove thyself a worthy object of divine  favor, then shalt thou feel the influence of the power that I  alone possess. The number of thy days shall be prolonged  beyond the ordinary decrees of fate."

In the procession of the festival, Lucius saw the image of the 
Goddess, on either side of which were female attendants, that, 
"with ivory combs in their hands, made believe, by the motion  of their arms and the twisting of their fingers, to comb and  ornament the Goddess' royal hair." Afterward, clad in linen  robes, came the initiated, "The hair of the women was  moistened by  p. 388  perfume, and enveloped in a transparent covering; but the  men, terrestrial stars, as it were, of the great religion, were  thoroughly shaven, and their bald heads shone exceedingly."

Afterward came the Priests, in robes of white linen. The first  bore a lamp in the form of a boat, emitting flame from an  orifice in the middle: the second, a small altar: the third, a  golden palm-tree: and the fourth displayed the figure of a left  hand, the palm open and expanded, "representing thereby a  symbol of equity and fair-dealing, of which the left hand, as  slower than the right hand, and more void of skill and craft, is  therefore an appropriate emblem."

After Lucius had, by the grace of Isis, recovered his human  form, the Priest said to him, "Calamity hath no hold on those  whom our Goddess hath chosen for her service, and whom  her majesty hath vindicated." And the people declared that he  was fortunate to be "thus after a manner bom again, and at  once betrothed to the service of the Holy Ministry."

When he urged the Chief Priest to initiate him, he was  answered that there was not "a single one among the initiated,  of a mind so depraved, or so bent on his own destruction, as,  without receiving a special command from Isis, to dare to  undertake her minis-try rashly and sacrilegiously, and thereby  commit an act certain to bring upon himself a dreadful  injury." "For," continued the Chief Priest, "the gates of the  shades below, and the care of our life being in the hands of  the Goddess ,—the ceremony of initiation into the Mysteries is.  as it were, to suffer death , with the precarious chance of  resuscitation. Wherefore the Goddess, in the wisdom of her 
Divinity, hath been accustomed to select as persons to whom  the secrets of her religion can with propriety be entrusted,  those who, standing as it were on the utmost limit of the  course of life they have completed, may through her 
Providence be in a manner born again , and commence the  career of a new existence."

When he was finally to be initiated, he was conducted to the  nearest baths, and after having bathed, the Priest first solicited  forgiveness of the Gods, and then sprinkled him all over with  the clearest and purest water, and conducted him back to the 
Temple; "where," says Apuleius, "after giving me some  instruction, that mortal tongue is not permitted to reveal, he  bade me for the succeeding ten days restrain my appetite, eat  no animal food, and drink no wine."  p. 389

These ten days elapsed, the Priest led him into the inmost  recesses of the Sanctuary. "And here, studious reader," he  continues, "peradventure thou wilt be sufficiently anxious to  know all that was said and done, which, were it lawful to  divulge, I would tell thee; and, wert thou permitted to hear,  thou shouldst know. Nevertheless, although the disclosure  would affix the penalty of rash curiosity to my tongue as well  as thy ears, yet will I, for fear thou shouldst be too long  tormented with religious longing, and suffer the pain of  protracted suspense, tell the truth notwithstanding. Listen then  to what I shall relate. I approached the abode of death; with  my foot I pressed the threshold of Proserpine's Palace. I was  transported through the elements, and conducted back again. 
At midnight I saw the bright light of the sun shining. I stood in  the presence of the Gods, the Gods of Heaven and of the 
Shades below; ay, stood near and worshipped. And now have 
I told thee such things that, hearing, thou necessarily canst not  understand; and being beyond the comprehension of the 
Profane, I can enunciate without committing a crime."

After night had passed, and the morning had dawned, the  usual ceremonies were at an end. Then he was consecrated by  twelve stoles being put upon him, clothed, crowned with  palm-leaves, and exhibited to the people. The remainder of  that day was celebrated as his birthday and passed in  festivities; and on the third day afterward, the same religious  ceremonies were repeated, including a religious breakfast, 
"followed by a final consummation of ceremonies."

A year afterward, he was warned to prepare for initiation into  the Mysteries of "the Great God, Supreme Parent of all the  other Gods, the invincible OSIRIS." "For," says Apuleius, 
"although there is a strict connexion between the religions of  both Deities, AND EVEN THE ESSENCE OF BOTH 
DIVINITIES IS IDENTICAL, the ceremonies of the  respective initiations are considerably different."

Compare with this hint the following language of the prayer  of Lucius, addressed to Isis; and we may judge what doctrines  were taught in the Mysteries, in regard to the Deity: "O Holy  and Perpetual Preserver of the Human Race! ever ready to  cherish mortals by Thy munificence, and to afford Thy sweet  maternal affection to the wretched under misfortune; Whose  bounty is never at rest, neither by day nor by night, nor  throughout the very minutest particle of duration; Thou who  stretchest forth Thy  p. 390  health-bearing right hand over the land and over the sea for  the protection of mankind, to disperse the storms of life, to  unravel the inextricable entanglement of the web of fate, to  mitigate the tempests of fortune, and restrain the malignant  influences of the stars,— the Gods in Heaven adore Thee, the 
Gods in the shades below do Thee homage, the stars obey 
Thee, the Divinities rejoice in Thee, the elements and the  revolving seasons serve Thee! At Thy nod the winds breathe,  clouds gather, seeds grow, buds germinate; in obedience to 
Thee the Earth revolves AND THE SUN GIVES US LIGHT. 
IT IS THOU WHO GOVERNEST THE UNIVERSE AND 
TREADEST TARTARUS UNDER THY FEET."

Then he was initiated into the nocturnal Mysteries of Osiris  and Serapis: and afterward into those of Ceres at Rome: but of  the ceremonies in these initiations, Apuleius says nothing.

Under the Archonship of Euclid, bastards and slaves were  excluded from initiation; and the same exclusion obtained  against the Materialists or Epicureans who denied Providence  and consequently the utility of initiation. By a natural  progress, it came at length to be considered that the gates of 
Elysium would open only for the Initiates, whose souls had  been purified and regenerated in the sanctuaries. But it was  never held, on the other hand, that initiation alone sufficed. 
We learn from Plato, that it was also necessary for the soul to  be purified from every stain: and that the purification  necessary was such as gave virtue, truth, wisdom, strength,  justice, and temperance.

Entrance to the Temples was forbidden to all who had  committed homicide, even if it were involuntary. So it is  stated by both Isocrates and Theon. Magicians and Charlatans  who made trickery a trade, and impostors pretending to be  possessed by evil spirits, were excluded from the sanctuaries. 
Every impious person and criminal was rejected; and 
Lampridius states that before the celebration of the Mysteries,  public notice was given, that none need apply to enter but  those against whom their consciences uttered no reproach,  and who were certain of their own innocence.

It was required of the Initiate that his heart and hands should  be free from any stain. Porphyry says that man's soul, at  death, should be enfranchised from all the passions, from  hate, envy, and the others; and, in a word, be as pure as it is  required to be in the Mysteries. Of course it is not surprising  that parricides and perjurers,  p. 391  and others who had committed crimes against God or man,  could not be admitted. In the Mysteries of Mithras, a lecture  was repeated to the Initiate on the subject of Justice. And the  great moral lesson of the Mysteries, to which all their mystic  ceremonial tended, expressed in a single line by Virgil, was to  practise Justice and revere the Deity ,—thus recalling men to  justice, by connecting it with the justice of the Gods, who  require it and punish its infraction. The Initiate could aspire to  the favors of the Gods, only because and while he respected  the rights of society and those of humanity. "The sun," says  the chorus of Initiates in Aristophanes, "bums with a pure  light for us alone, who, admitted to the Mysteries, observe the  laws of piety in our intercourse with strangers and our fellow-  citizens." The rewards of initiation were attached to the  practice of the social virtues. It was not enough to be initiated  merely. It was necessary to be faithful to the laws of  initiation, which imposed on men duties in regard to their  kind. Bacchus allowed none to participate in his Mysteries,  but men who conformed to the mles of piety and justice. 
Sensibility, above all, and compassion for the misfortunes of  others, were precious virtues, which initiation strove to  encourage. "Nature," says Juvenal, "has created us  compassionate, since it has endowed us with tears. Sensibility  is the most admirable of our senses. What man is truly worthy  of the torch of the Mysteries; who such as the Priest of Ceres  requires him to be, if he regards the misfortunes of others as  wholly foreign to himself?"

All who had not used their endeavors to defeat a conspiracy;  and those who had on the contrary fomented one; those  citizens who had betrayed their country, who had surrendered  an advantageous post or place, or the vessels of the State, to  the enemy; all who had supplied the enemy with money; and  in general, all who had come short of their duties as honest  men and good citizens, were excluded from the Mysteries of 
Eleusis. To be admitted there, one must have lived equitably,  and with sufficient good fortune not to be regarded as hated  by the Gods.

Thus the Society of the Initiates was, in its principle, and  according to the true purpose of its institution, a society of  virtuous men, who labored to free their souls from the tyranny  of the passions, and to develop the germ of all the social  virtues. And this was the meaning of the idea, afterward  misunderstood, that  p. 392  entry into Elysium was only allowed to the Initiates: because  entrance to the sanctuaries was allowed to the virtuous only,  and Elysium was created for virtuous souls alone.

The precise nature and details of the doctrines as to a future  life, and rewards and punishments there, developed in the 
Mysteries, is in a measure uncertain. Little direct information  in regard to it has come down to us. No doubt, in the  ceremonies, there was a scenic representation of Tartarus and  the judgment of the dead, resembling that which we find in 
Virgil: but there is as little doubt that these representations  were explained to be allegorical. It is not our purpose here to  repeat the descriptions given of Elysium and Tartarus. That  would be aside from our object. We are only concerned with  the great fact that the Mysteries taught the doctrine of the  soul's immortality, and that, in some shape, suffering, pain,  remorse, and agony, ever follow sin as its consequences.

Human ceremonies are indeed but imperfect symbols; and the  alternate baptisms in fire and water intended to purify us into  immortality, are ever in this world interrupted at the moment  of their anticipated completion. Life is a mirror which reflects  only to deceive, a tissue perpetually interrupted and broken,  an urn forever fed, yet never full.

All initiation is but introductory to the great change of death. 
Baptism, anointing, embalming, obsequies by burial or fire,  are preparatory symbols, like the initiation of Hercules before  descending to the Shades, pointing out the mental change  which ought to precede the renewal of existence. Death is the  true initiation, to which sleep is the introductory or minor  mystery. It is the final rite which united the Egyptian with his 
God, and which opens the same promise to all who are duly  prepared for it.

The body was deemed a prison for the soul; but the latter was  not condemned to eternal banishment and imprisonment. The 
Father of the Worlds permits its chains to be broken, and has  provided in the course of Nature the means of its escape. It  was a doctrine of immemorial antiquity, shared alike by

Egyptians, Pythagoreans, the Orphici, and by that  characteristic Bacchic Sage, "the Preceptor of the Soul," 
Silenus, that death is far better than life; that the real death  belongs to those who on earth are immersed in the Lethe of its  passions and fascinations, and that the true life commences  only when the soul is emancipated for its return.  p. 393

And in this sense, as presiding over life and death, Dionusos  is in the highest sense the LIBERATOR: since, like Osiris, he  frees the soul, and guides it in its migrations beyond the  grave, preserving it from the risk of again falling under the  slavery of matter or of some inferior animal form, the  purgatory of Metempsychosis; and exalting and perfecting its  nature through the purifying discipline of his Mysteries. "The  great consummation of all philosophy," said Socrates,  professedly quoting from traditional and mystic sources, "is 
Death : He who pursues philosophy aright, is studying how to  die."

All soul is part of the Universal Soul, whose totality is 
Dionusos; and it is therefore he who, as Spirit of Spirits, leads  back the vagrant spirit to its home, and accompanies it  through the purifying processes, both real and symbolical, of  its earthly transit. He is therefore emphatically the Mystes or 
Hierophant, the great Spiritual Mediator of Greek religion.

The human soul is itself duipovioc a God within the mind,  capable through its own power of rivalling the canonization of  the Hero, of making itself immortal by the practice of the  good, and the contemplation of the beautiful and true. The  removal to the Happy Islands could only be understood  mythically; everything earthly must die; Man, like (Edipus, is  wounded from his birth, his real elysium can exist only  beyond the grave. Dionusos died and descended to the shades. 
His passion was the great Secret of the Mysteries; as Death is  the Grand Mystery of existence. His death, typical of Nature's 
Death, or of her periodical decay and restoration, was one of  the many symbols of the palingenesia or second birth of man.

Man descended from the elemental Forces or Titans [Elohim],  who fed on the body of the Pantheistic Deity creating the 
Universe by self-sacrifice, commemorates in sacramental  observance this mysterious passion; and while partaking of  the raw flesh of the victim, seems to be invigorated by a fresh  draught from the fountain of universal life, to receive a new  pledge of regenerated existence. Death is the inseparable  antecedent of life; the seed dies in order to produce the plant,  and earth itself is rent asunder and dies at the birth of 
Dionusos. Hence the significancy of the phallus, or of its  inoffensive substitute, the obelisk, rising as an emblem of  resurrection by the tomb of buried Deity at Lema or at Sais.  p. 394

Dionusos-Orpheus descended to the Shades to recover the lost 
Virgin of the Zodiac, to bring back his mother to the sky as 
Thyone; or what has the same meaning, to consummate his  eventful marriage with Persephone, thereby securing, like the  nuptials of his father with Semele or Danae, the perpetuity of 
Nature. His under-earth office is the depression of the year,  the wintry aspect in the alternations of bull and serpent,  whose united series makes up the continuity of Time, and in  which, physically speaking, the stem and dark are ever the  parents of the beautiful and bright.

It was this aspect, sombre for the moment, but bright by  anticipation, which was contemplated in the Mysteries: the  human sufferer was consoled by witnessing the severer trials  of the Gods; and the vicissitudes of life and death, expressed  by apposite symbols, such as the sacrifice or submersion of  the Bull, the extinction and re-illumination of the torch,  excited corresponding emotions of alternate grief and joy, that  play of passion which was present at the origin of Nature, and  which accompanies all her changes.

The greater Eleusinias were celebrated in the month 
Boedromion, when the seed was buried in the ground, and  when the year, verging to its decline, disposes the mind to  serious reflection. The first days of the ceremonial were  passed in sorrow and anxious silence, in fasting and expiatory  or lustral offices. On a sudden, the scene was changed: sorrow  and lamentation were discarded, the glad name of Iacchus  passed from mouth to mouth, the image of the God, crowned  with myrtle and bearing a lighted torch, was borne in joyful  procession from the Ceramicus to Eleusis, where, during the  ensuing night, the initiation was completed by an imposing  revelation. The first scene was in the upovuoc, or outer court  of the sacred enclosure, where amidst utter darkness, or while  the meditating God, the star illuminating the Nocturnal 
Mystery, alone carried an unextinguished torch, the  candidates were overawed with terrific sounds and noises,  while they painfully groped their way, as in the gloomy  cavern of the soul's sublunar migration; a scene justly  compared to the passage of the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death. For by the immutable law exemplified in the trials of 
Psyche, man must pass through the terrors of the under-world,  before he can reach the height of Heaven. At length the gates  of the adytum were thrown open, a supernatural light  streamed from the illuminated statue  p. 393  of the Goddess, and enchanting sights and sounds, mingled  with songs and dances, exalted the communicant to a rapture  of supreme felicity, realizing, as far as sensuous imagery  could depict, the anticipated reunion with the Gods.

In the dearth of direct evidence as to the detail of the  ceremonies enacted, or of the meanings connected with them,  their tendency must be inferred from the characteristics of the  contemplated deities with their accessory symbols and mythi,  or from direct testimony as to the value of the Mysteries  generally.

The ordinary phenomena of vegetation, the death of the seed  in giving birth to the plant, connecting the sublimest hopes  with the plainest occurrences, was the simple yet beautiful  formula assumed by the great mystery in almost all religions,  from the Zend-Avesta to the Gospel. As Proserpina, the  divine power is as the seed decaying and destroyed; as 
Artemis, she is the principle of its destruction; but Artemis 
Proserpina is also Core Soteria, the Saviour, who leads the 
Spirits of Hercules and Hyacinthus to Heaven.

Many other emblems were employed in the Mysteries,—as the  dove, the myrtle-wreath, and others, all significant of life  rising out of death, and of the equivocal condition of dying  yet immortal man.

The horrors and punishments of Tartarus, as described in the 
Flue do and the /hneid, with all the ceremonies of the  judgments of Minos, Eacus, and Rlradamanthus, were  represented, sometimes more and sometimes less fully, in the 
Mysteries; in order to impress upon the minds of the Initiates  this great lesson,—that we should be ever, prepared to appear  before the Supreme Judge, with a heart pure and spotless; as 
Socrates teaches in the Gorgias. For the soul stained with  crimes, he says, to descend to the Shades, is the bitterest ill. 
To adhere to Justice and Wisdom, Plato holds, is our duty,  that we may some day take that lofty road that leads toward  the heavens, and avoid most of the evils to which the soul is  exposed in its subterranean journey of a thousand years. And  so in the Phaedo, Socrates teaches that we should seek here  below to free our soul of its passions, in order to be ready to  enter our appearance, whenever Destiny summons us to the 
Shades.

Thus the Mysteries inculcated a great moral truth, veiled with  a fable of huge proportions and the appliances of an  impressive spectacle, to which, exhibited in the sanctuaries,  art and natural  p. 396  magic lent all they had that was imposing. They sought to  strengthen men against the horrors of death and the fearful  idea of utter annihilation. Death, says the author of the  dialogue, entitled Axiochus, included in the works of Plato, is  but a passage to a happier state; but one must have lived well,  to attain that most fortunate result. So that the doctrine of the  immortality of the soul was consoling to the virtuous and  religious man alone; while to all others it came with menaces  and despair, surrounding them with terrors and alarms that  disturbed their repose during all their life.

For the material horrors of Tartarus, allegorical to the Initiate,  were real to the mass of the Profane; nor in latter times, did,  perhaps many Initiates read rightly the allegory. The triple-  walled prison, which the condemned soul first met, round  which swelled and surged the fiery waves of Phlegethon,  wherein rolled roaring, huge, blazing rocks; the great gate  with columns of adamant, which none save the Gods could  crush; Tisiphone, their warder, with her bloody robes; the lash  resounding on the mangled bodies of the miserable  unfortunates, their plaintive groans, mingled in horrid  hannony with the clashings of their chains; the Furies, lashing  the guilty with their snakes; the awful abyss where Flydra  howls with its hundred heads, greedy to devour; Tityus,  prostrate, and his entrails fed upon by the cruel vulture; 
Sisyphus, ever rolling his rock; Ixion on his wheel; Tantalus  tortured by eternal thirst and hunger, in the midst of water and  with delicious fruits touching his head; the daughters of 
Danaus at their eternal, fruitless task; beasts biting and  venomous reptiles stinging; and devouring flame eternally  consuming bodies ever renewed in endless agony; all these  sternly impressed upon the people the terrible consequences  of sin and vice, and urged them to pursue the paths of honesty  and virtue.

And if, in the ceremonies of the Mysteries, these material  horrors were explained to the Initiates as mere symbols of the  unimaginable torture, remorse, and agony that would rend the  immaterial soul and rack the immortal spirit, they were feeble  and insufficient in the same mode and measure only, as all  material images and symbols fall short of that which is  beyond the cognizance of our senses: and the grave 
Hierophant, the imagery, the paintings, the dramatic horrors,  the funeral sacrifices, the august mysteries, the solemn silence  of the sanctuaries, were none the  p. 397  less impressive, because they were known to be but symbols,  that with material shows and images made the imagination to  be the teacher of the intellect.

So, too, it was represented, that except for the gravest sins  there was an opportunity for expiation; and the tests of water,  air, and fire were represented; by means of which, during the  march of many years, the soul could be purified, and rise  toward the ethereal regions; that ascent being more or less  tedious and laborious, according as each soul was more or  less clogged by the gross impediments of its sins and vices. 
Herein was shadowed forth, (how distinctly taught the 
Initiates we know not), the doctrine that pain and sorrow,  misfortune and remorse, are the inevitable consequences that  flow from sin and vice, as effect flows from cause; that by  each sin and every act of vice the soul drops back and loses  ground in its advance toward perfection: and that the ground  so lost is and will be in reality never so recovered as that the  sin shall be as if it never had been committed; but that  throughout all the eternity of its existence, each soul shall be  conscious that every act of vice or baseness it did on earth has  made the distance greater between itself and ultimate  perfection.

We see this truth glimmering in the doctrine, taught in the 
Mysteries, that though slight and ordinary offences could be  expiated by penances, repentance, acts of beneficence, and  prayers, grave crimes were mortal sins, beyond the reach of  all such remedies. Eleusis closed her gates against Nero: and  the Pagan Priests told Constantine that among all their modes  of expiation there was none so potent as could wash from his  soul the dark spots left by the murder of his wife, and his  multiplied perjuries and assassinations.

The object of the ancient initiations being to ameliorate  mankind and to perfect the intellectual part of man, the nature  of the human soul, its origin, its destination, its relations to  the body and to universal nature, all formed part of the mystic  science; and to them in part the lessons given to the Initiate  were directed. For it was believed that initiation tended to his  perfection, and to preventing the divine part within him,  overloaded with matter gross and earthy, from being plunged  into gloom, and impeded in its return to the Deity. The soul,  with them, was not a mere conception or abstraction; but a  reality including in itself life and thought; or, rather, of whose  essence it was to live and think,  p. 398

[paragraph continues] It was material; but not brute, inert, inactive,  lifeless, motionless, formless, lightless matter. It was held to  be active, reasoning, thinking; its natural home in the highest  regions of the Universe, whence it descended to illuminate,  give form and movement to, vivify, animate, and carry with  itself the baser matter; and whither it unceasingly tends to  reascend, when and as soon as it can free itself from its  connection with that matter. From that substance, divine,  infinitely delicate and active, essentially luminous, the souls  of men were formed, and by it alone, uniting with and  organizing their bodies, men lived.

This was the doctrine of Pythagoras, who learned it when he  received the Egyptian Mysteries: and it was the doctrine of all  who, by means of the ceremonial of initiation, thought to  purify the soul. Virgil makes the spirit of Anchises teach it to 
/Eneas: and all the expiations and lustrations used in the 
Mysteries were but symbols of those intellectual ones by  which the soul was to be purged of its vice-spots and stains,  and freed of the incumbrance of its earthly prison, so that it  might rise unimpeded to the source from which it came.

Hence sprung the doctrine of the transmigration of souls;  which Pythagoras taught as an allegory, and those who came  after him received literally. Plato, like him, drew his doctrines  from the East and the Mysteries, and undertook to translate  the language of the symbols used there, into that of 
Philosophy; and to prove by argument and philosophical  deduction, what,/e/t by the consciousness, the Mysteries  taught by symbols as an indisputable fact,—the immortality of  the soul. Cicero did the same; and followed the Mysteries in  teaching that the Gods were but mortal men, who for their  great virtues and signal services had deserved that their souls  should, after death, be raised to that lofty rank.

It being taught in the Mysteries, either by way of allegory, the  meaning of which was not made known except to a select  few, or, perhaps only at a later day, as an actual reality, that  the souls of the vicious dead passed into the bodies of those  animals to whose nature their vices had most affinity, it was  also taught that the soul could avoid these transmigrations,  often successive and numerous, by the practice of virtue,  which would acquit it of them, free it from the circle of  successive generations, and restore it at once to its source.

Hence nothing was so ardently prayed for by the Initiates,  says Proclus, as this happy fortune, which,  p. 399  delivering them from the empire of Evil, would restore them  to their true life, and conduct them to the place of final rest.

To this doctrine probably referred those figures of animals  and monsters which were exhibited to the Initiate, before  allowing him to see the sacred light for which he sighed.

Plato says, that souls will not reach the term of their ills, until  the revolutions of the world have restored them to their  primitive condition, and purified them from the stains which  they have contracted by the contagion of fire, earth, and air. 
And he held that they could not be allowed to enter Heaven,  until they had distinguished themselves by the practice of  virtue in some one of three several bodies. The Manicheans  allowed five: Pindar, the same number as Plato; as did the 
Jews.

And Cicero says, that the ancient soothsayers, and the  interpreters of the will of the Gods, in their religious  ceremonies and initiations, taught that we expiate here below  the crimes committed in a prior life; and for that are bom. It  was taught in these Mysteries, that the soul passes through  several states, and that the pains and sorrows of this life are an  expiation of prior faults.

This doctrine of transmigration of souls obtained, as Porphyry  informs us, among the Persians and Magi. It was held in the 
East and the West, and that from the remotest antiquity. 
Herodotus found it among the Egyptians, who made the term  of the circle of migrations from one human body, through  animals, fishes, and birds, to another human body, three  thousand years. Empedocles even held that souls went into  plants. Of these, the laurel was the noblest, as of animals the  lion; both being consecrated to the Sun, to which, it was held  in the Orient, virtuous souls were to return. The Curds, the 
Chinese, the Kabbalists, all held the same doctrine. So Origen  held, and the Bishop Synesius, the latter of whom had been  initiated, and who thus prayed to God: "O Father, grant that  my soul, reunited to the light, may not be plunged again into  the defilements of earth!" So the Gnostics held; and even the 
Disciples of Christ inquired if the man who was bom blind,  was not so punished for some sin that he had committed  before his birth.

Virgil, in the celebrated allegory in which he develops the  doctrines taught in the Mysteries, enunciated the doctrine,  held by most of the ancient philosophers, of the pre-existence  of souls, in the eternal fire from which they emanate; that fire  which animates  p. 400  the stars, and circulates in every part of Nature: and the  purifications of the soul, by fire, water, and air, of which he  speaks, and which three modes were employed in the 
Mysteries of Bacchus, were symbols of the passage of the  soul into different bodies.

The relations of the human soul with the rest of nature were a  chief object of the science of the Mysteries. The man was  there brought face to face with entire nature. The world, and  the spherical envelope that surrounds it, were represented by a  mystic egg, by the side of the image of the Sun-God whose 
Mysteries were celebrated. The famous Orphic egg was  consecrated to Bacchus in his Mysteries. It was, says Plutarch,  an image of the Universe, which engenders everything, and  contains everything in its bosom. "Consult," says Macrobius, 
"the Initiates of the Mysteries of Bacchus, who honor with  special veneration the sacred egg." The rounded and almost  spherical form of its shell, he says, which encloses it on every  side, and confines within itself the principles of life, is a  symbolic image of the world; and the world is the universal  principle of all things.

This symbol was borrowed from the Egyptians, who also  consecrated the egg to Osiris, germ of Light, himself bom,  says Diodoms, from that famous egg. In Thebes, in Upper 
Egypt, he was represented as emitting it from his mouth, and  causing to issue from it the first principle of heat and light, or  the Fire-God, Vulcan, or Phtha. We find this egg even in 
Japan, between the horns of the famous Mithriac Bull, whose  attributes Osiris, Apis, and Bacchus all borrowed.

Orpheus, author of the Grecian Mysteries, which he carried  from Egypt to Greece, consecrated this symbol: and taught  that matter, uncreated and informous, existed from all  eternity, unorganized, as chaos; containing in itself the 
Principles of all Existences confused and intermingled, light  with darkness, the dry with the humid, heat with cold; from  which, it after long ages taking the shape of an immense egg,  issued the purest matter, or fust substance, and the residue  was divided into the four elements, from which proceeded  heaven and earth and all things else. This grand Cosmogonic  idea he taught in the Mysteries; and thus the Hierophant  explained the meaning of the mystic egg, seen by the Initiates  in the Sanctuary.

Thus entire Nature, in her primitive organization, was  presented  p. 401  to him whom it was wished to instruct in her secrets and  initiate in her mysteries; and Clemens of Alexandria might  well say that initiation was a real physiology.

So Phanes, the Light-God, in the Mysteries of the New 
Orphics, emerged from the egg of chaos: and the Persians had  the great egg of Ormuzd. And Sanchoniathon tells us that in  the Phoenician theology, the matter of chaos took the form of  an egg; and he adds: "Such are the lessons which the Son of 
Thabion, first Hierophant of the Phoenicians, turned into  allegories, in which physics and astronomy intermingled, and  which he taught to the other Hierophants, whose duty it was  to preside at orgies and initiations; and who, seeking to excite  the astonishment and admiration of mortals, faithfully  transmitted these things to their successors and the Initiates."

In the Mysteries was also taught the division of the Universal 
Cause into an Active and a Passive cause; of which two,

Osiris and Isis,—the heavens and the earth were symbols. 
These two First Causes, into which it was held that the great 
Universal First Cause at the beginning of things divided itself,  were the two great Divinities, whose worship was, according  to Varro, inculcated upon the Initiates at Samothrace. "As is  taught," he says, "in the initiation into the Mysteries at 
Samothrace, Heaven and Earth are regarded as the two first 
Divinities. They are the potent Gods worshipped in that 
Island, and whose names are consecrated in the books of our 
Augurs. One of them is male and the other female; and they  bear the same relation to each other as the soul does to the  body, humidity to dryness." The Curetes, in Crete, had  budded an altar to heaven and to Earth; whose Mysteries they  celebrated at Gnossus, in a cypress grove.

These two Divinities, the Active and Passive Principles of the 
Universe, were commonly symbolized by the generative parts  of man and woman; to which, in remote ages, no idea of  indecency was attached; the Phallus and Cteis, emblems of  generation and production, and which, as such, appeared in  the Mysteries. The Indian Lingam was the union of both, as  were the boat and mast and the point within a circle: all of  which expressed the same philosophical idea as to the Union  of the two great Causes of Nature, which concur, one actively  and the other passively, in the generation of all beings: which  were symbolized by what we now term Gemini, the Twins, at  that remote period when the Sun was  p. 402  in that Sign at the Vernal Equinox, and when they were Male  and Female; and of which the Phallus was perhaps taken from  the generative organ of the Bull, when about twenty-five  hundred years before our era he opened that equinox, and  became to the Ancient World the symbol of the creative and  generative Power.

The Initiates at Eleusis commenced, Proclus says, by invoking  the two great causes of nature, the Heavens and the Earth, on  which in succession they fixed their eyes, addressing to each a  prayer. And they deemed it their duty to do so, he adds,  because they saw in them the Father and Mother of all  generations. The concourse of these two agents of the 
Universe was termed in theological language a marriage. 
Tertullian, accusing the Valentinians of having borrowed  these symbols from the Mysteries of Eleusis, yet admits that  in those Mysteries they were explained in a manner consistent  with decency, as representing the powers of nature. He was  too little of a philosopher to comprehend the sublime esoteric  meaning of these emblems, which will, if you advance, in  other Degrees be unfolded to you.

The Christian Fathers contented themselves with reviling and  ridiculing the use of these emblems. But as they in the earlier  times created no indecent ideas, and were worn alike by the  most innocent youths and virtuous women, it will be far wiser  for us to seek to penetrate their meaning. Not only the 
Egyptians, says Diodorus Siculus, but every other people that  consecrate this symbol (the Phallus), deem that they thereby  do honor to the Active Force of the universal generation of all  living things. For the same reason, as we learn from the  geographer Ptolemy, it was revered among the Assyrians and 
Persians. Proclus remarks that in the distribution of the Zodiac  among the twelve great Divinities, by ancient astrology, six  signs were assigned to the male and six to the female  principle.

There is another division of nature, which has in all ages  struck all men, and which was not forgotten in the Mysteries;  that of Light and Darkness, Day and Night, Good and Evil;  which mingle with, and clash against, and pursue or are  pursued by each other throughout the Universe. The Great 
Symbolic Egg distinctly reminded the Initiates of this great  division of the world. Plutarch, treating of the dogma of a 
Providence, and of that of the two principles of Light and 
Darkness, which he regarded as the basis of the Ancient 
Theology, of the Orgies and the Mysteries,  p. 403  as well among the Greeks as the Barbarians,—a doctrine  whose origin, according to him, is lost in the night of time,—  cites, in support of his opinion, the famous Mystic Egg of the  disciples of Zoroaster and the Initiates in the Mysteries of

Mithras.

To the Initiates in the Mysteries of Eleusis was exhibited the  spectacle of these two principles, in the successive scenes of 
Darkness and Light which passed before their eyes. To the  profoundest darkness, accompanied with illusions and horrid  phantoms, succeeded the most brilliant light, whose splendor  blazed round the statue of the Goddess. The candidate, says 
Dion Chrysostomus, passed into a mysterious temple, of  astonishing magnitude and beauty, where were exhibited to  him many mystic scenes; where his ears were stunned with  many voices; and where Darkness and Light successively  passed before him. And Themistius in like manner describes  the Initiate, when about to enter into that part of the sanctuary  tenanted by the Goddess, as fdled with fear and religious awe,  wavering, uncertain in what direction to advance through the  profound darkness that envelopes him. But when the 
Hierophant has opened the entrance to the inmost sanctuary,  and removed the robe that hides the Goddess, he exhibits her  to the Initiate, resplendent with divine light. The thick shadow  and gloomy atmosphere which had environed the candidate  vanish; he is filled with a vivid and glowing enthusiasm, that  lifts his soul out of the profound dejection in which it was  plunged; and the purest light succeeds to the thickest  darkness.

In a fragment of the same writer, preserved by Stobasus, we  learn that the Initiate, up to the moment when his initiation is  to be consummated, is alarmed by every kind of sight: that  astonishment and terror take his soul captive; he trembles;  cold sweat flows from his body; until the moment when the 
Light is shown him,—a most astounding Light,—the brilliant  scene of Elysium, where he sees charming meadows  overarched by a clear sky, and festivals celebrated by dances;  where he hears harmonious voices, and the majestic chants of  the Hierophants; and views the sacred spectacles. Then,  absolutely free, and enfranchised from the dominion of all  ills, he mingles with the crowd of Initiates, and, crowned with  flowers, celebrates with them the holy orgies, in the brilliant  realms of ether, and the dwelling-place of Ormuzd.

In the Mysteries of Isis, the candidate first passed through the  p. 404  dark valley of the shadow of death; then into a place  representing the elements or sublunary world, where the two  principles clash and contend; and was finally admitted to a  luminous region, where the sun, with his most brilliant light,  put to rout the shades of night. Then he himself put on the  costume of the Sun-God, or the Visible Source of Ethereal 
Light, in whose Mysteries he was initiated; and passed from  the empire of darkness to that of light. After having set his  feet on the threshold of the palace of Pluto, he ascended to the 
Empyrean, to the bosom of the Eternal Principle of Light of  the Universe, from which all souls and intelligences emanate.

Plutarch admits that this theory of two Principles was the  basis of all the Mysteries, and consecrated in the religious  ceremonies and Mysteries of Greece. Osiris and Typhon, 
Ormuzd and Ahriman, Bacchus and the Titans and Giants, all  represented these principles. Phanes, the luminous God that  issued from the Sacred Egg, and Night, bore the sceptres in  the Mysteries of the New Bacchus. Night and Day were two  of the eight Gods adored in the Mysteries of Osiris. The  sojourn of Proserpine and also of Adonis, during six months  of each year in the upper world, abode of light, and six  months in the lower or abode of darkness, allegorically  represented the same division of the Universe.

The connection of the different initiations with the Equinoxes  which separate the Empire of the Nights from that of the 
Days, and fix the moment when one of these principles begins  to prevail over the other, shows that the Mysteries referred to  the continual contest between the two principles of light and  darkness, each alternately victor and vanquished. The very  object proposed by them shows that their basis was the theory  of the two principles and their relations with the soul. "We  celebrate the august Mysteries of Ceres and Proserpine," says  the Emperor Julian, "at the Autumnal Equinox, to obtain of  the Gods that the soul may not experience the malignant  action of the Power of Darkness that is then about to have  sway and rule in Nature." Sallust the Philosopher makes  almost the same remark as to the relations of the soul with the  periodical march of light and darkness, during an annual  revolution; and assures us that the mysterious festivals of 
Greece related to the same. And in all the explanations given  by Macrobius of the Sacred Fables in regard to the Sun,  adored under the names of Osiris, Horus, Adonis, Atys, 
Bacchus, etc., we  p. 405  invariably see that they refer to the theory of the two 
Principles, Light and Darkness, and the triumphs gained by  one over the other. In April was celebrated the first triumph  obtained by the light of day over the length of the nights; and  the ceremonies of mourning and rejoicing had, Macrobius  says, as their object, the vicissitudes of the annual  administration of the world.

This brings us naturally to the tragic portion of these religious  scenes, and to the allegorical history of the different  adventures of the Principle, Light, victor and vanquished by  turns, in the combats waged with Darkness during each  annual period. Here we reach the most mysterious part of the  ancient initiations, and that most interesting to the Mason who  laments the death of his Grand Master Khir-Om. Over it 
Herodotus throws the august veil of mystery and silence. 
Speaking of the Temple of Minerva, or of that Isis who was  styled the Mother of the Sun-God, and whose Mysteries were  termed Isiac, at Sais, he speaks of a Tomb in the Temple, in  the rear of the Chapel and against the wall; and says, "It is the  tomb of a man, whose name respect requires me to conceal. 
Within the Temple were great obelisks of stone [phalli ], and a  circular lake paved with stones and revetted with a parapet. It  seemed to me as large as that at Delos" [where the Mysteries  of Apollo were celebrated]. "In this lake the Egyptians  celebrate, during the night, what they style the Mysteries, in  which are represented the sufferings of the God of whom I  have spoken above." This God was Osiris, put to death by 
Typhon, and who descended to the Shades and was restored  to life; of which he had spoken before.

We are reminded, by this passage, of the Tomb of Khir-Om,  his death, and his rising from the grave, symbolical of  restoration of life; and also of the brazen Sea in the Temple at 
Jerusalem. Herodotus adds: "I impose upon myself a profound  silence in regard to these Mysteries, with most of which I am  acquainted. As little will I speak of the initiations of Ceres,  known among the Greeks as Thesmophoria. What I shall say  will not violate the respect which I owe to religion."

Athenagoras quotes this passage to show that not only the 
Statue but the Tomb of Osiris was exhibited in Egypt, and a  tragic representation of his sufferings; and remarks that the 
Egyptians had mourning ceremonies in honor of their Gods,  whose deaths they lamented; and to whom they afterward,  sacrificed as having passed to a state of immortality.  p. 406

It is, however, not difficult, combining the different rays of  light that emanate from the different Sanctuaries, to learn the  genius and the object of these secret ceremonies. We have  hints, and not details.

We know that the Egyptians worshipped the Sun, under the  name of Osiris. The misfortunes and tragical death of this 
God were an allegory relating to the Sun. Typhon, like 
Ahriman, represented Darkness. The sufferings and death of 
Osiris in the Mysteries of the Night were a mystic image of  the phenomena of Nature, and the conflict of the two great 
Principles which share the empire of Nature, and most  influenced our souls. The Sun is neither bom, dies, nor is  raised to life: and the recital of these events was but an  allegory, veiling a higher truth.

Homs, son of Isis, and the same as Apollo or the Sun, also  died and was restored again to life and to his mother; and the  priests of Isis celebrated these great events by mourning and  joyous festival succeeding each other.

In the Mysteries of Phoenicia, established in honor of 
Thammuz or Adoni, also the Sun, the spectacle of his death  and resurrection was exhibited to the Initiates. As we leam  from Meursius and Plutarch, a figure was exhibited  representing the corpse of a young man. Flowers were  strewed upon his body, the women mourned for him; a tomb  was erected to him. And these feasts, as we leam from 
Plutarch and Ovid, passed into Greece.

In the Mysteries of Mithras, the Sun-God, in Asia Minor, 
Armenia and Persia, the death of that God was lamented, and  his resurrection was celebrated with the most enthusiastic  expressions of joy. A corpse, we learn from Julian Firmicus,  was shown the Initiates, representing Mithras dead; and  afterward his resurrection was announced; and they were then  invited to rejoice that the dead God was restored to life, and  had by means of his sufferings secured their salvation. Three  months before, his birth had been celebrated, under the  emblem of an infant, bom on the 25 th of December, or the  eighth day before the Kalends of January.

In Greece, in the Mysteries of the same God, honored under  the name of Bakchos, a representation was given of his death,  slain by the Titans; of his descent into hell, his subsequent  resurrection, and his return toward his Principle or the pure  abode whence he had descended to unite himself with matter. 
In the islands  p. 407  of Chios and Tenedos, his death was represented by the  sacrifice of a man, actually immolated.

The mutilation and sufferings of the same Sun-God, honored  in Phrygia under the name of Atys, caused the tragic scenes  that were, as we learn from Diodorus Siculus, represented  annually in the Mysteries of Cybele, mother of the Gods. An  image was home there, representing the corpse of a young  man, over whose tomb tears were shed, and to whom funeral  honors were paid.

At Samothrace, in the Mysteries of the Cabiri or great Gods, a  representation was given of the death of one of them. This  name was given to the Sun, because the Ancient Astronomers  gave the name of Gods Cabiri and of Samothrace to the two 
Gods in the Constellation Gemini; whom others term Apollo  and Hercules, two names of the Sun. Athenion says that the  young Cabirus so slain was the same as the Dionusos or 
Bakchos of the Greeks. The Pelasgi, ancient inhabitants of 
Greece, and who settled Samothrace, celebrated these 
Mysteries, whose origin is unknown: and they worshipped 
Castor and Pollux as patrons of navigation.

The tomb of Apollo was at Delphi, where his body was laid,  after Python, the Polar Serpent that annually heralds the  coming of autumn, cold, darkness, and winter, had slain him,  and over whom the God triumphs, on the 25 th of March, on  his return to the lamb of the Vernal Equinox.

In Crete, Jupiter Ammon, or the Sun in Aries, painted with the  attributes of that equinoctial sign, the Ram or Lamb;—that 
Ammon who, Martianus Copella says, is the same as Osiris, 
Adoni, Adonis, Atys, and the other Sun-Gods,-had also a  tomb, and a religious initiation; one of the principal  ceremonies of which consisted in clothing the Initiate with the  skin of a white lamb. And in this we see the origin of the  apron of white sheep-skin, used in Masonry.

All these deaths and resurrections, these funeral emblems,  these anniversaries of mourning and joy, these cenotaphs  raised in different places to the Sun-God, honored under  different names, had but a single object, the allegorical  narration of the events which happened here below to the

Light of Nature, that sacred fire from which our souls were  deemed to emanate, warring with Matter and the dark 
Principle resident therein, ever at variance with the Principle  of Good and Light poured upon itself by the Supreme 
Divinity. All these Mysteries, says Clemens of Alexandria,  displaying  p. 408  to us murders and tombs alone, all these religious tragedies,  had a common basis, variously ornamented: and that basis  was the fictitious death and resurrection of the Sun, Soul of  the World, principle of life and movement in the Sublunary 
World, and source of our intelligences, which are but a  portion of the Eternal Light blazing in that Star, their chief  centre.

It was in the Sun that Souls, it was said, were purified: and to  it they repaired. It was one of the gates of the soul, through  which the theologians, says Porphyry, say that it re-ascends  toward the home of Light and the Good. Wherefore, in the 
Mysteries of Eleusis, the Dadoukos (the first officer after the 
Hierophant, who represented the Grand Demiourgos or Maker  of the Universe), who was posted in the interior of the 
Temple, and there received the candidates, represented the 
Sun.

It was also held that the vicissitudes experienced by the Father  of Light had an influence on the destiny of souls; which, of  the same substance as he, shared his fortunes. This we learn  from the Emperor Julian and Sallust the Philosopher. They are  afflicted when he suffers: they rejoice when he triumphs over  the Power of Darkness which opposes his sway and hinders  the happiness of Souls, to whom nothing is so terrible as  darkness. The fruit of the sufferings of the God, father of light  and Souls, slain by the Chief of the Powers of Darkness, and  again restored to life, was received in the Mysteries. "His  death works your Salvation;" said the High Priest of Mithras. 
That was the great secret of this religious tragedy, and its  expected fruit;—the resurrection of a God, who, repossessing 
Himself of His dominion over Darkness, should associate  with Him in His triumph those virtuous Souls that by their  purity were worthy to share His glory; and that strove not  against the divine force that drew them to Him, when He had  thus conquered.

To the Initiate were also displayed the spectacles of the chief  agents of the Universal Cause, and of the distribution of the  world, in the detail of its parts arranged in most regular order. 
The Universe itself supplied man with the model of the first 
Temple reared to the Divinity. The arrangement of the 
Temple of Solomon, the symbolic ornaments which formed  its chief decorations, and the dress of the High Priest,—all, as 
Clemens of Alexandria, Josephus and Philo state, had  reference to the order of the world. Clemens informs us that  the Temple contained many emblems  p. 409  of the Seasons, the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the  constellations Ursa Major and Minor, the zodiac, the  elements, and the other parts of the world.

Josephus, in his description of the High Priest's Vestments,  protesting against the charge of impiety brought against the 
Hebrews by other nations, for contemning the Heathen 
Divinities, declares it false, because, in the construction of the 
Tabernacle, in the vestments of the Sacrificers, and in the 
Sacred vessels, the whole World was in some sort  represented. Of the three parts, he says, into which the 
Temple was divided, two represent Earth and Sea, open to all  men, and the third, Heaven, God's dwelling-place, reserved  for Him alone. The twelve loaves of Shew-bread signify the  twelve months of the year. The Candlestick represented the  twelve signs through which the Seven Planets run their  courses; and the seven lights, those planets; the veils, of four  colors, the four elements; the tunic of the High Priest, the  earth; the Hyacinth, nearly blue, the Heavens; the ephod, of  four colors, the whole of nature; the gold, Light; the breast¬  plate, in the middle, this earth in the centre of the world; the  two Sardonyxes, used as clasps, the Sun and Moon; and the  twelve precious stones of the breast-plate arranged by threes,  like the Seasons, the twelve months, and the twelve signs of  the zodiac. Even the loaves were arranged in two groups of  six, like the zodiacal signs above and below the Equator. 
Clemens, the learned Bishop of Alexandria, and Philo, adopt  all these explanations.

Hermes calls the Zodiac, the Great Tent,—Tabernaculum. In  the Royal Arch Degree of the American Rite, the Tabernacle  has four veils, of different colors, to each of which belongs a  banner. The colors of the four are White, Blue, Crimson, and 
Purple, and the banners bear the images of the Bull, the Lion,  the Man, and the Eagle, the Constellations answering 2500  years before our era to the Equinoctial and Solstitial points: to  which belong four stars, Aldebaran, Regulus, Fomalhaut, and 
Antares. At each of these veils there are three words: and to  each division of the Zodiac, belonging to each of these Stars,  are three Signs. The four signs, Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and 
Aquarius, were termed the fixed signs, and are appropriately  assigned to the four veils.

So the Cherubim, according to Clemens and Philo,  represented the two hemispheres their wings, the rapid course  of the firmament, and of time which revolves in the Zodiac. 
"For the Heavens  p. 410  fly;" says Philo, speaking of the wings of the Cherubim:  which were winged representations of the Lion, the Bull, the 
Eagle, and the Man; of two of which, the human-headed,  winged bulls and lions, so many have been found at Nimroud;  adopted as beneficent symbols, when the Sun entered Taurus  at the Vernal Equinox and Leo at the Summer Solstice: and  when, also, he entered Scorpio, for which, on account of its  malignant influences, Aquilla , the eagle was substituted, at  the autumnal equinox; and Aquarius (the water-bearer) at the 
Winter Solstice.

So, Clemens says, the candlestick with seven branches  represented the seven planets, like which the seven branches  were arranged and regulated, preserving that musical  proportion and system of harmony of which the sun was the  centre and connection. They were arranged, says Philo, by  threes, like the planets above and those below the sun;  between which two groups was the branch that represented  him, the mediator or moderator of the celestial harmony. He  is, in fact, the fourth in the musical scale, as Philo remarks,  and Martianus Capella in his hymn to the Sun.

Near the candlestick were other emblems representing the  heavens, earth, and the vegetative matter out of whose bosom  the vapors arise. The whole temple was an abridged image of  the world. There were candlesticks with four branches,  symbols of the elements and the seasons; with twelve,  symbols of the signs; and even with three hundred and sixty,  the number of days in the year, without the supplementary  days. Imitating the famous Temple of Tyre, where were the  great columns consecrated to the winds and fire, the Tyrian  artist placed two columns of bronze at the entrance of the  porch of the temple. The hemispherical brazen sea, supported  by four groups of bulls, of three each, looking to the four  cardinal points of the compass, represented the bull of the 
Vernal Equinox, and at Tyre were consecrated to Astarte; to  whom Hiram, Josephus says, had budded a temple, and who  wore on her head a helmet bearing the image of a bull. And  the throne of Solomon, with bulls adorning its arms, and  supported on lions, like those of Horus in Egypt and of the

Sun at Tyre; likewise referred to the Vernal Equinox and 
Summer Solstice.

Those who in Thrace adored the sun, under the name of Saba- 
Zeus, the Grecian Bakchos, builded to him, says Macrobius, a  temple on Mount Zelmisso, its round fonn representing the  world and the sun. A circular aperture in the roof admitted the  light,  p. 411  and introduced the image of the sun into the body of the  sanctuary, where he seemed to blaze as in the heights of 
Heaven, and to dissipate the darkness within that temple  which was a representative symbol of the world. There the  passion, death, and resurrection of Bakchos were represented.

So the Temple of Eleusis was lighted by a window in the roof. 
The sanctuary so lighted, Dion compares to the Universe,  from which he says it differed in size alone; and in it the great  lights of nature played a great part and were mystically  represented. The images of the Sun, Moon, and Mercury were  represented there, (the latter the same as Anubis who  accompanied Isis); and they are still the three lights of a 
Masonic Lodge; except that for Mercury, the Master of the 
Lodge has been absurdly substituted.

Eusebius names as the principal Ministers in the Mysteries of 
Eleusis, first, the Hierophant, clothed with the attributes of  the Grand Architect (Demiourgos) of the Universe. After him  came the Dadoukos, or torch-bearer, representative of the 
Sun: then the altar-bearer, representing the Moon: and last,  the Hieroceryx, bearing the caduceus, and representing 
Mercury. It was not permissible to reveal the different  emblems and the mysterious pageantry of initiation to the 
Profane; and therefore we do not know the attributes,  emblems, and ornaments of these and other officers; of which 
Apuleius and Pausanias dared not speak.

We know only that everything recounted there was  marvellous; everything done there tended to astonish the 
Initiate: and that eyes and ears were equally astounded. The 
Hierophant, of lofty height, and noble features, with long hair,  of a great age, grave and dignified, with a voice sweet and  sonorous, sat upon a throne, clad in a long trailing robe; as the 
Motive-God of Nature was held to be enveloped in His work  and hidden under a veil which no mortal can raise. Even His  name was concealed, like that of the Demiourgos, whose  name was ineffable.

The Dadoukos also wore a long robe, his hair long, and a  bandeau on his forehead. Callias, when holding that office,  fighting on the great day of Marathon, clothed with the  insignia of his office, was taken by the Barbarians to be a 
King. The Dadoukos led the procession of the Initiates, and  was charged with the purifications.

We do not know the functions of the Epibomos or assistant at  the altar, who represented the moon. That planet was one of  the  p. 412  two homes of souls, and one of the two great gates by which  they descended and reascended. Mercury was charged with  the conducting of souls through the two great gates; and in  going from the sun to the moon they passed immediately by  him. He admitted or rejected them as they were more or less  pure, and therefore the Hieroceryx or Sacred Herald, who  represented Mercury, was charged with the duty of excluding  the Profane from the Mysteries.

The same officers are found in the procession of Initiates of 
Isis, described by Apuleius. All clad in robes of white linen,  drawn tight across the breast, .and close-fitting down to the  very feet, came, first, one bearing a lamp in the shape of a  boat; second, one carrying an altar; and third, one carrying a  golden palm-tree and the caduceus. These are the same as the  three officers at Eleusis, after the Hierophant. Then .one  carrying an open hand, and pouring milk on the ground from a  golden vessel in the shape of a woman's breast. The hand was  that of justice: and the milk alluded to the Galaxy or Milky 
Way, along which souls descended and remounted. Two  others followed, one bearing a winnowing fan, and the other a  water-vase; symbols of the purification of souls by air and  water; and the third purification, by earth, was represented by  an image of the animal that cultivates it, the cow or ox, borne  by another officer.

Then followed a chest or ark, magnificently ornamented,  containing an image of the organs of generation of Osiris, or  perhaps of both sexes; emblems of the original generating and  producing Powers. When Typhon, said the Egyptian fable, cut  up the body of Osiris into pieces, he flung his genitals into the 
Nile, where a fish devoured them. Atys mutilated himself, as  his Priests afterward did in imitation of him; and Adonis was  in that part of his body wounded by the boar: all of which  represented the loss by the Sun of his vivifying and generative  power, when he reached the Autumnal Equinox (the Scorpion  that on old monuments bites those parts of the Vernal Bull),  and descended toward the region of darkness and Winter.

Then, says Apuleius, came "one who carried in his bosom an  object that rejoiced the heart of the bearer, a venerable effigy  of the Supreme Deity, neither bearing resemblance to man,  cattle, bird, beast, or any living creature: an exquisite  invention, venerable from the novel originality of the  fashioning; a wonderful,  p. 413  ineffable symbol of religious mysteries, to be looked upon in  profound silence. Such as it was, its figure was that of a small  um of burnished gold, hollowed very artistically, rounded at  the bottom, and covered all over the outside with the  wonderful hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. The spout was not  elevated, but extended laterally, projecting like a long rivulet;  while on the opposite side was the handle, which, with similar  lateral extension, bore on its summit an asp, curling its body  into folds, and stretching upward, its wrinkled, scaly, swollen  throat."

The salient basilisk, or royal ensign of the Pharaohs, often  occurs on the monuments—a serpent in folds, with his head  raised erect above the folds. The basilisk was the Phoenix of  the serpent-tribe; and the vase or urn was probably the vessel,  shaped like a cucumber, with a projecting spout, out of which,  on the monuments of Egypt, the priests are represented  pouring streams of the crux anscita or Tau Cross, and of  sceptres, over the kings.

In the Mysteries of Mithras, a sacred cave, representing the  whole arrangement of the world, was used for the reception of  the Initiates. Zoroaster, says Eubulus, first introduced this  custom of consecrating caves. They were also consecrated, in 
Crete, to Jupiter; in Arcadia, to the Moon and Pan; and in the 
Island of Naxos, to Bacchus. The Persians, in the cave where  the Mysteries of Mithras were celebrated, fixed the seat of  that God, Father of Generation, or Demiourgos, near the  equinoctial point of Spring, with the Northern portion of the  world on his right, and the Southern on his left.

Mithras, says Porphyry, presided over the Equinoxes, seated  on a Bull, the symbolical animal of the Demiourgos, and  bearing a sword. The equinoxes were the gates through which  souls passed to and fro, between the hemisphere of light and  that or darkness. The milky way was also represented, passing  near each of these gates: and it was, in the old theology,  termed the pathway of souls. It is, according to Pythagoras,  vast troops of souls that form that luminous belt.

The route followed by souls, according to Porphyry, or rather  their progressive march in the world, lying through the fixed  stars and planets, the Mithriac cave not only displayed the  zodiacal and other constellations, and marked gates at the four  equinoctial and solstitial points of the zodiac, whereat souls  enter into and escape from the world of generations; and  through which they  p. 414  pass to and fro between the realms of light and darkness; but  it represented the seven planetary spheres which they needs  must traverse, in descending from the heaven of the fixed  stars to the elements that envelop the earth; and seven gates  were marked, one for each planet, through which they pass, in  descending or returning.

We learn this from Celsus, in Origen; who says that the  symbolical image of this passage among the Stars, used in the 
Mithriac Mysteries, was a ladder, reaching from earth to 
Heaven, divided into seven steps or stages, to each of which  was a gate, and at the summit an eighth, that of the fixed stars. 
The first gate, says Celsus, was that of Saturn, and of lead, by  the heavy nature whereof his dull slow progress was  symbolized. The second, of tin, was that of Venus,  symbolizing her soft splendor and easy flexibility. The third,  of brass, was that of Jupiter, emblem of his solidity and dry  nature. The fourth, of iron, was that of Mercury, expressing  his indefatigable activity and sagacity. The fifth, of copper,  was that of Mars, expressive of his inequalities and variable  nature. The sixth, of silver, was that of the Moon: and the  seventh, of gold, that of the Sun. This order is not the real  order of these Planets; but a mysterious one, like that of the  days of the Week consecrated to them, commencing with 
Saturday, and retrograding to Sunday. It was dictated, Celsus  says, by certain harmonic relations, those of the fourth.

Thus there was an intimate connection between the Sacred 
Science of the Mysteries, and ancient astronomy and physics;  and the grand spectacle of the Sanctuaries was that of the  order of the Known Universe, or the spectacle of Nature itself,  surrounding the soul of the Initiate, as it surrounded it when it  first descended through the planetary gates, and by the  equinoctal and solstitial doors, along the Milky Way, to be for  the first time immured in its prison-house of matter. But the 
Mysteries also represented to the candidate, by sensible  symbols, the invisible forces which move this visible 
Universe, and the virtues, qualities, and powers attached to  matter, and which maintain the marvellous order observed  therein. Of this Porphyry informs us.

The world, according to the philosophers of antiquity, was not  a purely material and mechanical machine. A great Soul,  diffused everywhere, vivified all the members of the immense  body of the Universe; and an Intelligence, equally great,  directed all its movements,  p. 415  and maintained the eternal harmony that resulted therefrom. 
Thus the Unity of the Universe, represented by the symbolic  egg, contained in itself two units, the Soul and the 
Intelligence, which pervaded all its parts: and they were to the 
Universe, considered as an animated and intelligent being,  what intelligence and the soul of life are to the individuality  of man.

The doctrine of the Unity of God, in this sense, was taught by 
Orpheus. Of this his hymn or palinode is a proof; fragments of  which are quoted by many of the Fathers, as Justin, Tatian, 
Clemens of Alexandria, Cyril, and Theodoret, and the whole  by Eusebius, quoting from Aristobulus. The doctrine of the 
LOGOS (word) or the NOOS (intellect), his incarnation,  death, resurrection or transfiguration; of his union with  matter, his division in the visible world, which he pervades,  his return to the original Unity, and the whole theory relative  to the origin of the soul and its destiny, were taught in the 
Mysteries, of which they were the great object.

The Emperor Julian explains the Mysteries of Atys and 
Cybele by the same metaphysical principles, respecting the  demiurgical Intelligence, its descent into matter, and its return  to its origin: and extends this explanation to those of Ceres. 
And so likewise does Sallust the Philosopher, who admits in 
God a secondary intelligent Force, which descends into the  generative matter to organize it. These mystical ideas  naturally fonned a part of the sacred doctrine and of the  ceremonies of initiation, the object of which, Sallust remarks,  was to unite man with the World and the Deity; and the final  tenn of perfection whereof was, according to Clemens, the  contemplation of nature, of real beings, and of causes. The  definition of Sallust is correct. The Mysteries were practised  as a means of perfecting the soul, of making it to know its  own dignity, of reminding it of its noble origin and  immortality, and consequently of its relations with the 
Universe and the Deity.

What was meant by real beings, was invisible beings, genii,  the faculties or powers of nature; everything not a part of the  visible world, which was called, by way of opposition,  apparent existence. The theory of Genii, or Powers of Nature,  and its Forces, personified, made part of the Sacred Science of  initiation, and of that religious spectacle of different beings  exhibited in the Sanctuary. It resulted from that belief in the  providence and superintendence of the Gods, which was one  of the primary bases of initiation. The  p. 416  administration of the Universe by Subaltern Genii, to whom it  is confided, and by whom good and evil are dispensed in the  world, was a consequence of this dogma, taught in the 
Mysteries of Mithras, where was shown that famous egg,  shared between Ormuzd and Ahriman, each of whom  commissioned twenty-four Genii to dispense the good and  evil found therein; they being under twelve Superior Gods, six  on the side of Light and Good, and six on that of Darkness  and Evil.

This doctrine of the Genii, depositaries of the Universal 
Providence, was intimately connected with the Ancient 
Mysteries, and adopted in the sacrifices and initiations both of 
Greeks and Barbarians. Plutarch says that the Gods, by means  of Genii, who are intermediates between them and men, draw  near to mortals in the ceremonies of initiation, at which the 
Gods charge them to assist, and to distribute punishment and  blessing. Thus not the Deity, but His ministers, or a Principle  and Power of Evil, were deemed the authors of vice and sin  and suffering: and thus the Genii or angels differed in  character like men, some being good and some evil; some 
Celestial Gods, Archangels, Angels, and some Infernal Gods, 
Demons and fallen Angels.

At the head of the latter was their Chief, Typhon, Ahriman, or 
Shaitan, the Evil Principle; who, having wrought disorder in  nature, brought troubles on men by land and sea, and caused  the greatest ills, is at last punished for his crimes. It was these  events and incidents, says Plutarch, which Isis desired to  represent in the ceremonial of the Mysteries, established by  her in memory of her sorrows and wanderings, whereof she  exhibited an image and representation in her Sanctuaries,  where also were afforded encouragements to piety and  consolation in misfortune. The dogma of a Providence, he  says, administering the Universe by means of intermediary 
Powers, who maintain the connection of man with the 
Divinity, was consecrated in the Mysteries of the Egyptians,

Phrygians, and Thracians, of the Magi and the Disciples of 
Zoroaster; as is plain by their initiations, in which mournful  and funereal ceremonies mingled, ft was an essential part of  the lessons given the Initiates, to teach them the relations of  their own souls with Universal Nature, the greatest lessons of  all, meant to dignify man in his own eyes, and teach him his  place in the Universe of things.

Thus the whole system of the Universe was displayed in all its  p. 417  parts to the eyes of the Initiate; and the symbolic cave which  represented it was adorned and clothed with all the attributes  of that Universe. To this world so organized, endowed with a  double force, active and passive, divided between light and  darkness, moved by a living and intelligent Force, governed  by Genii or Angels who preside over its different parts, and  whose nature and character are more lofty or low in  proportion as they possess a greater or less portion of dark  matter,—to this world descends the soul, emanation of the  ethereal fire, and exiled from the luminous region above the  world. It enters into this dark matter, wherein the hostile 
Principles, each seconded by his troops of Genii, are ever in  conflict, there to submit to one or more organizations in the  body which is its prison, until it shall at last return to its place  of origin, its true native country, from which during this life it  is an exile.

But one thing remained,—to represent its return, through the  constellations and planetary spheres, to its original home. The  celestial fire, the philosophers said, soul of the world and of  fire, an universal principle, circulating above the Heavens, in  a region infinitely pure and wholly luminous, itself pure,  simple, and unmixed, is above the world by its specific  lightness. If any part of it (say a human soul) descends, it acts  against its nature in doing so, urged by an inconsiderate desire  of the intelligence, a perfidious love for matter which causes  it to descend, to know what passes here below, where good  and evil are in conflict. The Soul, a simple substance, when  unconnected with matter, a ray or particle of the Divine Fire,  whose home is in Heaven, ever turns toward that home, while  united with the body, and struggles to return thither.

Teaching this, the Mysteries strove to recall man to his divine  origin, and point out to him the means of returning thither.

The great science acquired in the Mysteries was knowledge of  man's self, of the nobleness of his origin, the grandeur of his  destiny, and his superiority over the animals, which can never  acquire this knowledge, and whom he resembles so long as he  does not reflect upon his existence and sound the depths of his  own nature.

By doing and suffering, by virtue and piety and good deeds,  the soul was enabled at length to free itself from the body, and  ascend along the path of the Milky Way, by the gate of 
Capricorn and by the seven spheres, to the place whence by  many gradations and  p. 418  successive lapses and enthralments it had descended. And  thus the theory of the spheres, and of the signs and  intelligences which preside there, and the whole system of  astronomy, were connected with that of the soul and its  destiny; and so were taught in the Mysteries, in which were  developed the great principles of physics and metaphysics as  to the origin of the soul, its condition here below, its  destination, and its future fate.

The Greeks fix the date of the establishment of the Mysteries  of Eleusis at the year 1423 B. C., during the reign of 
Erechtheus at Athens. According to some authors, they were  instituted by Ceres herself; and according to others, by that 
Monarch, who brought them from Egypt, where, according to 
Diodorus of Sicily, he was bom. Another tradition was, that 
Orpheus introduced them into Greece, together with the 
Dionisiac ceremonies, copying the latter from the Mysteries  of Osiris, and the former from those of Isis.

Nor was it at Athens only, that the worship and Mysteries of 
Isis, metamorphosed into Ceres, were established. The 
Boeotians worshipped the Great or Cabiric Ceres, in the  recesses of a sacred grove, into which none but Initiates could  enter; and the ceremonies there observed, and the sacred  traditions of their Mysteries, were connected with those of the 
Cabiri in Samothrace.

So in Argos, Phocis, Arcadia, Achaia, Messenia, Corinth, and  many other parts of Greece, the Mysteries were practised,  revealing everywhere their Egyptian origin and everywhere  having the same general features; but those of Eleusis, in 
Attica, Pausanius informs us, had been regarded by the 
Greeks, from the earliest times, as being as far superior to all  the others, as the Gods are to .mere Heroes.

Similar to these were the Mysteries of Bona Dea, the Good 
Goddess, whose name, say Cicero and Plutarch, it was not  permitted to any man to know, celebrated at Rome from the  earliest times of that city. It was these Mysteries, practised by  women alone, the secrecy of which was impiously violated by 
Clodius. They were held at the Kalends of May; and,  according to Plutarch, much of the ceremonial greatly  resembled that of the Mysteries of Bakchos.

The Mysteries of Venus and Adonis belonged principally to 
Syria and Phoenicia, whence they passed into Greece and 
Sicily. Venus or Astarte was the Great Female Deity of the 
Phoenicians, as Hercules, Melkarth or Adoni was their Chief 
God. Adoni, called by the Greeks Adonis, was the lover of 
Venus. Slain by a  p. 419  wound in the thigh inflicted by a wild boar in the chase, the  flower called anemone sprang from his blood. Venus received  the corpse and obtained from Jupiter the boon that her lover  should thereafter pass six months of each year with her, and  the other six in the Shades with Proserpine; an allegorical  description of the alternate residence of the Sun in the two  hemispheres. In these Mysteries his death was represented  and mourned, and after this maceration and mourning were  concluded, his resurrection and ascent to Heaven were  announced.

Ezekiel speaks of the festivals of Adonis under the name of  those of Thammuz, an Assyrian Deity, whom every year the  women mourned, seated at the doors of their dwellings. These 
Mysteries, like the others, were celebrated in the Spring, at  the Vernal Equinox, when he was restored to life; at which  time, when they were instituted, the Sun (ADON, Lord, or 
Master) was in the Sign Taurus, the domicile of Venus. He  was represented with horns, and the hymn of Orpheus in his  honor styles him "the two-homed God;" as in Argos Bakchos  was represented with the feet of a bull.

Plutarch says that Adonis and Bakchos were regarded as one  and the same Deity; and that this opinion was founded on the  great similarity in very many respects between the Mysteries  of these two Gods.

The Mysteries of Bakchos were known as the Sabazian, 
Orphic, and Dionysiac Festivals. They went back to the  remotest antiquity among the Greeks, and were attributed by  some to Bakchos himself, and by others to Orpheus. The  resemblance in ceremonial between the observances  established in honor of Osiris in Egypt, and those in honor of 
Bakchos in Greece, the mythological traditions of the two 
Gods, and the symbols used in the festivals of each, amply  prove their identity. Neither the name of Bakchos, nor the  word orgies applied to his feasts, nor the sacred words used in  his Mysteries, are Greek, but of foreign origin. Bakchos was  an Oriental Deity, worshipped in the East, and his orgies  celebrated there, long before the Greeks adopted them. In the  earliest times he was worshipped in India, Arabia, and 
Bactria.

He was honored in Greece with public festivals, and in simple  or complicated Mysteries, varying in ceremonial in various  places, as was natural, because his worship had come thither  from different countries and at different periods. The people  who celebrated  p. 420  the complicated Mysteries were ignorant of the meaning of  many words which they used, and of many emblems which  they revered. In the Sabazian Feasts, for example [from Saba- 
Zeus, an oriental name of this Deity], the words EVOI, 
SABOT, were used, which are in nowise Greek; and a serpent  of gold was thrown into the bosom of the Initiate, in allusion  to the fable that Jupiter had, in the fonn of a serpent, had  connection with Proserpina, and begotten Bakchos, the bull;  whence the enigmatical saying, repeated to the Initiates, that a  bull engendered a dragon or serpent, and the serpent in turn  engendered the bull, who became Bakchos: the meaning of  which was, that the bull [Taurus, which then opened the 
Vernal Equinox, and the Sun in which Sign, figuratively  represented by the Sign itself, was Bakchos, Dionusos, Saba-

Zeus, Osiris, etc.], and the Serpent, another constellation,  occupied such relative positions in the Heavens, that when  one rose the other set, and vice versa.

The serpent was a familiar symbol in the Mysteries of 
Bakchos. The Initiates grasped them with their hands, as 
Orphiucus does on the celestial globe, and the Orpheo-  telestes, or purifier of candidates did the same, crying, as 
Demosthenes taunted /Tschincs with doing in public at the  head of the women whom his mother was to imitate, EVOI, 
SABOI, HYES ATTE, ATTE, HYES!

The Initiates in these Mysteries had preserved the ritual and  ceremonies that accorded with the simplicity of the earliest  ages, and the manners of the first men. The rules of 
Pythagoras were followed there. Like the Egyptians, who held  wool unclean, they buried no Initiate in woolen garments. 
They abstained from bloody sacrifices; and lived on fruits or  vegetables or inanimate things. They imitated the life of the  contemplative Sects of the Orient; thus approximating to the  tranquility of the first ashen, who lived exempt from trouble  and crimes in the bosom of a profound peace. One of the most  precious advantages promised by their initiation was, to put a  man in communion with the Gods, by purifying his soul of all  the passions that interfere with that enjoyment, and dim the  rays of divine light that are communicated to every soul  capable of receiving them, and that imitate their purity. One  of the degrees of initiation was the state of inspiration to  which the adepts were claimed to attain. The Initiates in the

Mysteries of the Lamb, at Pepuza, in Phrygia, professed to be  inspired, and prophesied; and it was claimed that the soul, by,  p. 421  means of these religious ceremonies, purified of all stain,  could see the Gods in this life, and certainly, in all cases, after  death.

The sacred gates of the Temple, where the ceremonies of  initiation were performed, were opened but once in each year,  and no stranger was ever allowed to enter it. Night threw her  veil over these august Mysteries, which could be revealed to  no one. There the sufferings of Bakchos were represented,  who, like Osiris, died, descended to hell and rose to life again;  and raw flesh was distributed to the Initiates, which each ate,  in memory of the death of the Deity, tom in pieces by the 
Titans.

These Mysteries also were celebrated at the Vernal Equinox;  and the emblem of generation, to express the active energy  and generative power of the Divinity, was a principal symbol. 
The Initiates wore garlands and crowns of myrtle and laurel.

In these Mysteries, the aspirant was kept in terror and  darkness to perfonn the three days and nights; and was then  made A(pamapo<;, or ceremony representing the death of 
Bakchos, the same mythological personage with Osiris. This  was effected by confining him in a close cell, that he might  seriously reflect, in solitude and darkness, on the business he  was engaged in: and his mind be prepared for the reception of  the sublime and mysterious truths of primitive revelation and  philosophy. This was a symbolic death; the deliverance from  it, regeneration; after which he was called Swpurp; or twin-  bom. While confined in the cell, the pursuit of Typhon after  the mangled body of Osiris, and the search of Rhea or Isis for  the same, were enacted in his hearing; the initiated crying  aloud the names of that Deity derived from the Sanscrit. Then  it was announced that the body was found; and the aspirant  was liberated amid shouts of joy and exultation.

Then he passed through a representation of Hell and Elysium. 
"Then," said an ancient writer, "they are entertained with  hymns and dances, with the sublime doctrines of sacred  knowledge, and with wonderful and holy visions. And now  become perfect and initiated, they are FREE, and no longer  under restraint; but, crowned and triumphant, they walk up  and down the regions of the blessed, converse with pure and  holy men, and celebrate the sacred Mysteries at pleasure." 
They were taught the nature and objects of the Mysteries, and  the means of making themselves known, and received the  name of Epopts', were fully instructed in the nature and  attributes of the Divinity, and the doctrine of a  p. 422  future state; and made acquainted with the unity and attributes  of the Grand Architect of the Universe, and the true meaning  of the fables in regard to the Gods of Paganism: the great 
Truth being often proclaimed, that "Zeus is the primitive

Source of all things; there is ONE God; ONE power, and 
ONE rule over all." And after full explanation of the many  symbols and emblems that surrounded them, they were  dismissed with the barbarous words Koyi: and Op;ra£„  corruptions of the Sanscrit words, Kansha Aom Pakscha ;  meaning, object of our wishes, God, Silence, or Worship the 
Deity in Silence.

Among the emblems used was the rod of Bakchos; which  once, it was said, he cast on the ground, and it became a  serpent; and at another time he struck the rivers Orontes and 
Hydaspes with it, and the waters receded and he passed over  dry-shod. Water was obtained, during the ceremonies, by  striking a rock with it. The Bake ha.' crowned their heads with  serpents, carried them in vases and baskets, and at the 
Eupqoic or finding, of the body of Osiris, cast one, alive, into  the aspirant's bosom.

The Mysteries of Atys in Phrygia, and those of Cybele his  mistress, like their worship, much resembled those of Adonis  and Bakchos, Osiris and Isis. Their Asiatic origin is  universally admitted, and was with great plausibility claimed  by Phrygia, which contested the palm of antiquity with Egypt. 
They, more than any other people, mingled allegory with their  religious worship, and were great inventors of fables; and  their sacred traditions as to Cybele and Atys, whom all admit  to be Phrygian Gods, were very various. In all, as we learn  from Julius Firmicus, they represented by allegory the  phenomena of nature, and the succession of physical facts,  under the veil of a marvellous history.

Their feasts occurred at the equinoxes, commencing with  lamentation, mourning, groans, and pitiful cries for the death  of Atys; and ending with rejoicings at his restoration to life.

We shall not recite the different versions of the legend of Atys  and Cybele, given by Julius Firmicus, Diodorus, Arnobius, 
Lactantius, Servius, Saint Augustine, and Pausanias. It is  enough to say that it is in substance this: that Cybele, a 
Phrygian Princess, who invented musical instruments and  dances, was enamored of Atys, a youth; that either he in a fit  of frenzy mutilated himself or was mutilated by her in a  paroxysm of jealousy; that he died,  p. 423  and afterward, like Adonis, was restored to life. It is the 
Phoenician fiction as to the Sun-God, expressed in other  tenns, under other forms, and with other names.

Cybele was worshipped in Syria, under the name of Rhea. 
Lucian says that the Lydian Atys there established her  worship and built her temple. The name of Rhea is also found  in the ancient cosmogony of the Phoenicians by 
Sanchoniathon. It was Atys the Lydian, says Lucian, who,  having been mutilated, first established the Mysteries of Rhea,  and taught the Phrygians, the Lydians, and the people of 
Samothrace to celebrate them. Rhea, like Cybele, was  represented drawn by lions, bearing a drum, and crowned  with flowers. According to Varro, Cybele represented the  earth. She partook of the characteristics of Minerva, Venus,  the Moon, Diana, Nemesis, and the Furies; was clad in  precious stones; and her High Priest wore a robe of purple and  a tiara of gold.

The Grand Feast of the Syrian Goddess, like that of the 
Mother of the Gods at Rome, was celebrated at the Vernal 
Equinox. Precisely at that equinox the Mysteries of Atys were  celebrated, in which the Initiates were taught to expect the  rewards of a future life, and the flight of Atys from the jealous  fury of Cybele was described, his concealment in the  mountains and in a cave, and his self-mutilation in a fit of  delirium; in which act his priests imitated him. The feast of  the passion of Atys continued three days; the first of which  was passed in mourning and tears; to which afterward  clamorous rejoicings succeeded; by which, Macrobius says,  the Sun was adored under the name of Atys. The ceremonies  were all allegorical, some of which, according to the Emperor 
Julian, could be explained, but more remained covered with  the veil of mystery. Thus it is that symbols outlast their  explanations, as many have done in Masonry, and ignorance  and rashness substitute new ones.

In another legend, given by Pausanias, Atys dies, wounded  like Adonis by a wild boar in the organs of generation; a  mutilation with which all the legends ended. The pine-tree  under which he was said to have died, was sacred to him; and  was found upon many monuments, with a bull and a ram near  it; one the sign of exaltation of the Sun, and the other of that  of the Moon.

The worship of the Sun under the name of Mithras belonged  to Persia, whence that name came, as did the erudite symbols  of that  p. 424  worship. The Persians, adorers of Fire, regarded the Sun as  the most brilliant abode of the fecundating energy of that  element, which gives life to the earth, and circulates in every  part of the Universe, of which it is, as it were, the soul. This  worship passed from Persia into Armenia, Cappadocia, and 
Cilicia, long before it was known at Rome. The Mysteries of 
Mithras flourished more than any others in the imperial city. 
The worship of Mithras commenced to prevail there under 
Trajan. Hadrian prohibited these Mysteries, on account of the  cruel scenes represented in their ceremonial: for human  victims were immolated therein, and the events of futurity  looked for in their palpitating entrails. They reappeared in  greater splendor than ever under Commodus, who with ins  own hand sacrificed a victim to Mithras: and they were still  more practised under Constantine and his successors, when  the Priests of Mithras were found everywhere in the Roman 
Empire, and the monuments of his worship appeared even in 
Britain.

Caves were consecrated to Mithras, in which were collected a  multitude of astronomical emblems; and cruel tests were  required of the Initiates.

The Persians built no temples; but worshipped upon the  summits of hills, in enclosures of unhewn stones. They  abominated images, and made the Sun and Fire emblems of  the Deity. The Jews borrowed this from them, and represented 
God as appearing to Abraham in a flame of fire, and to Moses  as a fire at Horeb and on Sinai.

With the Persians, Mithras, typified in the Sun, was the  invisible Deity, the Parent of the Universe, the Mediator. In 
Zoroaster's cave of initiation, the Sun and Planets were  represented over-head, in gems and gold, as also was the 
Zodiac. The Sun appeared emerging from the back of Taurus. 
Three great pillars, Eternity, Fecundity, and Authority,  supported the roof; and the whole was an emblem of the 
Universe.

Zoroaster, like Moses, claimed to have conversed face to face,  as man with man, with the Deity; and to have received from 
Him a system of pure worship, to be communicated only to  the virtuous, and those who would devote themselves to the  study of Philosophy. His fame spread over the world, and  pupils came to him from every country. Even Pythagoras was  his scholar.

After his novitiate, the candidate entered the cavern of  initiation, and was received on the point of a sword presented  to his  p. 425  naked left breast, by which he was slightly wounded. Being  crowned with olive, anointed with balsam of benzoin, and  other-wise prepared, he was purified with fire and water, and  went through seven stages of initiation. The symbol of these  stages was a high ladder with seven rounds or steps. In them,  he went through many fearful trials, in which darkness  displayed a principal part. He saw a representation of the  wicked in Hades; and finally emerged from darkness into  light. Received in a place representing Elysium, in the  brilliant assembly of the initiated, where the Archimagus  presided, robed in blue, he assumed the obligations of  secrecy, and was entrusted with the Sacred Words, of which  the Ineffable Name of God was the chief.

Then all the incidents of his initiation were explained to him:  he was taught that these ceremonies brought him nearer the 
Deity; and that he should adore the consecrated Fire, the gift  of that Deity and His visible residence. He was taught the  sacred characters known only to the initiated; and instructed  in regard to the creation of the world, and the true  philosophical meaning of the vulgar mythology; and  especially of the legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman, and the  symbolic meaning of the six Amshaspands created by the  former: Bahman, the Lord of Light; Ardibehest, the Genius of 
Fire; Shariver, the Lord of Splendor and Metals; 
Stapandomad, the Source of Fruitfulness; Khordad , the 
Genius of Water and Time; and Amerdad, the protector of the 
Vegetable World, and the prime cause of growth. And finally  he was taught the true nature of the Supreme Being, Creator  of Ormuzd and Ahriman, the Absolute First Cause, styled 
ZERUANE AKHERENE.

In the Mithriac initiation were several Degrees. The first, 
Tertullian says, was that of Soldier of Mithras. The ceremony  of reception consisted in presenting the candidate a crown,  supported by a sword. It was placed near his head, and he  repelled it, saying, "Mithras is my crown." Then he was  declared the soldier of Mithras, and had the right to call the  other Initiates fellow-soldiers or companions in arms. Hence  the title Companions in the Royal Arch Degree of the 
American Rite.

Then he passed, Porphyry says, through the Degree of the 
Lion,—the constellation Leo, domicile of the Sun and symbol  of Mithras, found on his monuments, These ceremonies were  termed at Rome Leontic and Heliac; and Coracia or Hiero- 
Coracia, of the Raven, a bird consecrated to the Sun, and a  sign placed in the  p. 426

Heavens below the Lion, with the Hydra, and also appearing  on the Mithriac monuments.

Thence he passed to a higher Degree, where the Initiates were  called Perses and children of the Sun. Above them were the 
Fathers, whose chief or Patriarch was styled Father of Fathers,  or Pater Patratus. The Initiates also bore the title of Eagles  and Hawks, birds consecrated to the Sun in Egypt, the former  sacred to the God Mendes, and the latter the emblem of the 
Sun and Royalty.

The little island of Samothrace was long the depositary of  certain august Mysteries, and many went thither from all parts  of Greece to be initiated. It was said to have been settled by  the ancient Pelasgi, early Asiatic colonists in Greece. The 
Gods adored in the Mysteries of this island were termed 
CABIRI, an oriental word, from Cabar, great. Varro calls the 
Gods of Samothrace, Potent Gods. In Arabic, Venus is called 
Cabar. Varro says that the Great Deities whose Mysteries  were practised there, were Heaven and Earth. These were but  symbols of the Active and Passive Powers or Principles of  universal generation. The two Twins, Castor and Pollux, or  the Dioscuri, were also called the Gods of Samothrace; and  the Scholiast of Apollonius, citing Mnaseas, gives the names  of Ceres, Proserpine, Pluto, and Mercury, as the four Cabiric 
Divinities worshipped at Samothrace, as Axieros, Axiocersa, 
Axiocersus, and Casmillus. Mercury was, there as  everywhere, the minister and messenger of the Gods; and the  young servitors of the altars and the children employed in the 
Temples were called Mercuries or Casmilli, as they were in 
Tuscany, by the Etrusci and Pelasgi, who worshipped the 
Great Gods.

Tarquin the Etruscan was an Initiate of the Mysteries of 
Samothrace; and Etruria had its Cabiri as Samothrace had. For  the worship of the Cabiri spread from that island into Etruria,

Phrygia, and Asia Minor: and it probably came from Phoenicia  into Samothrace: for the Cabiri are mentioned by 
Sanchoniathon; and the word Cabar belongs to the Hebrew, 
Phoenician, and Arabic languages.

The Dioscuri, tutelary Deities of Navigation, with Venus,  were invoked in the Mysteries of Samothrace. The  constellation Auriga, or Phaeton, was also honored there with  imposing ceremonies. Upon the Argonautic expedition, 
Orpheus, an Initiate of these  p. 427

[paragraph continues] Mysteries, a stomi arising, counselled his  companions to put into Samothrace. They did so, the storm  ceased, and they were initiated into the Mysteries there, and  sailed again with the assurance of a fortunate voyage, under  the auspices of the Dioscuri, patrons of sailors and navigation.

But much more than that was promised the Initiates. The 
Hierophants of Samothrace made something infinitely greater  to be the object of their initiations; to wit, the consecration of  men to the Deity, by pledging them to virtue; and the  assurance of those rewards which the justice of the Gods  reserves for Initiates after death. This, above all else, made  these ceremonies august, and inspired everywhere so great .a  respect for them, and so great a desire to be admitted to them. 
That originally caused the island to be styled Sacred. It was  respected by all nations. The Romans, when masters of the  world, left it its liberty and laws. It was an asylum for the  unfortunate, and a sanctuary inviolable. There men were  absolved of the crime of homicide, if not committed in a  temple.

Children of tender age were initiated there, and invested with  the sacred-robe, the purple cincture, and the crown of olive,  and seated upon a throne, like other Initiates. In the  ceremonies was represented the death of the youngest of the 
Cabiri, slain by his brothers, who fled into Etruria, carrying  with them the chest or ark that contained his genitals: and  there the Phallus and the sacred ark were adored. Herodotus  says that the Samothracian Initiates understood the object and  origin of this reverence paid the Phallus, and why it was  exhibited in the Mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria says that  the Cabiri taught the Tuscans to revere it. It was consecrated  at Heliopolis in Syria, where the Mysteries of a Divinity  having many points of resemblance with Atys and Cybele  were represented. The Pelasgi connected it with Mercury; and  it appears on the monuments of Mithras; always and  everywhere a symbol of the life-giving power of the Sun at  the Vernal Equinox.

In the Indian Mysteries, as the candidate made his three  circuits, he paused each time he reached the South, and said, 
"I copy the example of the Sun, and follow his beneficent  course." Blue Masonry has retained the Circuits, but has  utterly lost the explanation; which is, that in the Mysteries the  candidate invariably represented the Sun, descending 
Southward toward the reign of  p. 428  the Evil Principle, Ahriman, Siba, or Typhon (darkness and  winter); there figuratively to be slain, and after a few days to  rise again from the dead, and commence to ascend to the 
Northward.

Then the death of Sita was bewailed; or that of Cama, slain by 
Iswara, and committed to the waves on a chest, like Osiris and 
Bacchus; during which the candidate was terrified by  phantoms and horrid noises.

Then he was made to personify Vishnu, and perform his  avatars, or labors. In the first two he was taught in allegories  the legend of the Deluge: in the first he took three steps at  right angles, representing the three huge steps taken by 
Vishnu in that avatar; and hence the three steps in the Master's 
Degree ending at right angles.

The nine avatars finished, he was taught the necessity of faith,  as superior to sacrifices, acts of charity, or mortifications of  the flesh. Then he was admonished against five crimes, and  took a solemn obligation never to commit them. He was then  introduced into a representation of Paradise; the Company of  the Members of the Order, magnificently arrayed, and the 
Altar with a fire blazing upon it, as an emblem of the Deity.

Then a new name was given him, and he was invested in a  white robe and tiara, and received the signs, tokens, and  lectures. A cross was marked on his forehead, and an inverted  level, or the Tau Cross, on his breast. He received the sacred  cord, and divers amulets or talismans; and was then invested  with the sacred Word or Sublime Name, known only to the  initiated, the Triliteral A. U. M.

Then the multitude of emblems was explained to the  candidate; the arcana of science hidden under them, and the  different virtues of which the mythological figures were mere  personifications. And he thus learned the meaning of those  symbols, which, to the uninitiated, were but a maze of  unintelligible figures.

The third Degree was a life of seclusion, after the Initiate's  children were capable of providing for themselves; passed in  the forest, in the practice of prayers and ablutions, and living  only on vegetables. He was then said to be born again.

The fourth was absolute renunciation of the world, self¬  contemplation and self-torture; by which Perfection was  thought to be attained, and the soul merged in the Deity.

In the second Degree, the Initiate was taught the Unity of the  p. 429

[paragraph continues] Godhead, the happiness of the patriarchs, the  destruction by the Deluge, the depravity of the heart, and the  necessity of a mediator, the instability of life, the final  destruction of all created things, and the restoration of the  world in a more perfect fonn. They inculcated the Eternity of  the Soul, explained the meaning of the doctrine of the 
Metempsychosis, and held the doctrine of a state of future  rewards and punishments: and they also earnestly urged that  sins could only be atoned for by repentance, reformation, and  voluntary penance; and not by mere ceremonies and  sacrifices.

The Mysteries among the Chinese and Japanese came from 
India, and were founded on the same principles and with  similar rites. The word given to the new Initiate was O-MI- 
TO-FO, in which we recognize the original name A. U. M.,  coupled at a much later time with that of Fo, the Indian 
Buddha, to show that he was the Great Deity Himself.

The equilateral triangle was one of their symbols; and so was  the mystical Y; both alluding to the Triune God, and the latter  being the ineffable name of the Deity. A ring supported by  two serpents was emblematical of the world, protected by the  power and wisdom of the Creator; and that is the origin of the  two parallel 'lines (into which time has changed the two  serpents), that support the circle in our Lodges.

Among the Japanese, the term of probation for the highest 
Degree was twenty years.

The main features of the Dniidical Mysteries resembled those  of the Orient.

The ceremonies commenced with a hymn to the sun. The  candidates were arranged in ranks of threes, fives, and sevens,  according to their qualifications; and conducted nine times  around the Sanctuary, from East to West. The candidate  underwent many trials, one of which had direct reference to  the legend of Osiris. He was placed in a boat, and sent out to  sea alone, having to rely on his own skill and presence of  mind to reach the opposite shore in safety. The death of Hu  was represented in his hearing, with every external mark of  sorrow, while he was in utter darkness. He met with many  obstacles, had to prove his courage, and expose his life  against armed enemies; represented various animals, and at  last, attaining the permanent light, he was instructed by the 
Arch-Druid in regard to the Mysteries, and in the morality of  the  p. 430

[paragraph continues] Order, incited to act bravely in war, taught the  great truths of the immortality of the soul and a future state,  solemnly enjoined not to neglect the worship of the Deity, nor  the practice of rigid morality; and to avoid sloth, contention,  and folly.

The aspirant attained only the exoteric knowledge in the first  two Degrees. The third was attained only by a few, and they  persons of rank and consequence, and after long purification,  and study of all the arts and sciences known to the Druids, in  solitude, for nine months. This was the symbolical death and  burial of these Mysteries.

The dangerous voyage upon the actual open sea, in a small  boat covered with a skin, on the evening of the 29th of April,  was the last trial, and closing scene, of initiation. If he  declined this trial, he was dismissed with contempt. If he  made it and succeeded, he was termed thrice-born, was  eligible to all the dignities of the State, and received complete  instruction in the philosophical and religious doctrines of the 
Druids.

The Greeks also styled the Ejio7itth;, Tpr/ovoc, thrice-born;  and in India perfection was assigned to the Yogee who had  accomplished many births.

The general features of the initiations among the Goths were  the same as in all the Mysteries. A long probation, of fasting  and mortification, circular processions, representing the  march of the celestial bodies, many fearful tests and trials, a  descent into the infernal regions, the killing of the God Balder  by the Evil Principle, Lok, the placing of his body in a boat  and sending it abroad upon the waters; and, in short, the 
Eastern Legend, under different names, and with some  variations.

The Egyptian Anubis appeared there, as the dog guarding the  gates of death. The candidate was immured in the  representation of a tomb; and when released, goes in search of  the body of Balder, and finds him, at length, restored to life,  and seated upon a throne. He was obligated upon a naked  sword (as is still the custom in the Rit Moderne), and sealed  his obligation by drinking mead out of a human skull.

Then all the ancient primitive truths were made known to  him, so far as they had survived the assaults of time: and he  was informed as to the generation of the Gods, the creation of  the world, the deluge, and the resurrection, of which that of 
Balder was a type.

He was marked with the sign of the cross, and a ring was  given  p. 431  to him as a symbol of the Divine Protection; and also as an  emblem of Perfection; from which comes the custom of  giving a ring to the Aspirant in the 14th Degree.

The point within a Circle, and the Cube, emblem of Odin,  were explained to him; and lastly, the nature of the Supreme 
God, "the author of everything that existeth, the Eternal, the 
Ancient, the Living and Awful Being, the Searcher into  concealed things, the Being that never changeth;" with whom 
Odin the Conqueror was by the vulgar confounded: and the 
Triune God of the Indians was reproduced, as ODIN, the 
Almighty FATHER, FREA, (Rhea or Phre), his wife 
(emblem of universal matter), and Thor his son (the 
Mediator). Here we recognize Osiris, Isis, and Hor or Horus. 
Around the head of Thor, as if to show his eastern origin,  twelve stars were arranged in a circle.

He was also taught the ultimate destruction of the world, and  the rising of a new one, in which the brave and virtuous shall  en-joy everlasting happiness and delight: as the means of  securing which happy fortune, he was taught to practise the  strictest morality and virtue.

The Initiate was prepared to receive the great lessons of all  the Mysteries, by long trials, or by abstinence and chastity.

For many days he was required to fast and be continent, and  to drink liquids calculated to diminish his passions and keep  him chaste.

Ablutions were also required, symbolical of the purity  necessary to enable the soul to escape from its bondage in  matter. Sacred baths and preparatory baptisms were used,  lustrations, immersions, lustral sprinklings, and purifications  of every kind. At Athens they bathed in the Ilissus, which  thence became a sacred river; and before entering the Temple  of Eleusis, all were required to wash their hands in a vase of  lustral water placed near the entrance. Clean hands and a pure  heart were required of the candidates. Apuleius bathed seven  times in the sea, symbolical of the Seven Spheres through  which the Soul must reascend: and the Hindus must bathe in  the sacred river Ganges.

Clemens of Alexandria cites a passage of Menander, who  speaks of a purification by sprinkling three times with salt and  water. Sulphur, resin, and the laurel also served for  purification, as did air, earth, water, and fire. The Initiates at

Heliopolis, in Syria, says Lucian, sacrificed the sacred lamb,  symbol of Aries, then the sign of the Vernal Equinox; ate his  flesh, as the Israelites did at  p. 432  the Passover; and then touched his head and feet to theirs, and  knelt upon the fleece. Then they bathed in warm water, drank  of the same, and slept upon the ground.

There was a distinction between the lesser and greater 
Mysteries. One must have been for some years admitted to the  former, before he could receive the latter, which were but a  preparation for them, the Vestibule of the Temple, of which  those of Eleusis were the Sanctuary. There, in the lesser 
Mysteries, they were prepared to receive the holy truths  taught in the greater. The Initiates in the lesser were called  simply Mystes, or Initiates; but those in the greater, Epoptes,  or Seers. An ancient poet says that the former were an  imperfect shadow of the latter, as sleep is of Death. After  admission to the former, the Initiate was taught lessons of  morality, and the rudiments of the sacred science, the most  sublime and secret part of which was reserved for the Epopt,  who saw the Truth in its nakedness, while the Mystes only  viewed it through a veil and under emblems fitter to excite  than to satisfy his curiosity.

Before communicating the first secrets and primary dogmas  of initiation, the priests required the candidate to take a fearful  oath never to divulge the secrets. Then he made his vows,  prayers, and sacrifices to the Gods. The skins of the victims  consecrated to Jupiter were spread on the ground, and he was  made to set his feet upon them. He was then taught some  enigmatic formulas, as answers to questions, by which to  make himself known. He was then enthroned, invested with a  purple cincture, and crowned with flowers, or branches of  palm or olive.

We do not certainly know the time that was required to elapse  between the admission to the Lesser and Greater Mysteries of 
Eleusis. Most writers fix it at five years. It was a singular  mark of favor when Demetrius was made Mystes and Epopt  in one and the same ceremony. When at length admitted to the 
Degree of Perfection, the Initiate was brought face to face  with entire nature, and learned that the soul was the whole of  man; that earth was but his place of exile; that Heaven was his  native country; that for the soul to be bom is really to die; and  that death was for it the return to a new life. Then he entered  the sanctuary; but he did not receive the whole instruction at  once. It continued through several years. There were, as it  were, many apartments, through which he advanced by  degrees, and between which thick veils intervened.  p. 433

[paragraph continues] There were Statues and Paintings, says Proclus,  in the inmost sanctuary, showing the forms assumed by the 
Gods. Finally the last veil fell, the sacred covering dropped  from the image of the Goddess, and she stood revealed in all  her splendor, surrounded by a divine light, which, filling the  whole sanctuary, dazzled the eyes and penetrated the soul of  the Initiate. Thus is symbolized the final revelation of the true  doctrine as to the nature of Deity and of the soul, and of the  relations of each to matter.

This was preceded by frightful scenes, alternations of fear and  joy, of light and darkness; by glittering lightning and the crash  of thunder, and apparitions of spectres, or magical illusions,  impressing at once the eyes and ears. This Claudian describes,  in his poem on the rape of Proserpine, where he alludes to  what passed in her Mysteries. "The temple is shaken," he  cries; "fiercely gleams the lightning, by which the Deity  announces his presence. Earth trembles; and a terrible noise is  heard in the midst of these terrors. The Temple of the Son of 
Cecrops resounds with long-continued roars; Eleusis uplifts  her sacred torches; the serpents of Triptolemus are heard to  hiss; and fearful Hecate appears afar."

The celebration of the Greek Mysteries continued, according  to the better opinion, for nine days.

On the first the Initiates met. It was the day of the full moon,  of the month Boedromion; when the moon was full at the end  of the sign Aries, near the Pleiades and the place of her  exaltation in Taurus.

The second day there was a procession to the sea, for  purification by bathing.

The third was occupied with offerings, expiatory sacrifices,  and other religious rites, such as fasting, mourning,  continence, etc. A mullet was immolated, and offerings of  grain and living animals made.

On the fourth they carried in procession the mystic wreath of  flowers, representing that which Proserpine dropped when  seized by Pluto, and the Crown of Ariadne in the Heavens. It  was borne on a triumphal car drawn by oxen; and women  followed bearing mystic chests or boxes, wrapped with purple  cloths, containing grains of sesame, pyramidal biscuits, salt,  pomegranates and the mysterious serpent, and perhaps the  mystic phallus.

On the fifth was the superb procession of torches,  commemorative  p. 434  of the search for Proserpine by Ceres; the Initiates marching  by trios, and each bearing a torch; while at the head of the  procession marched the Dadoukos.

The sixth was consecrated to Iakchos, the young Light-God,  son of Ceres, reared in the sanctuaries and bearing the torch of  the Sun-God. The chorus in Aristophanes terms him the  luminous star that lights the nocturnal 'initiation. He was  brought from the sanctuary, his head crowned with myrtle,  and borne from the gate of the Ceramicus to Eleusis, along the  sacred way, amid dances, sacred songs, every mark of joy,  and mystic cries of Iakchos.

On the seventh there were gymnastic exercises and combats,  the victors in which were crowned and rewarded.

On the eighth was the feast of /bsculapius.

On the ninth the famous libation was made for the souls of the  departed. The Priests, according to Athenreus, filled two  vases, placed one in the East and one in the West, toward the  gates of day and night, and overturned them, pronouncing a  formula of mysterious prayers. Thus they invoked Light and 
Darkness, the two great principles of nature.

During all these days no one could be arrested, nor any suit  brought, on pain of death, or at least a heavy fine: and no one  was allowed, by the display of unusual wealth or  magnificence, to endeavor to rival this sacred pomp. 
Everything was for religion.

Such were the Mysteries; and such the Old Thought, as in  scattered and widely separated fragments it has come down to  us. The human mind still speculates upon the great mysteries  of nature, and still finds its ideas anticipated by the ancients,  whose profoundest thoughts are to be looked for, not in their  philosophies, but in their symbols, by which they endeavored  to express the great ideas that vainly struggled for utterance in  words, as they viewed the great circle of phenomena,—Birth, 
Life, Death, or Decomposition, and New Life out of Death  and Rottenness,—to them the greatest of mysteries. 
Remember, while you study their symbols, that they had a  profounder sense of these wonders than we have. To them the  transformations of the worm were a greater wonder than the  stars; and hence the poor dumb scarabasus or beetle was  sacred to them. Thus their faiths are condensed into symbols  or expanded into allegories, which they understood, but were  not always able to explain in language; for there are thoughts  and ideas which no language ever spoken by man has words  to express.

Footnotes

376:1 "i’D'i Tsapanai, in Hebrew, means a serpent.

XXV.

KNIGHT OF THE BRAZEN SERPENT.

THIS Degree is both philosophical and moral. While it  teaches the necessity of reformation as well as repentance, as  a means of obtaining mercy and forgiveness, it is also devoted  to an explanation of the symbols of Masonry; and especially  to those which are connected with that ancient and universal  legend, of which that of Khir-Om Abi is but a variation; that  legend which, representing a murder or a death, and a  restoration to life, by a drama in which figure Osiris, Isis and 
Horns, Atys and Cybele, Adonis and Venus, the Cabiri, 
Dionusos, and many another representative of the active and  passive Powers of Nature, taught the Initiates in the Mysteries  that the rule of Evil and Darkness is but temporary, and that  that of Light and Good will be eternal.

Maimonides says: "In the days of Enos, the son of Seth, men  fell into grievous errors, and even Enos himself partook of  their infatuation. Their language was, that since God has  placed on high the heavenly bodies, and used them as His  ministers, it was evidently His will that they should receive  from man the same  p. 436  veneration as the servants of a great prince justly claim from  the subject multitude. Impressed with this notion, they began  to build temples to the Stars, to sacrifice to them, and to  worship them, in the vain expectation that they should thus  please the Creator of all things. At first, indeed, they did not  suppose the Stars to be the only Deities, but adored in  conjunction with them the Lord God Omnipotent. In process  of time, however, that great and venerable Name was totally  forgotten, and the whole human race retained no other  religion than the idolatrous worship of the Host of Heaven."

The first learning in the world consisted chiefly in symbols.

The wisdom of the Ch aid a: a ns, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Jews;  of Zoroaster, Sanchoniathon, Pherecydes, Syrus, Pythagoras, 
Socrates, Plato, of all the ancients, that is come to our hand, is  symbolic. It was the mode, says Serranus on Plato's 
Symposium, of the Ancient Philosophers, to represent truth  by certain symbols and hidden images.

"All that can be said concerning the Gods," says Strabo,

"must be by the exposition of old opinions and fables; it being  the custom of the ancients to wrap up in enigma and allegory  their thoughts and discourses concerning Nature; which are  therefore not easily explained."

As you learned in the 24th Degree, my Brother, the ancient 
Philosophers regarded the soul of man as having had its origin  in Heaven. That was, Macrobius says, a settled opinion  among them all; and they held it to be the only true wisdom,  for the soul, while united with the body, to look ever toward  its source, and strive to return to the place whence it came. 
Among the fixed stars it dwelt, until, seduced by the desire of  animating a body, it descended to be imprisoned in matter. 
Thenceforward it has no other resource than recollection, and  is ever attracted toward its birth-place and home. The means  of return are to be sought for in itself. To re-ascend to its  source, it must do and suffer in the body.

Thus the Mysteries taught the great doctrine of the divine  nature and longings after immortality of the soul, of the  nobility of its origin, the grandeur of its destiny, its  superiority over the animals who have no aspirations  heavenward. If they straggled in vain to express its nature, by  comparing it to Fire and Light,—if they erred as to its original  place of abode, and the mode of its  p. 437  descent, and the path which, descending and ascending, it  pursued among the stars and spheres, these were the  accessories of the Great Truth, and mere allegories designed  to make the idea more impressive, and, as it were, tangible, to  the human mind.

Let us, in order to understand this old Thought, first follow  the soul in its descent. The sphere or Heaven of the fixed stars  was that Holy Region, and those Elysian Fields, that were the  native domicile of souls, and the place to which they re¬  ascended, when they had recovered their primitive purity and  simplicity. From that luminous region the soul set forth, when  it journeyed toward the body; a destination which it did not  reach until it had undergone three degradations, designated by  the name of Deaths; and until it had passed through the  several spheres and the elements. All souls remained in  possession of Heaven and of happiness, so long as they were  wise enough to avoid the contagion of the body, and to keep  themselves from any contact with matter. But those who,  from that lofty abode, where they were lapped in eternal light,  have looked longingly toward the body, and toward that  which we here below call life, but which is to the soul a real  death', and who have conceived for it a secret desire,-those  souls, victims of their concupiscence, are attracted by degrees  toward the inferior regions of the world, by the mere weight  of thought and of that terrestrial desire. The soul, perfectly  incorporeal, does not at once invest itself with the gross  envelope of the body, but little by little, by successive and  insensible alterations, and in proportion as it removes further  and further from the simple and perfect substance in which it  dwelt at first. It first surrounds itself with a body composed of  the substance of the stars; and afterward, as it descends  through the several spheres, with ethereal matter more and  more gross, thus by degrees descending to an earthly body;  and its number of degradations or deaths being the same as  that of the spheres which it traverses.

The Galaxy, Macrobius says, crosses the Zodiac in two  opposite points, Cancer and Capricorn, the tropical points in  the sun's course, ordinarily called the Gates of the Sun. These  two tropics, before his time, corresponded with those  constellations, but in his day with Gemini and Sagittarius, in  consequence of the precession of the equinoxes; but the signs  of the Zodiac remained unchanged; and the Milky Way  crossed at the signs Cancer and Capricorn, though not at those  constellations.  p. 438

Through these gates souls were supposed to descend to earth  and re-ascend to Heaven. One, Macrobius says, in his dream  of Scipio, was styled the Gate of Men; and the other, the Gate  of the Gods. Cancer was the former, because souls descended  by it to the earth; and Capricorn the latter, because by it they  re-ascended to their seats of immortality, and became Gods. 
From the. Milky Way, according to Pythagoras, diverged the  route to the dominions of Pluto. Until they left the Galaxy,  they were not deemed to have commenced to descend toward  the terrestrial bodies. From that they departed, and to that they  returned. Until they reached the sign Cancer, they had not left  it, and were still Gods. When they reached Leo, they  commenced their apprenticeship for their future condition;  and when they were at Aquarius, the sign opposite Leo, they  were furthest removed from human life.

The soul, descending from the celestial limits, where the 
Zodiac and Galaxy unite, loses its spherical shape, the shape  of all Divine Nature, and is lengthened into a cone, as a point  is lengthened into a line; and then, an indivisible monad  before, it divides itself and becomes a dead—that is, unity  becomes division, disturbance, and conflict. Then it begins to  experience the disorder which reigns in matter, to which it  unites itself, becoming, as it were, intoxicated by draughts of  grosser matter: of which inebriation the cup of Bakchos,  between Cancer and Leo, is a symbol. It is for them the cup of  forgetfulness. They assemble, says Plato, in the fields of  oblivion, to drink there the water of the river Ameles, which  causes men to forget everything. This fiction is also found in 
Virgil. "If souls," says Macrobius, "carried with them into the  bodies they occupy all the knowledge which they had  acquired of divine things, during their sojourn in the Heavens,  men would not differ in opinion as to the Deity; but some of  them forget more, and some less, of that which they had  learned."

We smile at these notions of the ancients; but we must learn  to look through these material images and allegories, to the  ideas, struggling for utterance, the great speechless thoughts  which they envelop: and it is well for us to consider whether  we ourselves have yet found out any better way of  representing to ourselves the soul's origin and its advent into  this body, so entirely foreign to it; if, indeed, we have ever  thought about it at all; or have not ceased to think, in despair.  p. 439

The highest and purest portion of matter, which nourishes and  constitutes divine existences, is what the poets term nectar,  the beverage of the Gods. The lower, more disturbed and  grosser portion, is what intoxicates souls. The ancients  symbolized it as the River Lethe, dark stream of oblivion.

How do we explain the soul's forgetfulness of its antecedents,  or reconcile that utter absence of remembrance of its former  condition, with its essential immortality? In truth, we for the  most part dread and shrink from any attempt at explanation of  it to ourselves.

Dragged down by the heaviness produced by this inebriating  draught, the soul falls along the zodiac and the milky way to  the lower spheres, and in its descent not only takes, in each  sphere, a new envelope of the material composing the  luminous bodies of the planets, but receives there the different  faculties which it is to exercise while it inhabits the body.

In Saturn, it acquires the power of reasoning and intelligence,  or what is termed the logical and contemplative faculty. From 
Jupiter it receives the power of action. Mars gives it valor,  enterprise, and impetuosity. From the Sun it receives the  senses and imagination, which produce sensation, perception,  and thought. Venus inspires it with desires. Mercury gives it  the faculty of expressing and enunciating what it thinks and  feels. And, on entering the sphere of the Moon, it acquires the  force of generation and growth. This lunary sphere, lowest  and basest to divine bodies, is first and highest to terrestrial  bodies. And the lunary body there assumed by the soul, while,  as it were, the sediment of celestial matter, is also the first  substance of animal matter.

The celestial bodies, Heaven, the Stars, and the other Divine  elements, ever aspire to rise. The soul reaching the region  which mortality inhabits, tends toward terrestrial bodies, and  is deemed to die. Let no one, says Macrobius, be surprised  that we so frequently speak of the death of this soul, which  yet we call immortal. It is neither annulled nor destroyed by  such death: but merely enfeebled for a time; and does not  thereby forfeit its prerogative of immortality; for afterward,  freed from the body, when it has been purified from the vice¬  stains contracted during that connection, it is re-established in  all its privileges, and returns to the luminous abode of its  immortality.

On its return, it restores to each sphere through which it  ascends, the passions and earthly faculties received from  them: to  p. 440  the Moon, the faculty of increase and diminution of the body;  to Mercury, fraud, the architect of evils; to Venus, the  seductive love of pleasure; to the Sun, the passion for  greatness and empire; to Mars, audacity and temerity; to 
Jupiter, avarice; and to Saturn, falsehood and deceit: and at  last, relieved of all, it enters naked and pure into the eighth  sphere or highest Heaven.

All this agrees with the doctrine of Plato, that the soul cannot  re-enter into Heaven, until the revolutions of the Universe  shall have restored it to its primitive condition, and purified it  from the effects of its contact with the four elements.

This opinion of the pre-existence of souls, as pure and  celestial substances, before their union with our bodies, to put  on and animate which they descend from Heaven, is one of  great antiquity. A modem Rabbi, Manasseh Ben Israel, says it  was always the belief of the Hebrews. It was that of most  philosophers who admitted the immortality of the soul: and  therefore it was taught in the Mysteries; for, as Lactantius  says, they could not see how it was possible that the soul  should exist after the body, if it had not existed before it, and  if its nature was not independent of that of the body. The  same doctrine was adopted by the most learned of the Greek

Fathers, and by many of the Latins: and it would probably  prevail largely at the present day, if men troubled themselves  to think upon this subject at all, and to inquire whether the  soul's immortality involved its prior existence.

Some philosophers held that the soul was incarcerated in the  body, by way of punishment for sins committed by it in a  prior state. How they reconciled this with the same soul's  unconsciousness of any such prior state, or of sin committed  there, does not appear. Others held that God, of his mere will,  sent the soul to inhabit the body. The Kabalists united the two  opinions. They held that there are four worlds, Aziluth, 
Briarth, Jezirath, and Aziatlr, the world of emanation , that of  creation, that of forms, and the material world; one above and  more perfect than the other, in that order, both as regards their  own nature and that of the beings who inhabit them. All souls  are originally in the world Aziluth, the Supreme Heaven,  abode of God, and of pure and immortal spirits. Those who  descend from it without fault of their own, by God's order, are  gifted with a divine fire, which preserves them from the  contagion of matter, and restores them to Heaven so soon as  their mission is ended. Those who descend through,  p. 441  their own fault, go from world to world, insensibly losing  their love of Divine things, and their self-contemplation; until  they reach the world Aziath, falling by their own weight. This  is a pure Platonism, clothed with the images and words  peculiar to the Kabalists. It was the doctrine of the Essenes,  who, says Porphyry, "believe that souls descend from the  most subtile ether, attracted to bodies by the seductions of  matter." It was in substance the doctrine of Origen; and it  came from the Chaldaeans, who largely studied the theory of  the Heavens, the spheres, and the influences of the signs and  constellations.

The Gnostics made souls ascend and descend through eight 
Heavens, in each of which were certain Powers that opposed  their return, and often drove them back to earth, when not  sufficiently purified. The last of these Powers, nearest the  luminous abode of souls, was a serpent or dragon.

In the ancient doctrine, certain Genii were charged with the  duty of conducting souls to the bodies destined to receive  them, and of withdrawing them from those bodies. According  to Plutarch, these were the functions of Proserpine and 
Mercury. In Plato, a familiar Genius accompanies man at his  birth, follows and watches him all his life, and at death  conducts him to the tribunal of the Great Judge. These Genii  are the media of communication between man and the Gods;  and the soul is ever in their presence. This doctrine is taught  in the oracles of Zoroaster: and these Genii were the 
Intelligences that resided in the planets.

Thus the secret science and mysterious emblems of initiation  were connected with the Heavens, the Spheres, and the 
Constellations: and this connection must be studied by  whomsoever would understand the ancient mind, and be  enabled to interpret the allegories, and explore the meaning of  the symbols, in which the old sages endeavored to delineate  the ideas that struggled within them for utterance, and could  be but insufficiently and inadequately expressed by language,  whose words are images of those things alone that can be  grasped by and are within the empire of the senses.

It is not possible for us thoroughly to appreciate the feelings  with which the ancients regarded the Heavenly bodies, and  the ideas to which their observation of the Heavens gave rise,  because we cannot put ourselves in their places, look at the  stars with their eyes in the world's youth, and divest  ourselves .of the knowledge  p. 442  which even the commonest of us have, that makes us regard  the Stars and Planets and all the Universe of Suns and Worlds,  as a mere inanimate machine and aggregate of senseless orbs,  no more astonishing, except in degree, than a clock or an  orrery. We wonder and are amazed at the Power and Wisdom 
(to most men it seems only a kind of Infinite Ingenuity) of the 
MAKER: they wondered at the Work, and endowed it with 
Life and Force and mysterious Powers and mighty Influences.

Memphis, in Egypt, was in Latitude 29° 5" North, and in 
Longitude 30° 18' East. Thebes, in Upper Egypt, in Latitude 
25° 45' North, and Longitude 32° 43' East. Babylon was in 
Latitude 32° 30' North, and Longitude 44° 23' East: while 
Saba, the ancient Sab as an capital of Ethiopia, was about in

Latitude 15° North.

Through Egypt ran the great River Nile, coming from beyond 
Ethiopia, its source in regions wholly unknown, in the abodes  of heat and fire, and its course from South to North. Its  inundations had formed the alluvial lands of Upper and Lower 
Egypt, which they continued to raise higher and higher, and to  fertilize by their deposits. At first, as in all newly-settled  countries, those inundations, occurring annually and always at  the same period of the year, were calamities: until, by means  of levees and drains and artificial lakes for irrigation, they  became blessings, and were looked for with joyful  anticipation, as they had before been awaited with terror.

Upon the deposit left by the Sacred River, as it withdrew into  its banks, the husbandman sowed his seed; and the rich soil  and the genial sun insured him an abundant harvest.

Babylon lay on the Euphrates, which ran from Southeast to 
Northwest, blessing, as all rivers in the Orient do, the arid  country through which it flowed; but its rapid and uncertain  overflows bringing terror and disaster.

To the ancients, as yet inventors of no astronomical  instruments, and looking at the Heavens with the eyes of  children, this earth was a level plain of unknown extent.

About its boundaries there was speculation, but no  knowledge. The inequalities of its surface were the  irregularities of a plane. That it was a globe, or that anything  lived on its under surface, or on what it rested, they had no  idea. Every twenty-four hours the sun came up from beyond  the Eastern rim of the world, and travelled across the sky,  over the earth, always South of, but sometimes nearer and  sometimes further from the point overhead; and sunk below  the  p. 443  world's Western rim. With him went light, and after him  followed darkness.

And every twenty-four hours appeared in the Heavens another  body, visible chiefly at night, but sometimes even when the  sun shone, which likewise, as if following the sun at a greater  or less distance, travelled across the sky; sometimes as a thin  crescent, and thence increasing to a full orb resplendent with  silver light; and sometimes more and sometimes less to the 
Southward of the point overhead, within the same limits as  the Sun.

Man, enveloped by the thick darkness of profoundest night,  when everything around him has disappeared, and he seems  alone with himself and the black shades that surround him,  feels his existence a blank and nothingness, except so far as  memory recalls to him the glories and splendors of light. 
Everything is dead to him, and he, as it were, to Nature. How  crushing and overwhelming the thought, the fear, the dread,  that perhaps that darkness may be eternal, and that day may  possibly never return; if it ever occurs to his mind, while the  solid gloom closes up against him like a wall! What then can  restore him to like, to energy, to activity, to fellowship and  communion with the great world which God has spread  around him, and which perhaps in the darkness may be  passing away? LIGHT restores him to himself and to nature  which seemed lost to him. Naturally, therefore, the primitive  men regarded light as the principle of their real existence,  without which life would be but one continued weariness and  despair. This necessity for light, and its actual creative energy,  were felt by all men: and nothing was more alarming to them  than its absence. It became their fust Divinity, a single ray of  which, flashing into the dark tumultuous bosom of chaos,  caused man and all the Universe to emerge from it. So all the  poets sung who imagined Cosmogonies; such was the first  dogma of Orpheus, Moses, and the Theologians. Light was 
Ormuzd, adored by the Persians, and Darkness Ahriman,  origin of all evils: Light was the life of the Universe, the  friend of man, the substance of the Gods and of the Soul.

The sky was to them a great, solid, concave arch; a  hemisphere of unknown material, at an unknown distance  above the flat level earth; and along it journeyed in their  courses the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, and the Stars.

The Sun was to them a great globe of fire, of unknown  dimensions,  p. 444  at an unknown distance. The Moon was a mass of softer light;  the stars and planets lucent bodies, armed with unknown and  supernatural influences.

It could not fail to be soon observed, that at regular intervals  the days and nights were equal; and that two of these intervals  measured the same space of time as elapsed between the  successive inundations, and between the returns of spring¬  time and harvest. Nor could it fail to be perceived that the  changes of the moon occurred regularly; the same number of  days always elapsing between the first appearance of her  silver crescent in the West at evening and that of her full orb  rising in the East at the same hour; and the same again,  between that and the new appearance of the crescent in the 
West.

It was also soon observed that the Sun crossed the Heavens in  a different line each day, the days being longest and the nights  shortest when the line of his passage was furthest North, and  the days shortest and nights longest when that line was  furthest South: that his progress North and South was  perfectly regular, marking four periods that were always the  same,—those when the days and nights were equal, or the 
Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes; that when the days were  longest, or the Summer Solstice; and that when they were  shortest, or the Winter Solstice.

With the Vernal Equinox, or about the 25 th of March of our 
Calendar, they found that there unerringly came soft winds,  the return of warmth, caused by the Sun turning back to the 
Northward from the middle ground of his course, the  vegetation of the new year, and the impulse to amatory action  on the part of the animal creation. Then the Bull and the Ram,  animals most valuable to the agriculturist, and symbols  themselves of vigorous generative power, recovered their  vigor, the birds mated and budded their nests, the seeds  germinated, the grass grew, and the trees put forth leaves. 
With the Summer Solstice, when the Sun reached the extreme  northern limit of his course, came great heat, and burning  winds, and lassitude and exhaustion; then vegetation  withered, man longed for the cool breezes of Spring and 
Autumn, and the cool water of the wintry Nile or Euphrates,  and the Lion sought for that element far from his home in the  desert.

With the Autumnal Equinox came ripe harvests, and fruits of  the tree and vine, and falling leaves, and cold evenings  presaging wintry frosts; and the Principle and Powers of 
Darkness, prevailing  p. 445  over those of Light, drove the Sun further to the South, so that  the nights grew longer than the days. And at the Winter 
Solstice the earth, was wrinkled with frost, the trees were  leafless, and the Sun reaching the most Southern point in his  career, seemed to hesitate whether to continue descending, to  leave the world to darkness and despair, or to turn upon his  steps and retrace his course to the Northward, bringing back  seed-time and Spring, and green leaves and flowers, and all  the delights of love.

Thus, naturally and necessarily, time was divided, first into  days, and then into moons or months, and years; and with  these divisions and the movements of the Heavenly bodies  that marked them, were associated and connected all men's  physical enjoyments and privations. Wholly agricultural, and  in their frail habitations greatly at the mercy of the elements  and the changing seasons, the primitive people of the Orient  were most deeply interested in the recurrence of the periodical  phenomena presented by the two great luminaries of Heaven,  on whose regularity all their prosperity depended.

And the attentive observer soon noticed that the smaller lights  of Heaven were, apparently, even more regular than the Sun  and Moon, and foretold with unerring certainty, by their  risings and settings, the periods of recurrence of the different  phenomena and seasons on which the physical well-being of  all men depended. They soon felt the necessity of  distinguishing the individual stars, or groups of stars, and  giving them names, that they might understand each other,  when referring to and designating them. Necessity produced  designations at once natural and artificial. Observing that, in  the circle of the year, the renewal and periodical appearance  of the productions of the earth were constantly associated, not  only with the courses of the Sun, but also with the rising and  setting of certain Stars, and with their position relatively to  the Sun, the centre to which they referred the whole starry  host, the mind naturally connected the celestial and terrestrial  objects that were in fact connected: and they commenced by  giving to particular Stars or groups of Stars the names of  those terrestrial objects which seemed connected with them;  and for those which still remained unnamed by this  nomenclature, they, to complete a system, assumed arbitrary  and fanciful names.

Thus the Ethiopian of Thebes or Saba styled those Stars under  p. 446  which the Nile commenced to overflow, Stars of Inundation,  or that poured out water (AQUARIUS).

Those Stars among which the Sun was, when he had reached  the Northern Tropic and began to retreat Southward, were  termed, from his retrograde motion, the Crab (CANCER).

As he approached, in Autumn, the middle point between the 
Northern and Southern extremes of his journeying, the days  and nights became equal; and the Stars among which he was  then found were called Stars of the Balance (LIBRA).

Those stars among which the Sun was, when the Lion, driven  from the Desert by thirst, came to slake it at the Nile, were  called Stars of the Lion (LEO).

Those among which the Sun was at harvest, were called those  of the Gleaning Virgin, holding a Sheaf of Wheat (VIRGO).

Those among which he was found in February, when the

Ewes brought forth their young, were called Stars of the 
Lamb (Arms).

Those in March, when it was time to plough, were called 
Stars of the Ox (TAURUS).

Those under which hot and burning winds came from the  desert, venomous like poisonous reptiles, were called Stars of  the Scorpion (SCORPIO).

Observing that the annual return of the rising of the Nile was  always accompanied by the appearance of a beautiful Star,  which at that period showed itself in the direction of the  sources of that river, and seemed to warn the husbandman to  be careful not to be surprised by the inundation, the Ethiopian  compared this act of that Star to that of the Animal which by  barking gives warning of danger, and styled it the Dog 
(SIRIUS).

Thus commencing, and as astronomy came to be more  studied, imaginary figures were traced all over the Heavens,  to which the different Stars were assigned. Chief among them  were those that lay along the path which the Sun travelled as  he climbed toward the North and descended to the South:  lying within certain limits and extending to an equal distance  on each side of the line of equal nights and days. This belt,  curving like a Serpent, was termed the Zodiac, and divided  into twelve Signs.

At the Vernal Equinox, 2455 years before our Era, the Sun  was entering the sign and constellation Taurus, or the Bull;  having passed through, since he commenced, at the Winter 
Solstice, to ascend Northward, the Signs Aquarius, Pisces and 
Aries; on  p. 44  entering the first of which he reached the lowest limit of his  journey Southward.

From TAURUS, he passed through Gemini and Cancer, and  reached LEO when he arrived at the terminus of his journey 
Northward. Thence, through Leo, Virgo, and Libra, he  entered SCORPIO at the Autumnal Equinox, and journeyed 
Southward through Scorpia, Sagittarius, and Capricomus to 
AQUARIUS, the terminus of his journey South.

The path by which he journeyed through these signs became  the Ecliptic ; and that which passes through the two equinoxes,  the Equator.

They knew nothing of the immutable laws of nature; and  whenever the Sun commenced to tend Southward, they feared  lest he might continue to do so, and by degrees disappear  forever, leaving the earth to be ruled forever by darkness,  storm, and cold.

Hence they rejoiced when he commenced to re-ascend after  the Winter Solstice, struggling against the malign influences  of Aquarius and Pisces, and amicably received by the Lamb. 
And when at the Vernal Equinox he entered Taurus, they still  more rejoiced at the assurance that the days would again be  longer than the nights, that the season of seed-time had come,  and the Summer and harvest would follow.

And they lamented when, after the Autumnal Equinox, the  malign influence of the venomous Scorpion, and vindictive 
Archer, and the filthy and ill-omened He-Goat dragged him  down toward the Winter Solstice.

Arriving there, they said he had been slain, and had gone to  the realm of darkness. Remaining there three days, he rose  again, and again ascended Northward in the heavens, to  redeem the earth from the gloom and darkness of Winter,  which soon became emblematical of sin, and evil, and  suffering; as the Spring, Summer, and Autumn became  emblems of happiness and immortality.

Soon they personified the Sun, and worshipped him under the  name of OSIRIS, and transmuted the legend of his descent  among the Winter Signs, into 'a fable of his death, his descent  into the infernal regions, and his resurrection.

The Moon became Isis, the wife of Osiris; and Winter, as well  as the desert or the ocean into which the Sun descended,  became TYPHON, the Spirit or Principle of Evil, warring  against and destroying Osiris.  p. 448

From the journey of the Sun through the twelve signs came  the legend of the twelve labors of Flercules, and the  incarnations of Vishnu and Buddha. Hence came the legend  of the murder of Kliurum, representative of the Sun, by the  three Fellow-crafts, symbols of the three Winter signs, 
Capricomus, Aquarius, and Pisces, who assailed him at the  three gates of Heaven and slew him at the Winter Solstice. 
Hence the search for him by the nine Fellow-crafts, the other  nine signs, his finding, burial, and resurrection.

The celestial Taurus, opening the new year, was the Creative 
Bull of the Hindus and Japanese, breaking with his horn the  egg out of which the world is bom. Hence the bull Arts was  worshipped by the Egyptians, and reproduced as a golden calf  by Aaron in the desert. Hence the cow was sacred to the 
Hindus. Hence, from the sacred and beneficent signs of 
Taurus and Leo, the human-headed winged lions and bulls in  the palaces at Kouyounjik and Nimroud, like which were the 
Cherubim set by Solomon in his Temple: and hence the  twelve brazen or bronze oxen, on which the laver of brass was  supported.

The Celestial Vulture or Eagle, rising and setting with the 
Scorpion, was substituted in its place, in many cases, on  account of the malign influences of the latter: and thus the  four great periods of the year were marked by the Bull, the 
Lion, the Man (Aquarius) and the Eagle; which were upon the  respective standards of Ephraim, Judah, Reuben, and Dan;  and still appear on the shield of American Royal Arch

Masonry.

Afterward the Ram or Lamb became an object of adoration,  when, in his turn, he opened the equinox, to deliver the world  from the wintry reign of darkness and evil.

Around the central and simple idea of the annual death and  resurrection of the Sun a multitude of circumstantial details  soon clustered. Some were derived from other astronomical  phenomena; while many were merely poetical ornaments and  inventions.

Besides the Sun and Moon, those ancients also saw a  beautiful Star, shining with a soft, silvery light, always  following the Sun at no great distance when he set, or  preceding him when he rose. Another of a red and angry  color, and still another more kingly and brilliant than all, early  attracted their attention, by their free movements among the  fixed hosts of Heaven: and the latter by his unusual brilliancy,  and the regularity with which he rose and set. These were 
Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. Mercury and Saturn  p. 449  could scarcely have been noticed in the world's infancy, or  until astronomy began to assume the proportions of a science.

In the projection of the celestial sphere by the astronomical  priests, the zodiac and constellations, arranged in a circle,  presented their halves in diametrical opposition; and the  hemisphere of Winter was said to be adverse, opposed,  contrary, to that of Summer. Over the angels of the latter  ruled a king (OSIRIS or ORMUZD), enlightened, intelligent,  creative, and beneficent. Over the fallen angels or evil genii of  the former, the demons or Devs of the subterranean empire of  darkness and sorrow, and its stars, ruled also a chief. In Egypt  the Scorpion first ruled, the sign next the Balance, and long  the chief of the Winter signs; and then the Polar Bear or Ass,  called Typhon, that is, deluge, on account of the rains which  inundated the earth while that constellation domineered. In 
Persia, at a later day, it was the serpent, which, personified as 
Ahriman, was the Evil Principle of the religion of Zoroaster.

The Sun does not arrive at the same moment in each year at  the equinoctial point on the equator. The explanation of his  anticipating that point belongs to the science of astronomy;  and to that we refer you for it. The consequence is, what is  termed the precession of the equinoxes, by means of which  the Sun is constantly changing his place in the zodiac, at each  vernal equinox; so that now, the signs retaining the names  which they had 300 years before Christ, they and the  constellations do not correspond; the Sun being now in the  constellation Pisces, when he is in the sign Aries.

The annual amount of precession is 50 seconds and a little  over [50" 1.]. The period of a complete Revolution of the 
Equinoxes, 25,856 years. The precession amounts to 30° or a  sign, in 2155.6 years. So that, as the sun now enters Pisces at  the Vernal Equinox, he entered Aries at that period, 300 years

B. C., and Taurus 2455 B. C. And the division of the Ecliptic,  now called Taurus, lies in the Constellation Aries; while the  sign Gemini is in the Constellation Taurus. Four thousand six  hundred and ten years before Christ, the sun entered Gemini  at the Vernal Equinox.

At the two periods, 2455 and 300 years before Christ, and  now, the entrances of the sun at the Equinoxes and Solstices  into the signs, were and are as follows:—  p. 450

B. C. 2455.

Vem.  he Taurus  from Aries.

Equinox,  entered

Summer

Solstice

Leo  from Cancer.

Autumnal

Equinox

Scorpio  from Libra.

Winter

Solstice

Aquarius

B. C. 300.  from Capricomus.

Vem. Eq.

Aries  from Pisces.

Sumner Sols.

Cancer  from Gemini.

Autumn Eq.

Libra  from Virgo.

Winter Sols.

Capricomus from Sagittarius.

1872.

Vern. Eq. Pisces from Aquarius.

Sum. Sols. Gemini from Taurus.

Aut. Eq. Virgo from Leo.

Winter Sols. Sagittarius from Scorpio.

From confounding signs with causes came the worship of the  sun and stars. "If," says Job, "I beheld the sun when it shined,  or the moon progressive in brightness; and my heart hath been  secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand, this were  an iniquity to be punished by the Judge; for I should have  denied the God that is above."

Perhaps we are not, on the whole, much wiser than those  simple men of the old time. For what do we know of effect  and cause, except that one thing regularly or habitually  follows another?

So, because the heliacal rising of Sirius preceded the rising of  the Nile, it was deemed to cause it; and other stars were in  like manner held to cause extreme heat, bitter cold, and  watery storm.

A religious reverence for the zodiacal Bull [TAURUS]  appears, from a very early period, to have been pretty general,  perhaps it was universal, throughout Asia; from that chain or  region of Caucasus to which it gave name; and which is still  known under the appellation of Mount Taurus, to the 
Southern extremities of the Indian Peninsula; extending itself  also into Europe, and through the Eastern parts of Africa.

This evidently originated during those remote ages of the  world, when the colure of the vernal equinox passed across  the stars in the head of the sign Taurus [among which was 
Aldebaran]; a  p. 451  period when, as the most ancient monuments of all the  oriental nations attest, the light of arts and letters first shone  forth.

The Arabian word AL-DE-BARAN, means the foremost, or  leading, star: and it could only have been so named, when it  did precede, or lead, all others. The year then opened with the  sun in Taurus; and the multitude of ancient sculptures, both in 
Assyria and Egypt, wherein the bull appears with lunette or  crescent horns, and the disk of the sun between them, are  direct allusions to the important festival of the first new moon  of the year: and there was everywhere an annual celebration  of the festival of the first new moon, when the year opened  with Sol and Luna in Taurus.

David sings: "Blow the trumpet in the New Mooir, in the time  appointed; on our solemn feast-day: for this is a statute unto

Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob. This he ordained to 
Joseph, for a testimony, when he came out of the land of 
Egypt."

The reverence paid to Taurus continued long after, by the  precession of the Equinoxes, the colure of the vernal equinox  had come to pass through Aries. The Chinese still have a  temple, called "The Palace of the homed Bull"; and the same  symbol is worshipped in Japan and all over Hindostan. The 
Cimbrians carried a brazen bull with them, as the image of  their God, when they overran Spain and Gaul; and the  representation of the Creation, by the Deity in the shape of a  bull, breaking the shell of an egg with his horns, meant 
Taums, opening the year, and bursting the symbolical shell of  the annually-recurring orb of the new year.

Theophilus says that the Osiris of Egypt was supposed to be  dead or absent fifty days in each year. Landseer thinks that  this was because the Sabrean priests were accustomed to see,  in the lower latitudes of Egypt and Ethiopia, the first or chief  stars of the Husbandman [BOOTES] sink achronically  beneath the Western horizon; and then to begin their  lamentations, or hold forth the signal for others to weep: and  when his prolific virtues were supposed to be transferred to  the vernal sun, bacchanalian revelry became devotion.

Before the colure of the Vernal Equinox had passed into 
Aries, and after it had left Aldebaran and the Hyades, the 
Pleiades were, for seven or eight centuries, the leading stars of  the Sabaean year. And thus we see, on the monuments, the  disk and crescent, symbols  p. 452  of the sun and moon in conjunction, appear successively,—  first on the head, and then on the neck and back of the 
Zodiacal Bull, and more recently on the forehead of the Ram.

The diagrammatical character or symbol, still in use to denote 
Taurus, V, is this very crescent and disk: a symbol that has  come down to us from those remote ages when this  memorable conjunction in Taurus, by marking the  commencement, at once of the Sabasan year and of the cycle  of the Chaldasan Saros, so pre-eminently distinguished that  sign as to become its characteristic symbol. On a bronze bull  from China, the crescent is attached to the back of the Bull, by  means of a cloud, and a curved groove is provided for the  occasional introduction of the disk of the sun, when solar and  lunar time were coincident and conjunctive, at the  commencement of the year, and of the lunar cycle. When that  was made, the year did not open with the stars in the head of  the Bull, but when the colure of the vernal equinox passed  across the middle or later degrees of the asterism Taurus, and  the Pleiades were, in China, as in Canaan, the leading stars of  the year.

The crescent and disk combined always represent the  conjunctive Sun and Moon; and when placed on the head of  the Zodiacal Bull, the commencement of the cycle termed

SAROS by the Chaldaeans, and Metallic by the Greeks; and  supposed to be alluded to in Job, by the phrase, "Mazzaroth in  his season"; that is to say, when the first new Moon and new 
Sun of the year were coincident, which happened once in  eighteen years and a fraction.

On the sarcophagus of Alexander, the same symbol appears  on the head of a Rain, which, in the time of that monarch, was  the leading sign. So too in the sculptured temples of the Upper 
Nile, the crescent and disk appear, not on the head of Taurus,  but on the forehead of the Ram or the Ram-headed God,  whom the Grecian Mythologists called Jupiter Ammon, really  the Sun in Aries.

If we now look for a moment at the individual stars which  composed and were near to the respective constellations, we  may find something that will connect itself with the symbols  of the Ancient Mysteries and of Masonry.

It is to be noticed that when the Sun is in a particular  constellation, no part of that constellation will be seen, except  just before sunrise and just after sunset; and then only the  edge of it: but the constellations opposite to it will be visible. 
When the Sun is in Taurus, for example, that is, when Taurus  sets with the Sun,  p. 453

[paragraph continues] Scorpio rises as he sets, and continues visible  throughout the night. And if Taurus rises and sets with the

Sun to-day, he will, six months hence, rise at sunset and set at  sunrise; for the stars thus gain on the Sun two hours a month.

Going back to the time when, watched by the Chakkean  shepherds, and the husbandmen of Ethiopia and Egypt,

"The milk-white Bull with golden horns 
"Led on the new-born year,"  we see in the neck of TAURUS, the Pleiades, and in his face  the Hyades, "which Grecia from their showering names," and  of whom the brilliant Aldebaran is the chief; while to the  southwestward is that most splendid of all the constellations, 
Orion, with Betelgueux in his right shoulder, Bellatrix in his  left shoulder, Rigel on the left foot, and in his belt the three  stars known as the Three Kings, and now as the Yard and Ell. 
Orion, ran the legend, persecuted the Pleiades; and to save  them from his fury, Jupiter placed them in the Heavens, where  he still pursues them, but in vain. They, with Arcturus and the 
Bands of Orion, are mentioned in the Book of Job. They are  usually called the Seven Stars, and it is said there were seven,  before the fall of Troy; though now only six are visible.

The Pleiades were so named from a Greek word signifying to  sail. In all ages they have been observed for signs and  seasons. Virgil says that the sailors gave names to "the 
Pleiades, Hyades, and the Northern Car: Pleiadas, Hyadas, 
Claramque Lycaonis Arcton.” And Palinurus, he says,

Arcturum, pluviasqiie Hyadas, Geminosque Triones,

Armatumque auro circumspicit Oriona,—  studied Arcturus and the rainy Hyades and the Twin Triones,  and Orion cinctured with gold.

Taurus was the prince and leader of the celestial host for more  than two thousand years; and when his head set with the Sun  about the last of May, the Scorpion was seen to rise in the 
South-east.

The Pleiades were sometimes called Vergilice, or the Virgins  of Spring; because the Sun entered this cluster of stars in the  season of blossoms. Their Syrian name was Succoth, or 
Succothbeneth, derived from a Chaldasan word signifying to  speculate or observe.

The Hyades are five stars in the form of a V, 11° southeast of  p. 454  the Pleiades. The Greeks counted them as seven. When the 
Vernal Equinox was in Taurus, Aldebaran led up the starry  host; and as he rose in the East, Aries was about 27° high.

When he was close upon the meridian, the Heavens presented  their most magnificent appearance. Capella was a little further  from the meridian, to the north; and Orion still further from it  to the southward. Procyon, Sirius, Castor and Pollux had  climbed about halfway from the horizon to the meridian. 
Regulus had just risen upon the ecliptic. The Virgin still  lingered below the horizon. Fomalhaut was halfway to the  meridian in the Southwest; and to the Northwest were the  brilliant constellations, Perseus, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and 
Andromeda; while the Pleiades had just passed the meridian.

ORION is visible to all the habitable world. The equinoctial  line passes through the centre of it. When Aldebaran rose in  the East, the Three Kings in Orion followed him; and as 
Taurus set, the Scorpion, by whose sting it was said Orion  died, rose in the East.

Orion rises at noon about the 9th of March. His rising was  accompanied with great rains and storms, and it became very  terrible to mariners.

In Bootes, called by the ancient Greeks Lycaon, from lukos, a  wolf, and by the Hebrews, Caleb Anubach, the Barking Dog,  is the Great Star ARCTURUS, which, when Taurus opened  the year, corresponded with a season remarkable for its great  heat.

Next comes GEMINI, the Twins, two human figures, in the  heads of which are the bright Stars CASTOR and POLLUX,  the Dioscuri, and the Cabiri of Samothrace, patrons of  navigation; while South of Pollux are the brilliant Stars 
SIRIUS and PROCYON, the greater and lesser Dog: and still  further South, Canopus, in the Ship Argo.

Sirius is apparently the largest and brightest Star in the

Heavens. When the Vernal Equinox was in Taurus, he rose  heliacally, that is, just before the Sun, when, at the Summer 
Solstice, the Sun entered Leo, about the 21st of June, fifteen  days previous to the swelling of the Nile. The heliacal rising  of Canopus was also a precursor of the rising of the Nile. 
Procyon was the forerunner of Sirius, and rose before him.

There are no important Stars in CANCER. In the Zodiacs of 
Esne and Dendera, and in most of the astrological remains of  p. 455

[paragraph continues] Egypt, the sign of this constellation was a  beetle (Scarabceus), which thence became sacred, as an  emblem of the gate through which souls descended from 
Heaven. In the crest of Cancer is a cluster of Stars formerly  called Prcesepe. the Manger, on each side of which is a small 
Star, the two of which were called Aselli little asses.

In Leo are the splendid Stars, REGULUS, directly on the  ecliptic, and DENEBOLA in the Lion's tail. Southeast of 
Regulus is the fine Star COR 11YDR/E.

The combat of Hercules with the Nemaean lion was his first  labor. It was the first sign into which the Sun passed, after  falling below the Summer Solstice; from which time he  struggled to re-ascend.

The Nile overflowed in this sign. It stands first in the Zodiac  of Dendera, and is in all the Indian and Egyptian Zodiacs.

In the left hand of VIRGO (Isis or Ceres) is the beautilul Star 
SPICA Virginis, a little South of the ecliptic. 
VINDEMIATRIX, of less magnitude, is in the right arm; and 
Northwest of Spica, in Bootes (the husbandman, Osiris), is the  splendid star ARCTURUS.

The division of the first Decan of the Virgin, Aben Ezra says,  represents a beautiful Virgin with flowing hair, sitting in a  chair, with two ears of com in her hand, and suckling an  infant. In an Arabian MS. in the Royal Library at Paris, is a  picture of the Twelve Signs. That of Virgo is a young girl  with an infant by her side. Virgo was Isis; and her  representation, carrying a child (Homs) in her arms, exhibited  in her temple, was accompanied by this inscription: "I AM 
ALL THAT IS, THAT WAS, AND THAT SHALL BE; and  the fruit which I brought forth is the Sun."

Nine months after the Sun enters Virgo, he reaches the Twins. 
When Scorpio begins to rise, Orion sets: when Scorpio comes  to the meridian, Leo begins to set, Typhon reigns, Osiris is  slain, and Isis (the Virgin) his sister and wife, follows him to  the tomb, weeping.

The Virgin and Bootes, setting heliacally at the Autumnal 
Equinox, delivered the world to the wintry constellations, and  introduced into it the genius of Evil, represented by Ophiucus,  the Serpent.

At the moment of the Winter Solstice, the Virgin rose  heliacally (with the Sun), having the Sun (Horns) in her  bosom.  p. 456

In LIBRA are four Stars of the second and third magnitude,  which we shall mention hereafter. They are Zuben-es- 
Chamali, Zuben-el-Gemabi, Zuben-hak-rabi, and Zuben-el- 
Gubi. Near the last of these is the brilliant and malign Star, 
ANT ARES in Scorpio.

In SCORPIO, ANTARES, of the 1st magnitude, and  remarkably red, was one of the four great Stars, 
FOMALHAUT, in Cetus, ALDEBARAN in Taurus, 
REGULUS in Leo, and ANTARES, that formerly answered  to the Solstitial and Equinoctial points, and were much  noticed by astronomers. This sign was sometimes represented  by a Snake, and sometimes by a Crocodile, but generally by a 
Scorpion, which last is found on the Mithriac Monuments,  and on the Zodiac of Dendera. It was considered a sign  accursed, and the entrance of the Sun into it commenced the  reign of Typhon.

In Sagittarius, Capricomus, and Aquarius there are no Stars of  importance.

Near Pisces is the brilliant Star FOMALHAUT. No sign in  the Zodiac is considered of more malignant influence than  this. It was deemed indicative of Violence and Death. Both  the Syrians and Egyptians abstained from eating fish, out of  dread and abhor-hence; and when the latter would represent  anything as odious, or express hatred by Hieroglyphics, they  painted a fish.

In Auriga is the bright Star CAPELLA, which to the 
Egyptians never set.

And, circling ever round the North Pole are Seven Stars,  known as Ursa Major, or the Great Bear, which have been an  object of universal observation in all ages of the world. They  were venerated alike by the Priests of Bel, the Magi of Persia,  the Shepherds of Chaldea, and the Phoenician navigators, as  well as by the astronomers of Egypt. Two of them, MERAK  and DUB HE, always point to the North Pole.

The Phoenicians and Egyptians, says Eusebius, were the first  who ascribed divinity to the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and  regarded them as the sole causes of the production and  destruction of all beings. From them vent abroad over all the  world all known opinions as to the generation and descent of  the Gods. Only the Hebrews looked beyond the visible world  to an invisible Creator. All the rest of the world regarded as 
Gods those luminous bodies that blaze in the firmament,  offered them sacrifices, bowed down  p. 457  before them, and raised neither their souls nor their worship  above the visible heavens.

The Chaldasans, Canaanites, and Syrians, among whom 
Abraham lived, did the same. The Canaanites consecrated  horses and chariots to the Sun. The inhabitants of Emesa in 
Phoenicia adored him under the name of Elagabalus; and the 
Sun, as Elercules, was the great Deity of the Tyrians. The 
Syrians worshipped, with fear and dread, the Stars of the 
Constellation Pisces, and consecrated images of them in their  temples. The Sun as Adonis was worshipped in Byblos and  about Mount Libanus. There was a magnificent Temple of the 
Sun at Palmyra, which was pillaged by the soldiers of 
Aurelian, who rebuilt it and dedicated it anew. The Pleiades,  under the name of Succoth-Beneth, were worshipped by the 
Babylonian colonists who settled in the country of the 
Samaritans. Saturn, under the name of Remphan, was  worshipped among the Copts. The planet Jupiter was  worshipped as Bel or Baal; Mars as Malec, Melech, or 
Moloch; Venus as Ashtaroth or Astarte, and Mercury as 
Nebo, among the Syrians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and 
Canaanites.

Sanchoniathon says that the earliest Phoenicians adored the 
Sun, whom they deemed sole Lord of the Eleavens; and  honored him, under the name of BEEL-SAMIN, signifying 
King of Heaven. They raised columns to the elements, fire,  and air or wind, and worshipped them; and Saba;ism, or the  worship of the Stars, flourished everywhere in Babylonia. The 
Arabs, under a sky always clear and serene, adored the Sun, 
Moon, and Stars. Abulfaragius so informs us, and that each of  the twelve Arab Tribes invoked a particular Star as its Patron.

The Tribe Hamyar was consecrated to the Sun, the Tribe 
Cennah to the Moon; the Tribe Misa was under the protection  of the beautiful Star in Taurus, Aldebaran; the Tribe Tai under  that of Canopus; the Tribe Kais, of Sirius; the Tribes 
Lachamus and Idamus, of Jupiter; the Tribe Asad, of 
Mercury; and so on.

The Saracens, in the time of Heraclius, worshipped Venus,  whom they called CABAR, or The Great; and they swore by  the Sun, Moon, and Stars. Shahristan, an Arabic author, says  that the Arabs and Indians before his time had temples  dedicated to the seven Planets. Abulfaragius says that the  seven great primitive nations, from whom all others  descended, the Persians, Chaldaeans, Greeks, Egyptians,

Turks, Indians, and Chinese, all originally were Sabasists, and  worshipped the Stars. They all, he says, like the C ha I da; a ns,  prayed, turning toward the North Pole.  p. 458  three times a day, at Sunrise, Noon, and Sunset, bowing  themselves three times before the Sun. They invoked the Stars  and the Intelligences which inhabited them, offered them  sacrifices, and called the fixed stars and planets gods. Philo  says that the dial da 1 a ns regarded the stars as sovereign  arbiters of the order of the world, and did not look beyond the  visible causes to any invisible and intellectual being. They  regarded NATURE as the great divinity, that exercised its  powers through the action of its parts, the Sun, Moon, Planets,  and Fixed Stars, the successive revolutions of the seasons, and  the combined action of Heaven and Earth. The great feast of  the Sabasans was when the Sun reached the Vernal Equinox:  and they had five other feasts, at the times when the five  minor planets entered the signs in which they had their  exaltation.

Diodorus Siculus informs us that the Egyptians recognized  two great Divinities, primary and eternal, the Sun and Moon,  which they thought governed the world, and from which  everything receives its nourishment and growth: that on them  depended all the great work of generation, and the perfection  of all effects produced in nature. We know that the two great 
Divinities of Egypt were Osiris and Isis, the greatest agents of  nature; according to some, the Sun and Moon, and according  to others, Heaven and Earth, or the active and passive  principles of generation.

And we learn from Porphyry that Chasremon, a learned priest  of Egypt, and many other learned men of that nation, said that  the Egyptians recognized as gods the stars composing the  zodiac, and all those that by their rising or setting marked its  divisions; the subdivisions of the signs into decans, the  horoscope and the stars that presided therein, and which were  called Potent Chiefs of Heaven: that considering the Sun as  the Great God, Architect, and Ruler of the World, they  explained not only the fable of Osiris and Isis, but generally  all their sacred legends, by the stars, by their appearance and  disappearance, by their ascension, by the phases of the moon,  and the increase and diminution of her light; by the march of  the sun, the division of time and the heavens into two parts,  one assigned to darkness and the other to light; by the Nile  and, in fine, by the whole round of physical causes.

Lucian tells us that the bull Apis, sacred to the Egyptians, was  the image of the celestial Bull, or Taurus; and that Jupiter 
Ammon, homed like a ram, was an image of the constellation 
Aries. Arid Clemens of Alexandria assures us that the four  principal  p. 459  sacred animals, carried in their processions, were emblems of  the four signs or cardinal points which fixed the seasons at the  equinoxes and solstices, and divided into four parts the yearly  march of the sun. They worshipped fire also, and water, and  the Nile, which river they styled Father, Preserver of Egypt,  sacred emanation from the Great God Osiris; and in their  hymns in which they called it the god crowned with millet 
(which grain, represented by the pschent, was part of the  head-dress of their kings), bringing with him abundance. The  other elements were also revered by them: and the Great 
Gods, whose names are found inscribed on an ancient  column, are the Air, Heaven, the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, 
Night, and Day. And, in fine, as Eusebius says, they regarded  the Universe as a great Deity, composed of a great number of  gods, the different parts of itself.

The same worship of the Heavenly Host extended into every  part of Europe, into Asia Minor, and among the Turks,

Scythians, and Tartars. The ancient Persians adored the Sun  as Mithras, and also the Moon, Venus, Fire, Earth, Air, and 
Water; and, having no statues or altars, they sacrificed on high  places to the Heavens and to the Sun. On seven ancient pyrea  they burned incense to the Seven Planets, and considered the  elements to be divinities. In the Zend-Avesta we find  invocations addressed to Mithras, the stars, the elements,  trees, mountains, and every part of nature. The Celestial Bull  is invoked there, to which the Moon unites herself; and the  four great stars, Taschter, Satevis, Haftorang, and Venant, the  great Star Rapitan, and the other constellations which watch  over the different portions of the earth.

The Magi, like a multitude of ancient nations, worshipped  fire, above all the other elements and powers of nature. In 
India, the Ganges and the Indus were worshipped, and the Sun  was the Great Divinity. They worshipped the Moon also, and  kept up the sacred fire. In Ceylon, the Sun, Moon, and other  planets were worshipped: in Sumatra, the Sun, called Iri, and  the Moon, called Handa. And the Chinese built Temples to 
Heaven, the Earth, and genii of the air, of the water, of the  mountains, and of the stars, to the sea-dragon, and to the  planet Mars.

The celebrated Labyrinth was built in honor of the Sun; and  its twelve palaces, like the twelve superb columns of the 
Temple at Hieropolis, covered with symbols relating to the  twelve signs and the occult qualities of the elements, were  consecrated to the twelve gods or tutelary genii of the signs of  the Zodiac. The  p. 460  figure of the pyramid and that of the obelisk, resembling the  shape of a flame, caused these monuments to be consecrated  to the Sun and to Fire. And Timasus of Locria says: "The  equilateral triangle enters into the composition of the  pyramid, which has four equal faces and equal angles, and  which in this is like fire, the most subtle and mobile of the  elements." They and the obelisks were erected in honor of the 
Sun, termed in an inscription upon one of the latter, translated  by the Egyptian Hermapion, and to be found in Ammianus 
Marcellinus, "Apollo the strong, Son of God, He who made  the world, true Lord of the diadems, who possesses Egypt and  fills it with His glory."

The two most famous divisions of the Heavens, by seven,  which is that of the planets, and by twelve, which is that of  the signs, are found on the religious monuments of all the  people of the ancient world. The twelve Great Gods of Egypt  are met with everywhere. They were adopted by the Greeks  and Romans; and the latter assigned one of them to each sign  of the Zodiac. Their images were seen at Athens, where an  altar was erected to each; and they were painted on the  porticos. The People of the North had their twelve Azes, or 
Senate of twelve great gods, of whom Odin was chief. The 
Japanese had the same number, and like the Egyptians divided  them into classes, seven, who were the most ancient, and five,  afterward added: both of which numbers are well known and  consecrated in Masonry.

There is no more striking proof of the universal adoration paid  the stars and constellations, than the arrangement of the 
Hebrew camp in the Desert, and the allegory in regard to the  twelve Tribes of Israel, ascribed in the Hebrew legends to 
Jacob. The Hebrew camp was a quadrilateral, in sixteen  divisions, of which the central four were occupied by images  of the four elements. The four divisions at the four angles of  the quadrilateral exhibited the four signs that the astrologers  called fixed, and which they regard as subject to the influence  of the four great Royal Stars, Regulus in Leo, Aldebaran in 
Taurus, Antares in Scorpio, and Fomalhaut in the mouth of 
Pisces, on which falls the water poured out by Aquarius; of  which constellations the Scorpion was represented in the 
Hebrew blazonry by the Celestial Vulture or Eagle, that rises  at the same time with it and is its paranatellon. The other  signs were arranged on the four faces of the q uadrilateral , and  in the parallel and interior divisions.  p. 461

There is an astonishing coincidence between the  characteristics assigned by Jacob to his sons, and those of the  signs of the Zodiac, or the planets that have their domicile in  those signs.

Reuben is compared to running water, unstable, and that  cannot excel; and he answers to Aquarius, his ensign being a  man. The water poured out by Aquarius flows toward the

South Pole, and it is the first of the four Royal Signs,  ascending from the Winter Solstice.

The Lion (Leo) is the device of Judah; and Jacob compares  him to that animal, whose constellation in the Heavens is the  domicile of the Sun; the Lion of the Tribe of Judah; by whose  grip, when that of apprentice and that of fellow-craft,—of 
Aquarius at the Winter Solstice and of Cancer at the Vernal 
Equinox,-had not succeeded in raising him, Khurum was  lifted out of the grave.

Ephraim, on whose ensign appears the Celestial Bull, Jacob  compares to the ox. Dan, bearing as his device a Scorpion, he  compares to the Cerastes or homed Serpent, synonymous in  astrological language with the vulture or pouncing eagle; and  which bird was often substituted on the flag of Dan, in place  of the venomous scorpion, on account of the terror which that  reptile inspired, as the symbol of Typhon and his malign  influences; wherefore the Eagle, as its paranatellon, that is,  rising and setting at the same time with it, was naturally used  in its stead. Hence the four famous figures in the sacred  pictures of the Jews and Christians, and in Royal Arch 
Masonry, of the Lion, the Ox, the Man, and the Eagle, the  four creatures of the Apocalypse, copied there from Ezekiel,  in whose reveries and rhapsodies they are seen revolving  around blazing circles.

The Ram, domicile of Mars, chief of the Celestial Soldiery  and of the twelve Signs, is the device of Gad, whom Jacob  characterizes as a warrior, chief of his army.

Cancer, in which are the stars termed Aselli, or little asses, is  the device of the flag of Issachar, whom Jacob compares to  an ass.

Capricorn, of old represented with the tail of a fish, and called  by astronomers the Son of Neptune, is the device of Zebulon,  of whom Jacob says that he dwells on the shore of the sea.

Sagittarius, chasing the Celestial Wolf, is the emblem of 
Benjamin, whom Jacob compares to a hunter: and in that  constellation the Romans placed the domicile of Diana the  huntress. Virgo,  p. 462  the domicile of Mercury, is borne on the flag of Naphtali,  whose eloquence and agility Jacob magnifies, both of which  are attributes of the Courier of the Gods. And of Simeon and 
Levi he speaks as united, as are the two fishes that make the 
Constellation Pisces, which is their armorial emblem.

Plato, in his Republic, followed the divisions of the Zodiac  and the planets. So also did Lycurgus at Sparta, and Cecrops  in the Athenian Commonwealth. Chun, the Chinese legislator,  divided China into twelve Tcheou, and specially designated  twelve mountains. The Etruscans divided themselves into  twelve Cantons. Romulus appointed twelve Lictors. There  were twelve tribes of Ishmael and twelve disciples of the

Hebrew Reformer. The New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse has  twelve gates.

The Souciet, a Chinese book, speaks of a palace composed of  four buildings, whose gates looked toward the four comers of  the world. That on the East was dedicated to the new moons  of the months of Spring; that on the West to those of Autumn;  that on the South to those of Summer; and that on the North to  those of Winter: and in this palace the Emperor and his  grandees sacrificed a lamb, the animal that represented the 
Sun at the Vernal Equinox.

Among the Greeks, the march of the Choruses in their  theatres represented the movements of the Heavens and the  planets, and the Strophe and Anti-Strophe imitated, 
Aristoxenes says, the movements of the Stars. The number  five was sacred among the Chinese, as that of the planets  other than the Sun and Moon. Astrology consecrated the  numbers twelve, seven, thirty, and three hundred and sixty;  and everywhere seven, the number of the planets, was as  sacred as twelve, that of the signs, the months, the oriental  cycles, and the sections of the horizon. We shall speak more  at large hereafter, in another Degree, as to these and other  numbers, to which the ancients ascribed mysterious powers.

The Signs of the Zodiac and the Stars appeared on many of  the ancient coins and medals. On the public seal of the 
Locrians, Ozoles was Hespems, or the planet Venus. On the  medals of Antioch on the Orontes was the ram and crescent;  and the Ram was the special Deity of Syria, assigned to it in  the division of the earth among the twelve signs. On the 
Cretan coins was the Equinoctial Bull; and he also appeared  on those of the Mamertins and of Athens. Sagittarius appeared  on those of the Persians. In  p. 463

[paragraph continues] India the twelve signs appeared upon the  ancient coins. The Scorpion was engraved on the medals of  the Kings of Comagena, and Capricorn on those of Zeugma, 
Anazorba, and other cities. On the medals of Antoninus are  found nearly all the signs of the Zodiac.

Astrology was practised among all the ancient nations. In 
Egypt, the book of Astrology was borne reverentially in the  religious processions; in which the few sacred animals were  also carried, as emblems of the equinoxes and solstices. The  same science flourished among the Chaldasans, and over the  whole of Asia and Africa. When Alexander invaded India, the  astrologers of the Oxydraces came to him to disclose the  secrets of their science of Heaven and the Stars. The 
Brahmins whom Apollonius consulted, taught him the secrets  of Astronomy, with the ceremonies and prayers whereby to  appease the gods and learn the future from the stars. In China,  astrology taught the mode of governing the State and families. 
In Arabia it was deemed the mother of the sciences; and old  libraries are lull of Arabic books on this pretended science. It  flourished at Rome. Constantine had his horoscope drawn by  the astrologer Valens. It was a science in the middle ages, and  even to this day is neither forgotten nor unpractised. Catherine  de Medici was fond of it. Louis XIV. consulted his horoscope,  and the learned Casini commenced his career as an astrologer.

The ancient Saba.'ans established feasts in honor of each  planet, on the day, for each, when it entered its place of  exaltation, or reached the particular degree in the particular  sign of the zodiac in which astrology had fixed the place of its  exaltation; that is, the place in the Heavens where its  influence was supposed to be greatest, and where it acted on 
Nature with the greatest energy. The place of exaltation of the 
Sun was in Aries, because, reaching that point, he awakens all 
Nature, and warns into life all the germs of vegetation; and  therefore his most solemn feast among all nations, for many  years before our Era, was fixed at the time of his entrance into  that sign. In Egypt, it was called the Feast of Fire and Light. It  was the Passover, when the Paschal Lamb was slain and  eaten, among the Jews, and Neurouz among the Persians. The 
Romans preferred the place of domicile to that of exaltation;  and celebrated the feasts of the planets under the signs that  were their houses. The Chaldasans, whom, and not the 
Egyptians, the Sabasans followed in this, preferred the places  of exaltation.  p. 464

Saturn, from the length of time required for his apparent  revolution, was considered the most remote, and the Moon the  nearest planet. After the Moon came Mercury and Venus,  then the Sun, and then Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

So the risings and settings of the Fixed Stars, and their  conjunctions with the Sun, and their first appearance as they  emerged from his rays, fixed the epochs for the feasts  instituted in their honor; and the Sacred Calendars of the  ancients were regulated accordingly.

In the Roman games of the circus, celebrated in honor of the 
Sun and of entire Nature, the Sun, Moon, Planets, Zodiac, 
Elements, and the most apparent parts and potent agents of 
Nature were personified and represented, and the courses of  the Sun in the Heavens were imitated in the Hippodrome; his  chariot being drawn by four horses of different colors,  representing the four elements and seasons. The courses were  from East to West, like the circuits round the Lodge, and  seven in number, to correspond with the number of planets. 
The movements of the Seven Stars that revolve around the  pole were also represented, as were those of Capella, which  by its heliacal rising at the moment when the Sun reached the 
Pleiades, in Taurus, announced the commencement of the  annual revolution of the Sun.

The intersection of the Zodiac by the colures at the 
Equinoctial and Solstitial points, fixed four periods, each of  which has, by one or more nations, and in some cases by the  same nation at different periods, been taken for the  commencement of the year. Some adopted the Vernal 
Equinox, because then day began to prevail over night, and  light gained a victory over darkness. Sometimes the Summer 
Solstice was preferred; because then day attained its  maximum of duration, and the acme of its glory and  perfection. In Egypt, another reason was, that then the Nile  began to over-flow, at the heliacal rising of Sirius. Some  preferred the Autumnal Equinox, because then the harvests  were gathered, and the hopes of a new crop were deposited in  the bosom of the earth. And some preferred the Winter 
Solstice, because then, the shortest day having arrived, their  length commenced to increase, and Light began the career  destined to end in victory at the Vernal Equinox.

The Sun was figuratively said to die and be born again at the 
Winter Solstice; the games of the Circus, in honor of the  invincible God-Sun, were then celebrated, and the Roman  year, established  p. 465  or reformed by Numa, commenced. Many peoples of Italy  commenced their year, Macrobius says, at that time; and  represented by the four ages of man the gradual succession of  periodical increase and diminution of day, and the light of the 
Sun; likening him to an infant bom at the Winter Solstice, a  young man at the Vernal Equinox, a robust man at the 
Summer Solstice, and an old man at the Autumnal Equinox.

This idea was borrowed from the Egyptians, who adored the 
Sun at the Winter Solstice, under the figure of an infant.

The image of the Sign in which each of the four seasons  commenced, became the form under which was figured the

Sun of that particular season. The Lion's skin was worn by 
Hercules; the horns of the Bull adorned the forehead of 
Bacchus; and the autumnal serpent wound its long folds round  the Statue of Serapis, 2500 years before our era; when those 
Signs corresponded with the commencement of the Seasons. 
When other constellations replaced them at those points, by  means of the precession of the Equinoxes, those attributes  were changed. Then the Ram furnished the horns for the head  of the Sun, under the name of Jupiter Ammon. He was no  longer born exposed to the waters of Aquarius, like Bacchus,  nor enclosed in an urn like the God Canopus; but in the 
Stables of Augeas or the Celestial Goat. He then completed  his triumph, mounted on an ass, in the constellation Cancer,  which then occupied the Solstitial point of Summer.

Other attributes the images of the Sun borrowed from the  constellations which, by their rising and setting, fixed the  points of departure of the year, and the commencements of its  four principal divisions.

First the Bull and afterward the Ram (called by the Persians  the Lamb), was regarded as the regenerator of Nature, through  his union with the Sun. Each, in his turn, was an emblem of  the Sun overcoming the winter darkness, and repairing the  disorders of Nature, which every year was regenerated under  these Signs, after the Scorpion and Serpent of Autumn had  brought upon it barrenness, disaster, and darkness. Mithras  was represented sitting on a Bull; and that animal was an  image of Osiris: while the Greek Bacchus armed his front  with its horns, and was pictured with its tail and feet.

The Constellations also became noteworthy to the  husbandman, which by their rising or setting, at morning or  evening, indicated  p. 466  the coming of this period of renewed fruitfulness and new  life. Capella, or the kid Amalthea, whose horn is called that of  abundance, and whose place is over the equinoctial point, or 
Taurus; and the Pleiades, that long indicated the Seasons, and  gave rise to a multitude of poetic fables, were the most  observed and most celebrated in antiquity.

The original Roman year commenced at the Vernal Equinox. 
July was formerly called Quintilis, the 5th month, and August 
Sextilis, the 6th, as September is still the 7th month, October  the 8th, and so on. The Persians commenced their year at the  same time, and celebrated their great feast of Neurouz when  the Sun entered Aries and the Constellation Perseus rose,— 
Perseus, who first brought down to earth the heavenly fire  consecrated in their temples: and all the ceremonies then  practised reminded men of the renovation of Nature and the  triumph of Ormuzd, the Light-God, over the powers of 
Darkness and Ahriman their Chief.

The Legislator of the Jews fixed the commencement of their  year in the month Nisan, at the Vernal Equinox, at which  season the Israelites marched out of Egypt and were relieved  of their long bondage; in commemoration of which Exodus,  they ate the Paschal Lamb at that Equinox. And when 
Bacchus and his army had long marched in burning deserts,  they were led by a Lamb or Ram into beautiful meadows, and  to the Springs that watered the Temple of Jupiter Ammon. 
For, to the Arabs and Ethiopians, whose great Divinity 
Bacchus was, nothing was so perfect a type of Elysium as a 
Country abounding in springs and rivulets.

Orion, on the same meridian with the Stars of Taurus, died of  the sting of the celestial Scorpion, that rises when he sets; as  dies the Bull of Mithras in Autumn: and in the Stars that  correspond with the Autumnal Equinox we find those  malevolent genii that ever war against the Principle of good,  and that take from the Sun and the Heavens the fruit-  producing power that they communicate to the earth.

With the Vernal Equinox, dear to the sailor as to the  husbandman, came the Stars that, with the Sun, open  navigation, and rule the stormy Seas. Then the Twins plunge  into the solar fires, or disappear at setting, going down with  the Sun into the bosom of the waters. And these tutelary 
Divinities of mariners, the Dioscuri or Chief Cabiri of 
Samothrace, sailed with Jason to possess themselves of the  golden-fleeced ram, or Aries, whose rising in the  p. 467  morning announced the Sun's entry into Taurus, when the 
Serpent-bearer Jason rose in the evening, and, in aspect with  the Dioscuri, was deemed their brother. And Orion, son of 
Neptune, and most potent controller of the tempest-tortured  ocean, announcing sometimes calm and sometimes tempest,  rose after Taurus, rejoicing in the forehead of the new year.

The Summer Solstice was not less an important point in the 
Sun's march than the Vernal Equinox, especially to the 
Egyptians, to whom it not only marked the end and term of  the increasing length of the days and of the domination of  light, and the maximum of the Sun's elevation; but also the  annual recurrence of that phenomenon peculiar to Egypt, the  rising of the Nile, which, ever accompanying the Sun in his  course, seemed to rise and fall as the days grew longer and  shorter, being lowest at the Winter Solstice, and highest at  that of Summer. Thus the Sun seemed to regulate its swelling;  and the time of his arrival at the solstitial point being that of  the first rising of the Nile, was selected by the Egyptians as  the beginning of a year which they called the Year of God,  and of the Sothiac Period, or the period of Sothis, the Dog- 
Star, who, rising in the morning, fixed that epoch, so  important to the people of Egypt. This year was also called  the Heliac, that is the Solar year, and the Canicular year; and  it consisted of three hundred and sixty-five days, without  intercalation; so that at the end of four years, or of four times  three hundred and sixty-five days, making 1460 days, it  needed to add a day, to make four complete revolutions of the 
Sun. To correct this, some Nations made every fourth year  consist, as we do now, of 366 days: but the Egyptians  preferred to add nothing to the year of 365 days, which, at the  end of 120 years, or of 30 times 4 years, was short 30 days or  a month; that is to say, it required a month more to complete  the 120 revolutions of the Sun, though so many were counted,  that is, so many years. Of course the commencement of the 
121st year would not correspond with the Summer Solstice,  but would precede it by a month: so that, when the Sun  arrived at the Solstitial point whence he at first set out, and  whereto he must needs return, to make in reality 120 years, or 
120 complete revolutions, the first month of the 121st year  would have ended.

Thus, if the commencement of the year went back 30 days  every 120 years, this commencement of the year, continuing  to  p. 468  recede, would, at the end of 12 times 120 years, or of 1460  years, get back to the Solstitial point, or primitive point of  departure of the period. The Sun would then have made but 
1459 revolutions, though 1460 were counted; to make up  which, a year more would need to be added. So that the Sun  would not have made his 1460 revolutions until the end of 
1461 years of 365 days each,—each revolution being in reality  not 365 days exactly, but 365%.

This period of 1461 years, each of 365 days, bringing back  the commencement of the Solar year to the Solstitial point, at  the rising of Sirius, after 1460 complete Solar revolutions,  was called in Egypt the Sothiac period, the point of departure  whereof was the Summer Solstice, first occupied by the Lion  and afterward by Cancer, under which sign is Sirius, which  opened the period. It was, says Porphyry, at this Solstitial 
New Moon, accompanied by the rising of Seth or the Dog- 
Star, that the beginning of the year was fixed, and that of the  generation of all things, or, as it were, the natal hour of the  world.

Not Sirius alone determined the period of the rising of the 
Nile. Aquarius, his urn, and the stream flowing from it, in  opposition to the sign of the Summer Solstice then occupied  by the Sun, opened in the evening the march of Night, and  received the full Moon in his cup. Above him and with him  rose the feet of Pegasus, struck wherewith the waters flow  forth that the Muses drink. The Lion and the Dog, indicating,  were supposed to cause the inundation, and so were  worshipped. While the Sun passed through Leo, the waters  doubled their depth; and the sacred fountains poured their  streams through the heads of lions. Hydra, rising between 
Sirius and Leo, extended under three signs. Its head rose with 
Cancer, and its tail with the feet of the Virgin and the  beginning of Libra; and the inundation continued while the 
Sun passed along its whole extent.

The successive contest of light and darkness for the  possession of the lunar disk, each being by turns victor and  vanquished, exactly resembled what passed upon the earth by  the action of the Sun and his journeys from one Solstice to the  other. The lunary revolution presented the same periods of  light and darkness as the year, and was the object of the sane  religious fictions. Above the Moon, Pliny said, everything is  pure, and filled with eternal light. There ends the cone of  shadow which the earth projects, and which produces night;  there ends the sojourn of night and  p. 469  darkness; to it the air extends; but there we enter the pure  substance.

The Egyptians assigned to the Moon the demiurgic or creative  force of Osiris, who united himself to her in the spring, when  the Sun communicated to her the principles of generation  which she afterward disseminated in the air and all the  elements. The Persians considered the Moon to have been  impregnated by the Celestial Bull, first of the signs of spring. 
In all ages, the Moon has been supposed to have great  influence upon vegetation, and the birth and growth of  animals; and the belief is as widely entertained now as ever,  and that influence regarded as a mysterious and inexplicable  one. Not the astrologers alone, but Naturalists like Pliny, 
Philosophers like Plutarch and Cicero, Theologians like the 
Egyptian Priests, and Metaphysicians like Proclus, believed  firmly in these lunar influences.

"The Egyptians," says Diodorus Siculus, "acknowledged two  great gods, the Sun and Moon, or Osiris and Isis, who govern  the world and regulate its administration by the dispensation  of the seasons.. .. Such is the nature of these two great

Divinities, that they impress an active and fecundating force,  by which the generation of beings in effected; the Sun, by  heat and that spiritual principle that forms the breath of the  winds; the Moon by humidity and dryness; and both by the  forces of the air which they share in common. By this  beneficial influence everything is born, grows, and vegetates. 
Wherefore this whole huge body, in which nature resides, is  maintained by the combined action of the Sun and Moon, and  their five qualities, the principles spiritual, fiery, dry, humid,  and airy."

So five primitive powers, elements, or elementary qualities,  are united with the Sun and Moon in the Indian theology: air,  spirit, fire, water, and earth: and the same five elements are  recognized by the Chinese. The Phoenicians, like the 
Egyptians, regarded the Sun and Moon and Stars as sole  causes of generation and destmction here below.

The Moon, like the Sun, changed continually the track in  which she crossed the Heavens, moving ever to and fro  between the upper and lower limits of the Zodiac; and her  different places, phases, and aspects there, and her relations  with the Sun and the constellations, have been a fruitful  source of mythological fables.

All the planets had what astrology termed their houses, in the  p. 470

[paragraph continues] Zodiac. The House of the Sun was in Leo, and  that of the Moon in Cancer. Each other planet had two signs; 
Mercury had Gemini and Virgo; Venus, Taurus and Libra; 
Mars, Aries and Scorpio; Jupiter, Pisces and Sagittarius; and 
Saturn, Aquarius and Capricornus. From this distribution of  the signs also came many mythological emblems and fables;  as also many came from the places of exaltation of the  planets. Diana of Ephesus, the Moon, wore the image of a  crab on her bosom, because in that sign was the Moon's  domicile; and lions bore up the throne of Homs, the Egyptian 
Apollo, the Sun personified, for a like reason: while the 
Egyptians consecrated the tauriform scarabams to the Moon,  because she had her place of exaltation in Taurus; and for the  same reason Mercury is said to have presented Isis with a  helmet like a bull's head.

A further division of the Zodiac was of each sign into three  parts of 10° each, called Decans, or, in the whole Zodiac, 36  parts, among which the seven planets were apportioned anew,  each planet having an equal number of Decans, except the  first, which, opening and closing the series of planets five  times repeated, necessarily had one Decan more than the  others. This subdivision was not invented until after Aries  opened the Vernal Equinox; and accordingly Mars, having his  house in Aries, opens the series of decans and closes it; the  planets following each other, five times in succession, in the  following order, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, 
Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, etc.; so that to each sign are assigned  three planets, each occupying 10 degrees. To each Decan a 
God or Genius was assigned, making thirty-six in all, one of  whom, the Chaldasans said, came down upon earth every ten  days, remained so many days, and re-ascended to Heaven. 
This division is found on the Indian sphere, the Persian, and  that Barbaric one which Aben Ezra describes. Each genius of  the Decans had a name and special characteristics. They  concur and aid in the effects produced by the Sun, Moon, and  other planets charged with the administration of the world:  and the doctrine in regard to them, secret and august as it was  held, was considered of the gravest importance; and its  principles, Firmicus says, were not entrusted by the ancients,  inspired as they were by the Deity, to any but the Initiates,  and to them only with great reserve, and a kind of fear, and  when cautiously enveloped with an obscure veil, that they  might not come to be known by the profane,  p. 471

With these Decans were connected the paranatellons or those  stars outside of the Zodiac, that rise and set at the same  moment with the several divisions of 10° of each sign. As  there were anciently only forty-eight celestial figures or  constellations, of which twelve were in the Zodiac, it follows  that there were, outside of the Zodiac, thirty-six other  asterisms, paranatellons of the several thirty-six Decans. For  example, as when Capricorn set, Sirius and Procyon, or Canis 
Major and Canis Minor, rose, they were the Paranatellons of 
Capricorn, though at a great distance from it in the heavens. 
The rising of Cancer was known from the setting of Corona 
Borealis and the rising of the Great and Little Dog, its three  paranatellons.

The risings and settings of the Stars are always spoken of as  connected with the Sun. In that connection there are three  kinds of them, cosmical, achronical, and heliacal, important to  be distinguished by all who would understand this ancient  learning.

When any Star rises or sets with the same degree of the same  sign of the Zodiac that the Sun occupies at the time, it rises  and sets simultaneously with the Sun, and this is termed rising  or setting cosmically; but a star that so rises and sets can never  be seen, on account of the light that precedes, and is left  behind by the Sun. It is therefore necessary, in order to know  his place in the Zodiac, to observe stars that rise just before or  set just after him.

A Star that is in the East when night commences, and in the 
West when it ends, is said to rise and set achronically. A Star  so rising or setting was in opposition to the Sun, rising at the  end of evening twilight, and setting at the beginning of  morning twilight, and this happened to each Star but once a  year, because the Sun moves from West to East, with  reference to the Stars, one degree a day.

When a Star rises as night ends in the morning, or sets as  night commences in the evening, it is said to rise or set  heliacally, because the Sun ( Helios ) seems to touch it with his  luminous atmosphere. A Star thus reappears after a  disappearance, often, of several months, and thenceforward it  rises an hour earlier each day, gradually emerging from the

Sun's rays, until at the end of three months it precedes the Sun  six hours, and rises at midnight. A Star sets heliacally, when  no longer remaining visible above the western horizon after  sunset, the day arrives when they cease to  p. 472  be seen setting in the West. They so remain invisible, until the 
Sun passes so far to the Eastward as not to eclipse them with  his light; and then they reappear, but in the East, about an  hour and a half before sunrise: and this is their heliacal rising. 
In this interval, the cosmical rising and setting take place.

Besides the relations of the constellations and their  paranatellons with the houses and places of exaltation of the 
Planets, and with their places in the respective Signs and 
Decans, the Stars were supposed to produce different effects  according as they rose or set, and according as they did so  either cosmically, achronically, or heliacally; and also  according to the different seasons of the year in which 'these  phenomena occurred; and these differences were carefully  marked on the old Calendars; and many things in the ancient  allegories are referable to them.

Another and most important division of the Stars was into  good and bad, beneficent and malevolent. With the Persians,  the former, of the Zodiacal Constellations, were from Aries to 
Virgo, inclusive; and the latter from Libra to Pisces, inclusive. 
Hence the good Angels and Genii, and the bad Angels, Devs, 
Evil Genii, Devils, Fallen Angels, Titans, and Giants of the

Mythology. The other thirty-six Constellations were equally  divided, eighteen on each side, or, with those of the Zodiac,  twenty-four.

Thus the symbolic Egg, that issued from the mouth of the  invisible Egyptian God KNEPH; known in the Grecian 
Mysteries as the Orphic Egg; from which issued the God 
CHUMONG of the Coresians, and the Egyptian OSIRIS, and 
PHANES, God and Principle of Light; from which, broken by  the Sacred Bull of the Japanese, the world emerged; and  which the Greeks placed at the feet of BACCHUS TAURI- 
CORNUS; the Magian Egg of ORMUZD, from which came  the Amshaspands and Devs; was divided into two halves, and  equally apportioned between the Good and Evil 
Constellations and Angels. Those of Spring, as for example 
Aries and Taurus, Auriga and Capella, were the beneficent  stars; and those of Autumn, as the Balance, Scorpio, the 
Serpent of Ophiucus, and the Dragon of the Hesperides, were  types and subjects of the Evil Principle, and regarded as  malevolent causes of the ill effects experienced in Autumn  and Winter. Thus are explained the mysteries of the  joumeyings of the human soul through the spheres, when it  descends to the earth by the Sign of the Serpent, and returns  to the Empire of light by that of the Lamb or Bull.  p. 473

The creative action of Heaven was manifested, and all its  demiurgic energy developed, most of all at the Vernal 
Equinox, to which refer all the fables that typify the victory of

Light over Darkness, by the triumphs of Jupiter, Osiris, 
Ormuzd, and Apollo. Always the triumphant god takes the  form of the Bull, the Ram, or the Lamb. Then Jupiter wrests  from Typhon his thunderbolts, of which that malignant Deity  had possessed himself during the Winter. Then the God of 
Light overwhelms his foe, pictured as a huge Serpent. Then 
Winter ends; the Sun, seated on the Bull and accompanied by 
Orion, blazes in the Heavens. All nature rejoices at the  victory; and Order and Harmony are everywhere re¬  established, in place of the dire confusion that reigned while  gloomy Typhon domineered, and Ahriman prevailed against 
Ormuzd.

The universal Soul of the World, motive power of Heaven  and of the Spheres, it was held, exercises its creative energy  chiefly through the medium of the Sun, during his revolution  along the signs of the Zodiac, with which signs unite the  paranatellons that modify their influence, and concur in  furnishing the symbolic attributes of the Great Luminary that  regulates Nature and is the depository of her greatest powers. 
The action of this Universal Soul of the World is displayed in  the movements of the Spheres, and above all in that of the 
Sun, in the successions of the risings and settings of the Stars,  and in their periodical returns. By these are explainable all the  metamorphoses of that Soul, personified as Jupiter, as 
Bacchus, as Vishnu, or as Buddha, and all the various  attributes ascribed to it; and also the worship of those animals  that were consecrated in the ancient Temples, representatives  on earth of the Celestial Signs, and supposed to receive by  transmission from them the rays and emanations which in  them flow from the Universal Soul.

All the old Adorers of Nature, the Theologians, Astrologers,  and Poets, as well as the most distinguished Philosophers,  supposed that the Stars were so many animated and intelligent  beings, or eternal bodies, active causes of effect here below,  animated by a living principle, and directed by an intelligence  that was itself but an emanation from and a part of the life and  universal intelligence of the world: and we find in the  hierarchical order and distribution of their eternal and divine 
Intelligences, known by the names of Gods, Angels, and 
Genii, the same distributions and  p. 474  the same divisions as those by which the ancients divided the  visible Universe and distributed its parts. And the famous  divisions by seven and by twelve, appertaining to the planets  and the signs of the zodiac, is everywhere found in the  hierarchical order of the Gods, and Angels, and the other 
Ministers that are the depositaries of that Divine Force which  moves and rules the world.

These, and the other Intelligences assigned to the other Stars,  have absolute dominion over all parts of Nature; over the  elements, the animal and vegetable kingdoms, over man and  all his actions, over his virtues and vices, and over good and  evil, which divide between them his life. The passions of his  soul and the maladies of his body,—these and the entire man  are dependent on the heavens and the genii that there inhabit,  who preside at his birth, control his fortunes during life, and  receive his soul or active and intelligent part when it is to be  re-united to the pure life of the lofty Stars. And all through the  great body of the world are disseminated portions of the  universal Soul, impressing movement on everything that  seems to move of itself, giving life to the plants and trees,  directing by a regular and settled plan the organization and  development of their germs, imparting constant mobility to  the running waters and maintaining their eternal motion,  impelling the winds and changing their direction or stilling  them, calming and arousing the ocean, unchaining the storms,  pouring out the fires of volcanoes, or with earthquakes  shaking the roots of huge mountains and the foundations of  vast continents; by means of a force that, belonging to Nature,  is a mystery to man.

And these invisible Intelligences, like the stars, are marshalled  in two great divisions, under the banners of the two Principles  of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness; under Ormuzd and 
Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon. The Evil Principle was the  motive power of brute matter; and it, personified as Ahriman  and Typhon, had its hosts and armies of Devs and Genii, 
Fallen Angels and Malevolent Spirits, who waged continual  wage with the Good Principle, the Principle of Empyreal 
Light and Splendor, Osiris, Ormuzd, Jupiter or Dionusos,  with 'his bright hosts of Amshaspands, Izeds, Angels, and 
Archangels; a warfare that goes on from birth until death, in  the soul of every man that lives.

We have heretofore, in the 24th Degree, recited the principal  incidents in the legend of Osiris and Isis, and it remains but to  point  p. 475  out the astronomical phenomena which it has converted into  mythological facts.

The Sun, at the Vernal Equinox, was the fruit-compelling star  that by his warmth provoked generation and poured upon the  sublunary world all the blessings of Heaven; the beneficent  god, tutelary genius of universal vegetation, that  communicates to the dull earth new activity, and stirs her  great heart, long chilled by Winter and his frosts, until from  her bosom burst all the greenness and perfume of spring,  making her rejoice in leafy forests and grassy lawns and  flower-enamelled meadows, and the promise of abundant  crops of grain and fruits and purple grapes in their due season.

He was then called Osiris, Husband of Isis, God of 
Cultivation and Benefactor of Men, pouring on them and on  the earth the choicest blessings within the gift of the Divinity. 
Opposed to him was Typhon, his antagonist in the Egyptian  mythology, as Ahriman was the foe of Ormuzd, the Good 
Principle, in the theology of the Persians.

The first inhabitants of Egypt and Ethiopia, as Diodorus 
Siculus informs us, saw in the Heavens two first eternal  causes of things, or great Divinities, one the Sun, whom they  called Osiris, and the other the Moon, whom they called Isis;  and these they considered the causes of all the generations of  earth. This idea, we learn from Eusebius, was the same as that  of the Phoenicians. On these two great Divinities the  administration of the world depended. All sublunary bodies  received from them their nourishment and increase, during the  annual revolution which they controlled, and the different  seasons into which it was divided.

To Osiris and Isis, it was held, were owing civilization, the  discovery of agriculture, laws, arts of all kinds, religious  worship, temples, the invention of letters, astronomy, the  gymnastic arts, and music; and thus they were the universal  benefactors. Osiris travelled to civilize the countries which he  passed through, and communicate to them his valuable  discoveries. He built cities, and taught men to cultivate the  earth. Wheat and wine were his first presents to men. Europe, 
Asia, and Africa partook of the blessings which he  communicated, and the most remote regions of India  remembered him, and claimed him as one of their great gods.

You have learned how Typhon, his brother, slew him. His  body was cut into pieces, all of which were collected by Isis,  except his  p. 476  organs of generation, which had been thrown into and  devoured in the waters of the river that every year fertilized 
Egypt. The other portions were buried by Isis, and over them  she erected a tomb. Thereafter she remained single, loading  her subjects with blessings. She cured the sick, restored sight  to the blind, made the paralytic whole, and even raised the  dead. From her Homs or Apollo learned divination and the  science of medicine.

Thus the Egyptians pictured the beneficent action of the two  luminaries that, from the bosom of the elements, produced all  animals and men, and all bodies that are bom, grow, and die  in the eternal circle of generation and destruction here below.

When the Celestial Bull opened the new year at the Vernal 
Equinox, Osiris, united with the Moon, communicated to her  the seeds of fruitfulness which she poured upon the air, and  therewith impregnated the generative principles which gave  activity to universal vegetation. Apis, represented by a bull,  was the living and sensible image of the Sun or Osiris, when  in union with Isis or the Moon at the Vernal Equinox,  concurring with her in provoking everything that lives to  generation. This conjunction of the Sun with the Moon at the 
Vernal Equinox, in the constellation Taurus, required the Bull 
Apis to have on his shoulder a mark resembling the Crescent 
Moon. And the fecundating influence of these two luminaries  was expressed by images that would now be deemed gross  and indecent, but which then were not misunderstood.

Everything good in Nature comes from Osiris,—order,  harmony, and the favorable temperature of the seasons and  celestial periods. From Typhon come the stormy passions and  irregular impulses that agitate the brute and material part of  man; maladies of the body, and violent shocks that injure the  health and derange the system; inclement weather,  derangement of the seasons, and eclipses. Osiris and Typhon  were the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians; principles of  good and evil, of light and darkness, ever at war in the  administration of the Universe.

Osiris was the image of generative power. This was expressed  by his symbolic statues, and by the sign into which he entered  at the Vernal Equinox. He especially dispensed the humid  principle of Nature, generative element of all things; and the 
Nile and all moisture were regarded as emanations from him,  without which there could be no vegetation.

That Osiris and Isis were the Sun and Moon, is attested by  p. 472  many ancient writers; by Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Lucian, 
Suidas, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and others. His power  was symbolized by an Eye over a Sceptre. The Sun was  termed by the Greeks the Eye of Jupiter, and the Eye of the 
World; and his is the All-Seeing Eye in our Lodges. The  oracle of Claros styled him King of the Stars and of the 
Eternal Fire, that en-genders the year and the seasons,  dispenses rain and winds, and brings about daybreak and  night. And Osiris was invoked as the God that resides in the 
Sun and is enveloped by his rays, the invisible and eternal  force that modifies the sublunary world by means of the Sun.

Osiris was the same God known as Bacchus, Dionusos, and 
Serapis. Serapis is the author of the regularity and harmony of  the world. Bacchus, jointly with Ceres (identified by 
Herodotus with Isis) presides over the distribution of all our  blessings; and from the two emanates everything beautiful  and good in Nature. One furnishes the germ and principle of  every good; the other receives and preserves it as a deposit;  and the latter is the function of the Moon in the theology of  the Persians. In each theology, Persian and Egyptian, the 
Moon acts directly on the earth; but she is fecundated, in one  by the Celestial Bull and in the other by Osiris, with whom  she is united at the Vernal Equinox, in the sign Taurus, the  place of her exaltation or greatest influence on the earth. The  force of Osiris, says Plutarch, is exercised through the Moon. 
She is the passive cause relatively to him, and the active cause  relatively to the earth, to which she transmits the germs of  fruitfulness received from him.

In Egypt the earliest movement in the waters of the Nile  began to appear at the Vernal Equinox, when the new Moon  occurred at the entrance of the Sun into the constellation 
Taurus; and thus the Nile was held to receive its fertilizing  power from the combined action of the equinoctial Sun and  the new Moon, meeting in Taurus. Osiris was often  confounded with the Nile, and Isis with the earth; and Osiris  was deemed to act on the earth, and to transmit to it his  emanations, through both the Moon and the Nile; whence the  fable that his generative organs were thrown into that river. 
Typhon, on the other hand, was the principle of aridity and  barrenness; and by his mutilation of Osiris was meant that  drought which caused the Nile to retire within his bed and  shrink up in Autumn.  p. 478

Elsewhere than in Egypt, Osiris was the symbol of the  refreshing rains that descend to fertilize the earth; and Typhon  the burning winds of Autumn; the stormy rains that rot the  flowers, the plants, and leaves; the short, cold days; and  everything injurious in Nature, and that produces corruption  and destruction.

In short, Typhon is the principle of corruption, of darkness, of  the lower world from which come earthquakes, tumultuous  corn-motions of the air, burning heat, lightning, and fiery  meteors, and plague and pestilence. Such too was the 
Ahriman of the Persians; and this revolt of the Evil Principle  against the Principle of Good and Light, has been represented  in every cosmogony, under many varying forms. Osiris, on  the contrary, by the intermediation of Isis, fills the material  world with happiness, purity, and order, by which the  hannony of Nature is maintained. It was said that he died at  the Autumnal Equinox, when Taums or the Pleiades rose in  the evening, and that he rose to life again in the Spring, when  vegetation was inspired with new activity.

Of course the two signs of Taurus and Scorpio will figure  most largely in the mythological history of Osiris, for they  marked the two equinoxes, 2500 years before our Era; and  next to them the other constellations, near the equinoxes, that  fixed the limits of the duration of the fertilizing action of the 
Sun; and it is also to be remarked that Venus, the Goddess of 
Generation, has her domicile in Taurus, as the Moon has there  her place of exaltation.

When the Sun was in Scorpio, Osiris lost his life, and that  fruitfulness which, under the form of the Bull, he had  communicated, through the Moon, to the Earth. Typhon, his  hands and feet horrid with serpents, and whose habitat in the 
Egyptian planisphere was under Scorpio, confined him in a  chest and flung him into the Nile, under the 17th degree of 
Scorpio. Under that sign he lost his life and virility; and he  recovered them in the Spring, when he had connection with  the Moon. When he entered Scorpio, his light diminished, 
Night reassumed her dominion, the Nile shrunk within its  banks, and the earth lost her verdure and the trees their leaves. 
Therefore it is that on the Mithriac Monuments, the Scorpion  bites the testicles of the Equinoctial Bull, on which sits 
Mithras, the Sun of Spring and God of Generation; and that,  on the same monuments, we see two trees, one covered with  young leaves, and at its foot a little bull and a torch burning;  and the  p. 479  other loaded with fmit, and at its foot a Scorpion, and a torch  reversed and extinguished.

Ormuzd or Osiris, the beneficent Principle that gives the  world light, was personified by the Sun, apparent source of  light. Darkness, personified by Typhon or Ahriman, was his  natural enemy. The Sages of Egypt described the necessary  and eternal rivalry or opposition of these principles, ever  pursuing one the other, and one dethroning the other in every  annual revolution, and at a particular period, one in the Spring  under the Bull, and the other in Autumn under the Scorpion,  by the legendary history of Osiris and Typhon, detailed to us  by Diodorus and Synesius; in which history were also  personified the Stars and constellations Orion, Capella, the 
Twins, the Wolf, Sirius, and Hercules, whose risings and  settings noted the advent of one or the other equinox.

Plutarch gives us the positions in the Heavens of the Sun and 
Moon, at the moment when Osiris was murdered by Typhon. 
The Sun, he says, was in the Sign of the Scorpion, which he  then entered at the Autumnal Equinox. The Moon was full,  the adds; and consequently, as it rose at sunset, it occupied 
Taurus, which, opposite to Scorpio, rose as it and the Sun  sank together, so that she was then found alone in the sign 
Taurus, where, six months before, she had been in union or  conjunction with Osiris, the Sun, receiving from him those  germs of universal fertilization which he communicated to  her. It was the sign through which Osiris first ascended into  his empire of light and good. It rose with the Sun on the day  of the Vernal Equinox; it remained six months in the  luminous hemisphere, ever preceding the Sun and above the  horizon during the day; until in Autumn, the Sun arriving at 
Scorpio, Taurus was in complete opposition with him, rose  when he set, and completed its entire course above the  horizon during the night; presiding, by rising in the evening,  over the commencement of the long nights. Hence in the sad  ceremonies commemorating the death of Osiris, there was  borne in procession a golden bull covered with black crape,  image of the darkness into which the familiar sign of Osiris  was entering, and which was to spread over the Northern  regions, while the Sun, prolonging the nights, was to be  absent, and each to remain under the dominion of Typhon, 
Principle of Evil and Darkness.

Setting out from the sign Taurus, Isis, as the Moon, went  seeking for Osiris through all the superior signs, in each of  which she  p. 480  became lull in the successive months from the Autumnal to  the Vernal Equinox, without finding him in either. Let us  follow her in her allegorical wanderings.

Osiris was slain by Typhon his rival, with whom conspired a 
Queen of Ethiopia, by whom, says Plutarch, were designated  the winds. The paranatellons of Scorpio, the sign occupied by  the Sun when Osiris was slain, were the Serpents, reptiles  which sup-plied the attributes of the Evil Genii and of 
Typhon, who himself bore the form of a serpent in the 
Egyptian planisphere. And in the division of Scorpio is also  found Cassiopeia, Queen of Ethiopia, whose setting brings  stormy winds.

Osiris descended to the shades or infernal regions. There he  took the name of Serapis, identical with Pluto, and assumed  his nature. He was then in conjunction with Serpentarius,  identical with /Esculapius, whose form he took in his passage  to the lower signs, where he takes the names of Pluto and 
Ades.

Then Isis wept for the death of Osiris, and the golden bull  covered with crape was carried in procession. Nature  mourned the impending loss of her Summer glories, and the  advent of the empire of night, the withdrawing of the waters,  made fruitful by the Bull in Spring, the cessation of the winds  that brought rains to swell the Nile, the shortening of the days,  and the despoiling of the earth. Then Taurus, directly opposite  the Sun, entered into the cone of shadow which the earth  projects, by which the Moon is eclipsed at full, and with  which, making night, the Bull rises and descends as if covered  with a veil, while he remains above our horizon.

The body of Osiris, enclosed in a chest or coffin, was cast into  the Nile. Pan and the Satyrs, near Chemmis, first discovered  his death, announced it by their cries, and everywhere created  sorrow and alarm. Taurus, with the full Moon, then entered  into the cone of shadow, and under him was the Celestial 
River, most properly called the Nile, and below, Perseus, the 
God of Chemmis, and Auriga, leading a she-goat, himself  identical with Pan, whose wife Aiga the she-goat was styled.

Then Isis went in search of the body. She first met certain  children who had seen it, received from them their  information, and gave them in return the gift of divination. 
The second full Moon occurred in Gemini, the Twins, who  presided over the oracles of Didymus, and one of whom was 
Apollo, the God of Divination,  p. 481

She learned that Osiris had, through mistake, had connection  with her sister Nephte, which she discovered by a crown of  leaves of the melilot, which he had left behind him. Of this  connection a child was bom, whom Isis, aided by her dogs,  sought for, found, reared, and attached to herself, by the name  of Anubis, her faithful guardian. The third full Moon occurs  in Cancer, domicile of the Moon. The paranatellons of that  sign are, the crown of Ariadne or Proserpine, made of leaves  of the melilot, Procyon and Canis Major, one star of which  was called the Star of Isis, while Sirius himself was honored  in Egypt under the name of Anubis.

Isis repaired to Byblos, and seated herself near a fountain,  where she was found by the women of the Court of a King. 
She was induced to visit his Court, and became the nurse of  his son. The fourth full Moon was in Leo, domicile of the 
Sun, or of Adonis, King of Byblos. The paranatellons of this  sign are the flowing water of Aquarius, and Cepheus, King of 
Ethiopia, called Regulus, or simply The King. Behind him  rise Cassiopeia his wife, Queen of Ethiopia, Andromeda his  daughter, and Perseus his son-in-law, all paranatellons in part  of this sign, and in part of Virgo.

Isis suckled the child, not at her breast, but with the end of her  finger, at night. She burned all the mortal parts of its body,  and then, taking the shape of a swallow, she flew to the great  column of the palace, made of the tamarisk-tree that grew up  round the coffin containing the body of Osiris, and within  which it was still enclosed. The fifth lull Moon occurred in 
Virgo, the true image of Isis, and which Eratosthenes calls by  that name. It pictured a woman suckling an infant, the son of 
Isis, bom near the Winter Solstice. This sign has for  paranatellons the mast of the Celestial Ship, and the swallow¬  tailed fish or swallow above it, and a portion of Perseus, son-  in-law of the King of Ethiopia.

Isis, having recovered the sacred coffer, sailed from Byblos in  a vessel with the eldest son of the King, toward Boutos, where 
Anubis was, having charge of her son Homs; and in the  morning dried up a river, whence arose a strong wind. 
Landing, she hid the coffer in a forest. Typhon, hunting a wild  boar by moonlight, discovered it, recognized the body of his  rival, and cut it into fourteen pieces, the number of days  between the lull and new Moon, and in every one of which  days the Moon loses a portion of the light that at the  commencement filled her whole disk. The sixth lull Moon  occurred in Libra, over the divisions separating which  p. 482  from Virgo are the Celestial Ship, Perseus, son of the King of 
Ethiopia and Bootes, said to have nursed Homs. The river of 
Orion that sets in the morning is also a paranatellon of Libra,  as are Ursa Major, the Great Bear or Wild Boar of 
Erymanthus, and the Dragon of the North Pole, or the  celebrated Python from which the attributes of Typhon were  borrowed. All these surround the full Moon of Libra, last of  the Superior Signs, and the one that precedes the new Moon  of Spring, about to be reproduced in Taurus, and there be  once more in conjunction with the Sun.

Isis collects the scattered fragments of the body of Osiris,  buries them, and consecrates the phallus, carried in pomp at  the Pamylia, or feasts of the Vernal Equinox, at which time  the congress of Osiris and the Moon was celebrated. Then 
Osiris had returned from the shades, to aid Homs his son and 
Isis his wife against the forces of Typhon. He thus reappeared,  say some, under the form of a wolf, or, others say, under that  of a horse. The Moon, fourteen days after she is full in Libra,  arrives at Taurus and unites herself to the Sun, whose fires she  thereafter for fourteen days continues to accumulate on her  disk from new Moon to full. Then she unites with herself all  the months in that superior portion of the world where light  always reigns, with harmony and order, and she borrows from  him the force which is to destroy the germs of evil that 
Typhon had, during the winter, planted everywhere in nature. 
This passage of the Sun into Taums, whose attributes he  assumes on his return from the lower hemisphere or the  shades, is marked by the rising in the evening of the Wolf and  the Centaur, and by the heliacal setting of Orion, called the 
Star of Homs, and which thenceforward is in conjunction with  the Sun of Spring, in his triumph over the darkness or

Typhon.

Isis, during the absence of Osiris, and after she had hidden the  coffer in the place where Typhon found it, had rejoined that  malignant enemy; indignant at which, Homs her son deprived  her of her ancient diadem, when she rejoined Osiris as he was  about to attack Typhon: but Mercury gave her in its place a  hehnet shaped like the head of a bull. Then Homs, as a  mighty warrior, such as Orion was described, fought with and  defeated Typhon; who, in the shape of the Serpent or Dragon  of the Pole, had assailed his father. So, in Ovid, Apollo  destroys the same Python, when Io, fascinated by Jupiter, is  metamorphosed into a cow, and placed in the sign of the 
Celestial Bull, where she becomes Isis. The equinoctial  p. 483  year ends at the moment when the Sun and Moon, at the 
Vernal Equinox, are united with Orion, the Star of Homs,  placed in the Heavens under Taurus. The new Moon becomes  young again in Taurus, and shows herself as a crescent, for  the first time, in the next sign, Gemini, the domicile of 
Mercury. Then Orion, in conjunction with the Sun, with  whom he rises, precipitates the Scorpion, his rival, into the  shades of night, causing him to set whenever he himself  reappears on the eastern horizon, with the Sun. Day lengthens  and the genus of evil are by degrees eradicated: and Homs 
(from Aur, Light) reigns triumphant, symbolizing, by his  succession to the characteristics of Osiris, the eternal renewal  of the Sun's youth and creative vigor at the Vernal Equinox.

Such are the coincidences of astronomical phenomena with  the legend of Osiris and Isis; sufficing to show the origin of  the legend, overloaded as it became at length with all the  ornamentation natural to the poetical and figurative genius of  the Orient.

Not only into this legend, but into those of all the ancient  nations, enter the Bull, the Lamb, the Lion, and the Scorpion  or the Serpent; and traces of the worship of the Sun yet linger  in all religions. Everywhere, even in our Order, survive the  equinoctial and solstitial feasts. Our ceilings still glitter with  the greater and lesser luminaries of the Heavens, and our  lights, in their number and arrangement, have astronomical  references. In all churches and chapels, as in all Pagan  temples and pagodas, the altar is in the East; and the ivy over  the east windows of old churches is the Hedera Helix of 
Bacchus. Even the cross had an astronomical origin; and our 
Lodges are full of the ancient symbols.

The learned author of the Sabrean Researches, Landseer,  advances another theory in regard to the legend of Osiris; in  which he makes the constellation Bootes play a leading part. 
He observes that, as none of the stars were visible at the same  time with the Sun, his actual place in the Zodiac, at any given  time, could only be ascertained by the Sab a: an astronomers by  their observations of the stars, and of their heliacal and  achronical risings and settings. There were many solar  festivals among the Sabreans, and part of them agricultural  ones; and the concomitant signs of those festivals were the  risings and settings of the stars of the Husbandman, Bear-  driver, or Hunter, BOOTES. His stars were,  p. 484  among the Hierophants, the established nocturnal indices or  signs of the Sun's place in the ecliptic at different seasons of  the year, and the festivals were named, one, that of the 
Aphanism or disappearance; another, that of the Zetesis, or  search, etc., of Osiris or Adonis, that is, of Bootes.

The returns of certain stars, as connected with their  concomitant seasons of spring (or seed-time) and harvest,  seemed to the ancients, who had not yet discovered that  gradual change, resulting from the apparent movement of the  stars in longitude, which has been termed the precession of  the equinoxes, to be eternal and immutable; and those  periodical returns were to the initiated, even more than to the  vulgar, celestial oracles, announcing the approach of those  important changes, upon which the prosperity, and even the  very existence of man must ever depend; and the oldest of the 
Sabrean constellations seem to have been, an astronomical 
Priest , a King, a Queen, a Husbandman, and a Warrior, and  these more frequently recur on the Sabasan cylinders than any  other constellations whatever. The King was Cepheus or 
Chepheus of Ethiopia: the Husbandman, Osiris, Bacchus, 
Sabazeus, Noah or Bootes. To the latter sign, the Egyptians  were nationally, traditionally and habitually grateful; for they  conceived that from Osiris all the greatest of terrestrial  enjoyments were derived. The stars of the Husbandman were  the signal for those successive agricultural labors on which  the annual produce of the soil depended; and they came in  consequence to be considered and hailed, in Egypt and 
Ethiopia, as the genial stars of terrestrial productiveness; to  which the oblations, prayers, and vows of the pious Sabasan  were regularly offered up.

Landseer says that the stars in Bootes, reckoning down to  those of the 5th magnitude inclusive, are twenty-six, which,  seeming achronically to disappear in succession, produced the  fable of the cutting of Osiris into twenty-six pieces by 
Typhon. There are more stars than this in the constellation;  but no more that the ancient votaries of Osiris, even in the  clear atmosphere of the Sabasan climates, could observe  without telescopes.

Plutarch says Osiris was cut into fourteen pieces: Diodorus,  into twenty-six', in regard to which, and to the whole legend, 
Landseer's ideas, varying from those commonly entertained,  are as follows:

Typhon, Landseer thinks, was the ocean, which the ancients  p. 485  fabled or believed surrounded the Earth, and into which all  the stars in their turn appear successively to sink; [perhaps it  was DARKNESS personified, which the ancients called 
TYPHON. He was hunting by moonlight, says the old legend,  when he met with Osiris].

The ancient Saba must have been near latitude 15° north. 
Axoum is nearly in 14°, and the Western Saba or Meroe is to  the north of that. Forty-eight centuries ago, Aldebaran, the  leading star of the year, had, at the Vernal Equinox, attained  at daylight in the morning, an elevation of about 14 degrees,  sufficient for him to have ceased to be combust, that is, to  have emerged from the Sun's rays, so as to be visible. The  ancients allowed twelve days for a star of the first magnitude  to emerge from the solar rays; and there is less twilight, the  further South we go.

At the same period, too, Cynosura was not the pole-star, but 
Alpha Draconis was; and the stars rose and set with very  different degrees of obliquity from those of their present  risings and settings. By having a globe constructed with  circumvolving poles, capable of any adjustment with regard  to the colures, Mr. Landseer ascertained that, at that remote  period, in lat. 15° north, the 26 stars in Bootes, or 27,  including Arcturus, did not set anchronically in succession;  but several set simultaneously in couples, and six by threes  simultaneously; so that, in all, there were but fourteen  separate settings or disappearances, corresponding with the  fourteen pieces into which Osiris was cut, according to 
Plutarch. Kappa, Iota, and Theta, in the uplifted western hand,  disappeared together, and last of all. They really skirted the  horizon; but were invisible in that low latitude, for the three or  four days mentioned in some of the versions; while the Zetesis  or search was proceeding, and the women of Phoenicia and 
Jerusalem sat weeping for the Wonder, Thammuz; after which  they immediately reappeared, below and to the eastward of a 
Draconis.

And, on the very morning after the achronical departure of the  last star of the Husbandman, Aldebaran rose heliacally, and  became visible in the East in the morning before day.

And precisely at the moment of the heliacal rising of 
Arcturus, also rose Spica Virginis. One is near the middle of  the Husbandman, and the other near that of the Virgin; and 
Arcturus may have been the part of Osiris which Isis did not  recover with the other pieces of the body.  p. 486

At Dedan and Saba it was thirty-six days, from the beginning  of the aphanism, i.e., the disappearances of these stars, to the  heliacal rising of Aldebaran. During these days, or forty at 
Medina, or a few more at Babylon and Byblos, the stars of the 
Husbandman successively sank out of sight, during the  crepusculum or short-lived morning twilight of those 
Southern climes. They disappear during the glancings of the  dawn, the special season of ancient sidereal observation.

Thus the forty days of mourning for Osiris were measured out  by the period of the departure of his Stars. When the last had  sunken out of sight, the vernal season was ushered in; and the 
Sun arose with the splendid Aldebaran, the Tauric leader of  the Hosts of Heaven; and the whole East rejoiced and kept  holiday.

With the exception of the Stars %, i and 5, Bootes did not  begin to reappear in the Eastern quarter of the Heavens till  after the lapse of about four months. Then the Stars of Taurus  had declined Westward, and Virgo was rising heliacally. In  that latitude, also, the Stars of Ursa Major [termed anciently  the Ark of Osiris] set; and Benetnasch, the last of them,  returned to the Eastern horizon, with those in the head of Leo,  a little before the Summer Solstice. In about a month,  followed the Stars of the Husbandman; the chief of them, Ras, 
Mirach, and Arcturus, being very nearly simultaneous in their  heliacal rising.

Thus the Stars of Bootes rose in the East immediately after 
Vindemiatrix, and as if under the genial influence of its rays;  he had his annual career of prosperity; he revelled orientally  for a quarter of a year, and attained his meridian altitude with 
Virgo; and then, as the Stars of the Water-Urn rose, and 
Aquarius began to pour forth his annual deluge, he declined 
Westward, preceded by the Ark of Osiris. In the East, he was  the sign of that happiness in which Nature, the great Goddess  of passive production, rejoiced. Now, in the West, as he  declines toward the Northwestern horizon, his generative  vigor gradually abates; the Solar year grows old; and as his 
Stars descend beneath the Western Wave, Osiris dies, and the  world mourns.

The Ancient Astronomers saw all the great Symbols of 
Masonry in the Stars. Sirius still glitters in our Lodges as the 
Blazing Star, (/ 'Etoile Flamboyante). The Sun is still  symbolized by the point within a Circle; and, with the Moon  and Mercury or Anubis, in the three Great Lights of the 
Lodge. Not only to these, but  p. 487  to the figures and numbers exhibited by the Stars, were  ascribed peculiar and divine powers. The veneration paid to  numbers had its source there. The three Kings in Orion are in  a straight line, and equidistant from each other, the two  extreme Stars being 3° apart, and each of the three distant  from the one nearest it 1° 30'. And as the number three is  peculiar to apprentices, so the straight line is the first principle  of Geometry, having length but no breadth, and being but the  extension of a point, and an emblem of Unity, and thus of 
Good, as the divided or broken line is of Duality or Evil. Near  these Stars are the I lyadcs,//v<? in number, appropriate to the 
Fellow-Craft; and close to them the Pleiades, of the master's  number, seven; and thus these three sacred numbers,  consecrated in Masonry as they were in the Pythagorean  philosophy, always appear together in the Heavens, when the 
Bull, emblem of fertility and production, glitters among the 
Stars, and Aldebaran leads the Hosts of Heaven ( Tsbauth ).

Algenib in Perseus and Almaach and Algol in Andromeda  form a right-angled triangle, illustrate the 47th problem, and  display the Grand Master's square upon the skies. Denebola in 
Leo, Arcturus in Bootes, and Spica in Virgo form an  equilateral triangle, universal emblem of Perfection, and the 
Deity with His Trinity of Infinite Attributes, Wisdom, Power,  and Harmony; and that other, the generative, preserving, and  destroying Powers. The Three Kings form, with Rigel in 
Orion, two triangles included in one: and Capella and 
Menkalina in Auriga, with Bellatrix and Betelgueux in Orion,  form two isosceles triangles with p Tauri, that is equidistant  from each pair; while the fu st four make a right-angled  parallelogram,—the oblong square so often mentioned in our 
Degrees.

Julius Firmicus, in his description of the Mysteries, says, "But  in those funerals and lamentations which are annually  celebrated in honor of Osiris, their defenders pretend a  physical reason. They call the seeds of fruit, Osiris; the Earth, 
Isis; the natural heat, Typhon: and because the fruits are  ripened by the natural heat, and collected for the life of man,  and are separated from their marriage to the earth, and are  sown again when Winter approaches, this they would have to  be the death of Osiris: but when the fruits, by the genial  fostering of the earth, begin again to be generated by a new  procreation, this is the finding of Osiris."

No doubt the decay of vegetation and the falling of the leaves,  p. 488  emblems of dissolution and evidences of the action of that 
Power that changes Life into Death, in order to bring Life  again out of Death, were regarded as signs of that Death that  seemed coming upon all Nature; as the springing of leaves  and buds and flowers in the spring was a sign of restoration to  life: but these were all secondary, and referred to the Sun as  first cause. It was his figurative death that was mourned, and  not theirs; and that with that death, as with his return to life,  many of the stars were connected.

We have already alluded to the relations which the twelve  signs of the Zodiac bear to the legend of the Master's Degree. 
Some other coincidences may have sufficient interest to  warrant mention.

Klrir-Om was assailed at the East, West, and South Gates of  the Temple. The two equinoxes were called, we have seen, by  all the Ancients, the Gates of Heaven, and the Syrians and 
Egyptians considered the Fish (the Constellation near 
Aquarius, and one of the Stars whereof is Fomalhaut) to be  indicative of violence and death.

Klrir-Om lay several days in the grave; and, at the Winter 
Solstice, for five or six days, the length of the days did not  perceptibly increase. Then, the Sun commencing again to  climb Northward, as Osiris was said to arise from the dead, so 
Klrir-Om was raised, by the powerful attraction of the Lion 
(Leo), who waited for him at the Summer Solstice, and drew  him to himself.

The names of the three assassins may have been adopted from  three Stars that we have already named. We search in vain in  the Hebrew or Arabic for the names Jubelo, Jubela, and 
Jubelum. They embody an utter absurdity, and are capable of  no explanation in those languages. Nor are the names Gibs, 
Gravelot, Hobhen, and the like, in the Ancient and Accepted 
Rite, any more plausible, or better referable to any ancient  language. But when, by the precession of the Equinoxes, the 
Sun was in Libra at the Autumnal Equinox, he met in that  sign, where the reign of Typhon commenced, three Stars  forming a triangle, Zuben-es Chamali in the West, Zuben- 
Hak-Rabi in the East, and Zuben-El-Gubi in the South, the  latter immediately below the Tropic of Capricorn, and so  within the realm of Darkness. From these names, those of the  murderers have perhaps been corrupted. In Zuben-Hak-Rabi  we may see the original of Jubelum Akirop; and in Zuben-El- 
Gubi, that of Jubelo Gibs: and time and ignorance may even  have transmuted the words Es Chamali into one as little like  them as Gravelot.  p. 489

Isis, the Moon personified, sorrowing sought for her husband. 
Nine or twelve Fellow-Crafts (the Rites vary as to the  number), in white aprons, were sent to search for Khir-Om, in  the Legend of the Master's Degree; or, in this Rite, the Nine 
Knights Elu. Along the path that the Moon travels are nine  conspicuous Stars, by which nautical men determine their  longitude at Sea;-Arietis, Aldebaran, Pollux, Regulus, Spica 
Virginis, Antares, Altair, Fomalhaut, and Markab. These  might well be said to accompany Isis in her search.

In the York Rite, twelve Fellow-Crafts were sent to search for  the body of Khir-Om and the murderers. Their number  corresponds with that of the Pleiades and Hyades in Taurus,  among which Stars the Sun was found when Light began to  prevail over Darkness, and the Mysteries were held. These 
Stars, we have shown, received early and particular attention  from the astronomers and poets. The Pleiades were the Stars  of the ocean to the benighted mariner; the. Virgins of Spring,  heralding the season of blossoms.

As six Pleiades only are now visible, the number twelve may  have been obtained by them, with Aldebaran, and five far  more brilliant Stars than any other of the Hyades, in the same  region of the Heavens, and which were always spoken of in  connection with the Pleiades;—the Three Kings in the belt of 
Orion, and Bellatrix and Betelgueux on his shoulders;  brightest of the flashing starry hosts.

"Canst thou," asks Job, "bind the sweet influences of the 
Pleiades or loose the bands of Orion?" And in the book of 
Amos we find these Stars connected with the victory of Light  over Darkness: "Seek Him," says that Seer, "that maketh the 
Seven Stars (the familiar name of the Pleiades), and Orion, 
AND TURNETH THE SHADOW OF DEATH INTO 
MORNING."

An old legend in Masonry says that a dog led the Nine this to  the cavern where Abiram was hid. Bootes was anciently  called Caleb Anubach, a Barking Dog; and was personified in 
Anubis, who bore the head of a dog, and aided Isis in her  search. Arcturus, one of his Stars, fiery red, as if fervent and  zealous, is also connected by Job with the Pleiades and Orion. 
When Taurus opened the year, Arcturus rose after the Sun, at  the time of the Winter Solstice, and seemed searching him  through the darkness, until, sixty days afterward, he rose at  the same hour, Orion then  p. 490  also, at the Winter Solstice, rose at noon, and at night seemed  to be in search of the Sun.

So, referring again to the time when the Sun entered the 
Autumnal Equinox, there are nine remarkable Stars that come  to the meridian nearly at the same time, rising as Libra sets,  and so seeming to chase that Constellation. They are Capella  and Menkalina in the Charioteer, Aldebaran in Taurus, 
Bellatrix, Betelgueux, the Three Kings, and Rigel in Orion. 
Aldebaran passes the meridian first, indicating his right to .his  peculiar title of Leader. Nowhere in the heavens are there,  near the same meridian, so many splendid Stars. And close  behind them, but further South, follows Sirius, the Dog-Star,  who showed the nine Elus the way to the murderer's cave.

Besides the division of the signs into the ascending and  descending series (referring to the upward and downward  progress of the soul), the latter from Cancer to Capricorn, and  the former from Capricorn to Cancer, there was another  division of them not less important; that of the six superior  and six inferior signs; the former, 2455 years before our era,  from Taurus to Scorpio, and 300 years before our era, from

Aries to Libra; and the latter, 2455 years B. C. from Scorpio  to Taurus, and 300 years B. C. from Libra to Aries; of which  we have already spoken, as the two Hemispheres, or 
Kingdoms of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness; of Ormuzd  and Ahriman among the Persians, and Osiris and Typhon  among the Egyptians.

With the Persians, the first six Genii, created by Ormuzd,  presided over the first six signs, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, 
Cancer, Leo, and Virgo: and the six evil Genii, or Devs,  created by Ahriman, over the six others, Libra, Scorpio, 
Sagittarius, Capricomus, Aquarius, and Pisces. The soul was  fortunate and happy under the Empire of the first six; and  began to be sensible of evil, when it passed under the Balance  or Libra, the seventh sign. Thus the soul entered the realm of 
Evil and Darkness when it passed into the Constellations that  belong to and succeed the Autumnal Equinox; and it re¬  entered the reahn of Good and Light, when it arrived,  returning, at those of the Vernal Equinox. It lost its felicity by  means of the Balance, and regained it by means of the Lamb. 
This is a necessary consequence of the premises; and it is  confirmed by the authorities and by emblems still extant.

Sallust the Philosopher, speaking of the Feasts of Rejoicing  p. 491  celebrated at the Vernal Equinox, and those of Mourning, in  memory of the rape of Proserpine, at the Autumnal Equinox,  says that the former were celebrated, because then is effected,  as it were, the return of the soul toward the Gods; that the  time when the principle of Light recovered its superiority over  that of Darkness, or day over night, was the most favorable  one for souls that tend to re-ascend to their Principle; and that  when Darkness and the Night again become victors, was most  favorable to the descent of souls toward the infernal regions.

For that reason, the old astrologers, as Firmicus states, fixed  the locality of the river Styx in the 8th degree of the Balance. 
And he thinks that by Styx was allegorically meant the earth.

The Emperor Julian gives the same explanation, but more  hilly developed. He states, as a reason why the august 
Mysteries of Ceres and Proserpine were celebrated at the 
Autumnal Equinox, that at that period of the year men feared  lest the impious and dark power of the Evil Principle, then  commencing to conquer, should do harm to their souls. They  were a precaution and means of safety, thought to be  necessary at the moment when the God of Light was passing  into the opposite or adverse region of the world; while at the 
Vernal Equinox there was less to be feared, because then that 
God, present in one portion of the world, recalled souls to 
Him, he says, and showed Himself to be their Saviour. He had  a little before developed that theological idea, of the attractive  force which the Sun exercises over souls, drawing them to  him and raising them to his luminous sphere. He attributes  this effect to him at the feasts of Atys, dead and restored to  life, or the feasts of Rejoicing, which at the end of three days  succeeded the mourning for that death; and he inquires why  those Mysteries were celebrated at the Vernal Equinox. The  reason, he says, is evident. As the sun, arriving at the  equinoctial point of Spring, drawing nearer to us, increases  the length of the days, that period seems most appropriate for  those ceremonies. For, besides that there is a great affinity  between the substance of Light and the nature of the Gods, the 
Sun has that occult force of attraction, by which he draws  matter toward himself, by means of his warmth, making  plants to shoot and grow, etc.; and why can he not, by the  same divine and pure action of his rays, attract and draw to  him fortunate souls? Then, as light is analogous to the Divine 
Nature, and favorable to souls, struggling to return to  p. 492  their First Principle, and as that light so increases at the 
Vernal Equinox, that the days prevail in duration over the  nights, and as the Sun has an attractive force, besides the  visible energy of his rays, it follows that souls are attracted  toward the solar light. He does not further pursue the  explanation; because, he says, it belongs to a mysterious  doctrine, beyond the reach of the vulgar and known only to  those who understand the mode of action of Deity, like the 
Chaldasan author whom he cites, who had treated of the 
Mysteries of Light, or the God with seven rays.

Souls, the Ancients held, having emanated from the Principle  of Light, partaking of its destiny here below, cannot be  indifferent to nor unaffected by these revolutions of the Great 
Luminary, alternately victor and overcome during every Solar  revolution.

This will be found to be confirmed by an examination of  some of the Symbols used in the Mysteries. One of the most  famous of these was THE SERPENT, the peculiar Symbol  also of this Degree. The Cosmogony of the Hebrews and that  of the Gnostics designated this reptile as the author of the fate  of Souls. It was consecrated in the Mysteries of Bacchus and  in those of Eleusis. Pluto overcame the virtue of Proserpine  under the form of a serpent; and, like the Egyptian God 
Serapis, was always pictured seated on a serpent, or with that  reptile entwined about him. It is found on the Mithriac 
Monuments, and supplied with attributes of Typhon to the 
Egyptians. The sacred basilisc, in coil, with head and neck  erect, was the royal ensign of the Pharaohs. Two of them were  entwined around and hung suspended from the winged Globe  on the Egyptian Monuments . On a tablet in one of the Tombs  at Thebes, a God with a spear pierces a serpent's head. On a  tablet from the Temple of Osiris at Philas is a tree, with a man  on one side, and a woman on the other, and in front of the  woman an erect basilisc, with horns on its head and a disk  between the horns. The head of Medusa was encircled by  winged snakes, which, the head removed, left the Hierogram  or Sacred Cypher of the Ophites or Serpent-worshippers. And  the Serpent, in connection with the Globe or circle, is found  upon the monuments of all the Ancient Nations.

Over Libra, the sign through which souls were said to descend  or fall, is found, on the Celestial Globe, the Serpent, grasped  by Serpentarius, the Serpent-bearer. The head of the reptile is  under Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, called by Ovid, 
Libera, or  p. 493

[paragraph continues] Proserpine', and the two Constellations rise,  with the Balance, after the Virgin (or Isis), whose feet rest on  the eastern horizon at Sunrise on the day of the equinox. As  the Serpent extends over both signs, Libra and Scorpio, it has  been the gate through which souls descend, during the whole  time that those two signs in succession marked the Autumnal 
Equinox. To this alluded the Serpent, which, in the Mysteries  of Bacchus Saba-Zeus, was flung into the bosom of the 
Initiate.

And hence came the enigmatical expression, the Serpent  engenders the Bull, and the Bull the Serpent, alluding to the  two ad-verse constellations, answering to the two equinoxes,  one of which rose as the other set, and which were at the two  points of the heavens through which souls passed, ascending  and descending. By the Serpent of Autumn, souls fell; and  they were regenerated again by the Bull on which Mithras  sate, and whose attributes Bacchus-Zagreus and the Egyptian 
Osiris assumed, in their Mysteries, wherein were represented  the fall and regeneration of souls, by the Bull slain and  restored to life.

Afterward the regenerating Sun assumed the attributes of 
Aries or the Lamb; and in the Mysteries of Ammon, souls  were regenerated by passing through that sign, after having  fallen through the Serpent.

The Serpent-bearer, or Ophicus, was /Esculapius, God of 
Healing. In the Mysteries of Eleusis, that Constellation was  placed in the eighth Heaven: and on the eighth day of those 
Mysteries, the feast of /Esculapius was celebrated. It was also  termed Epidaums, or the feast of the Serpent of Epidaurus. 
The Serpent was sacred to /Esculapius; and was connected in  various ways with the mythological adventures of Ceres.

So the libations to Souls, by pouring wine on the ground, and  looking toward the two gates of Heaven, those of day and  night, referred to the ascent and descent of Souls.

Ceres and the Serpent, Jupiter Ammon and the Bull, all  figured in the Mysteries of Bacchus. Suppose Aries, or Jupiter 
Ammon occupied by the Sun setting in the West;-Virgo 
(Ceres) will be on the Eastern horizon, and in her train the 
Crown, or Proserpine. Suppose Taurus setting;—then the 
Serpent is in the East; and reciprocally; so that Jupiter 
Ammon, or the Sun of Aries, causes the Crown to rise after  the Virgin, in the train of which comes the Serpent. Place  reciprocally the Sun at the other equinox,  p. 494  with the balance in the West, in conjunction with the Serpent  under the Crown; and we shall see the Bull and the Pleiades  rise in the East. Thus are explained all the fables as to the  generation of the Bull by the Serpent and of the Serpent by  the Bull, the biting of the testicles of the Bull by the Scorpion,  on the Mithriac Monuments; and that Jupiter made Ceres with  child by tossing into her bosom the testicles of a Ram.

In the Mysteries of the bull-homed Bacchus, the officers held  serpents in their hands, raised them above their heads, and  cried aloud "Eva!" the generic oriental name of the serpent,  and the particular name of the constellation in which the 
Persians placed Eve and the serpent. The Arabians call it 
Hevan, Ophiucus himself, Hawa, and the brilliant star in his  head, Ras-al-Hawa. The use of this word Eva or Evoe caused 
Clemens of Alexandria to say that the priests in the Mysteries  invoked Eve, by whom evil was brought into the world.

The mystic winnowing-fan, encircled by serpents, was used in  the feasts of Bacchus. In the Isiac Mysteries a basilisc twined  round the handle of the mystic vase. The Ophites fed a serpent  in a mysterious ark, from which they took him when they  celebrated the Mysteries, and allowed him to glide among the  sacred bread. The Romans kept serpents in the Temples of 
Bona Dea and /Esculapius. In the Mysteries of Apollo, the  pursuit of Latona by the serpent Python was represented. In  the Egyptian Mysteries, the dragon Typhon pursued Isis.

According to Sanchoniathon, TAAUT, the interpreter of 
Heaven to men, attributed something divine to the nature of  the dragon and serpents, in which die Phoenicians and 
Egyptians followed him. They have more vitality, more  spiritual force, than any other creature; of a fiery nature,  shown by the rapidity of their motions, without the limbs of  other animals. They assume many shapes and attitudes, and  dart with extraordinary quickness and force. When they have  reached old age, they throw off that age and are young again,  and increase in size and strength, for a certain period of years.

The Egyptian Priests fed the sacred serpents in the temple at 
Thebes. Taaut himself had in his writings discussed these  mysteries in regard to the serpent. Sanchoniathon said in  another work, that the serpent was immortal, and re-entered  into himself; which, according to some ancient theosophists,  particularly those  p. 495  of India, was an attribute of the Deity. And he also said that  the serpent never died, unless by a violent death.

The Phoenicians called the serpent Agathodemon [the good  spirit]; and Kneph was the Serpent-God of the Egyptians.

The Egyptians, Sanchoniathon said, represented the serpen l  with the head of a hawk, on account of the swift flight of that  bird: and the chief Hierophant, the sacred interpreter, gave  very mysterious explanations of that symbol; saying that such  a serpent was a very divine creature, and that, opening his  eyes, he lighted with their rays the whole of first-born space:  when he closes them, it is darkness again. In reality, the  hawk-headed serpent, genius of light, or good genius, was the  symbol of the Sun.

In the hieroglyphic characters, a snake was the letter T or DJ. 
It occurs many times on the Rosetta stone. The homed serpent  was the hieroglyphic for a God.

According to Eusebius, the Egyptians represented the world  by a blue circle, sprinkled with flames, within which was  extended a serpent with the head of a hawk. Proclus says they  represented the four quarters of the world by a cross, and the  soul of the world, or Kneph, by a serpent surrounding it in the  form of a circle.

We read in Anaxagoras, that Orpheus said, that the water, and  the vessel that produced it, were the primitive principles of  things, and together gave existence to an animated being,  which was a serpent, with two heads, one of a lion and the  other of a bull, between which was the figure of a God whose  name was Hercules or Kronos: that from Hercules came the  egg of the world, which produced Heaven and earth, by  dividing itself into two hemispheres: and that the God Phanes,  which issued from that egg, was in the shape of a serpent.

The Egyptian Goddess Ken, represented standing naked on a  lion, held two serpents in her hand. She is the same as the 
Astarte or Ashtaroth of the Assyrians. Hera, worshipped in  the Great Temple at Babylon, held in her right hand a serpent  by the head; and near Khea, also worshipped there, were two  large silver serpents.

In a sculpture from Kouyunjik, two serpents attached to poles  are near a fire-altar, at which two eunuchs are standing. Upon  it is the sacred fire, and a bearded figure leads a wild goat to  the sacrifice.  p. 496

The serpent of the Temple of Epidaums was sacred to 
Aesculapius, the God of Medicine, and 462 years after the  building of the city, was taken to Rome after a pestilence.

The Phoenicians represented the God Nomu (Kneph or Amun- 
Kneph) by a serpent. In Egypt, a Sun supported by two asps  was the emblem of Horhat the good genius; and the serpent  with the winged globe was placed over the doors and  windows of the Temples as a tutelary God. Antipater of Sidon  calls Amun "the renowned Serpent," and the Cerastes is often  found embalmed in the Thebaid.

On ancient Tyrian coins and Indian medals, a serpent was  represented, coiled round the trunk of a tree. Python, the 
Serpent Deity, was esteemed oracular; and the tripod at 
Delphi was a triple-headed serpent of gold.

The portals of all the Egyptian Temples are decorated with the  hierogram of the Circle and the Serpent. It is also found upon  the Temple of Naki-Rustan in Persia; on the triumphal arch at 
Pechin, in China; over the gates of the great Temple of 
Chaundi Teeva, in Java; upon the walls of Athens; and in the 
Temple of Minerva at Tegea. The Mexican hierogram was  formed by the intersecting of two great Serpents, which  described the circle with their bodies, and had each a human  head in its mouth.

All the Buddhists crosses in Ireland had serpents carved upon  them. Wreaths of snakes are on the columns of the ancient 
Hindu Temple at Burwah-Sangor.

Among the Egyptians, it was a symbol of Divine Wisdom,  when extended at length; and, with its tail in its mouth, of 
Eternity.

In the ritual of Zoroaster, the Serpent was a symbol of the 
Universe. In China, the ring between two Serpents was the  symbol of the world governed by the power and wisdom of  the Creator. The Bacchanals carried serpents in their hands or  round their heads.

The Serpent entwined round an Egg, was a symbol common  to the Indians, the Egyptians, and the Dmids. It referred to the  creation of the Universe. A Serpent with an egg in his mouth  was a symbol of the Universe containing within itself the  germ of all things that the Sun develops.

The property possessed by the Serpent, of casting its skin, and  apparently renewing its youth, made it an emblem of eternity  and immortality. The Syrian women still employ it as a charm  against  p. 497  barrenness, as did the devotees of Mithras and Saba-Zeus.

The Earth-born civilizers of the early world, Fohi, Cecrops,  and Erechtheus, were half-man, half-serpent. The snake was  the guardian of the Athenian Acropolis. NAKHUSTAN, the  brazen serpent of the wilderness, became naturalized among  the Hebrews as a token of healing power. "Be ye," said Christ, 
"wise as serpents, and harmless as doves."

The Serpent was as often a symbol of malevolence and  enmity. It appears among the emblems of Siva-Roudra, the  power of desolation and death: it is the bane of Aepytus,

Idom, Archemorus, and Philoctetes: it gnaws the roots of the  tree of life in the Eddas, and bites the heel of unfortunate 
Eurydice. In Hebrew writers it is generally a type of evil; and  is particularly so in the Indian and Persian Mythologies.

When the Sea is churned by Mount Mandar rotating within  the coils of the Cosmical Serpent Vasouki, to produce the 
Amrita or water of immortality, the serpent vomits a hideous  poison, which spreads through and infects the Universe, but  which Vishnu renders harmless by swallowing it. Ahriman in  serpent-form invades the realm of Ormuzd; and the Bull,  emblem of life, is wounded by him and dies. It was therefore  a religious obligation with every devout follower of Zoroaster  to exterminate reptiles, and other impure animals, especially  serpents. The moral and astronomical significance of the 
Serpent were connected. It became a maxim of the Zend- 
Avesta, that Ahriman, the Principle of Evil, made the Great 
Serpent of Winter, who assaulted the creation of Ormuzd.

A serpent-ring was a well-known symbol of time: and to  express dramatically how time preys upon itself, the Egyptian  priests fed vipers in a subterranean chamber, as it were in the  sun's Winter abode on the fat of bulls, or the year's  plenteousness. The dragon of Winter pursues Ammon, the  golden ram, to Mount Casius. The Virgin of the zodiac is  bitten in the heel by Serpens, who, with Scorpio, rises  immediately behind her; and as honey, the emblem of purity  and salvation, was thought to be an antidote to the serpent's  bite, so the bees of Aristasus, the emblems of nature's  abundance, are destroyed through the agency of the serpent,  and regenerated within the entrails of the Vernal Bull.

The Sun-God is finally victorious. Chrishna crushes the head  of the serpent Calyia; Apollo destroys Python, and Hercules  that Lemaean monster whose poison festered in the foot of 
Philoctetes,  p. 498  of Mopsus, of Chiron, or of Sagittarius. The infant Hercules  destroys the pernicious snakes detested of the gods, and ever,  like St. George of England and Michael the Archangel, wars  against hydras and dragons.

The eclipses of the sun and moon were believed by the  orientals to be caused by the assaults of a daemon in dragon-  form; and they endeavored to scare away the intruder by  shouts and menaces. This was the original Leviathan or 
Crooked Serpent of old, transfixed in the olden time by the  power of Jehovah, and suspended as a glittering trophy in the  sky; yet also the Power of Darkness supposed to be ever in  pursuit of the Sun and Moon. When it finally overtakes them,  it will entwine them in its folds, and prevent their shining. In  the last Indian Avatara, as in the Eddas, a serpent vomiting  flames is expected to destroy the world, The serpent presides  over the close of the year, where it guards the approach to the  golden fleece of Aries, and the three apples or seasons of the 
Hesperides; presenting a formidable obstacle to the career of  the Sun-God. The Great Destroyer of snakes is occasionally  married to them; Hercules with the northern dragon begets the  three ancestors of Scythia; for the Sun seems at one time to  rise victorious from the contest with darkness, and at another  to sink into its embraces. The northern constellation Draco,  whose sinuosities wind like a river through the wintry bear,  was made the astronomical cincture of the Universe, as the  serpent encircles the mundane egg in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The Persian Ahriman was called "The old serpent, the liar  from the beginning, the Prince of Darkness, and the rover up  and down." The Dragon was a well-known symbol of the  waters and of great rivers; and it was natural that by the  pastoral Asiatic Tribes, the powerful nations of the alluvial  plains in their neighborhood who adored the dragon or Fish,  should themselves be symbolized under the form of dragons;  and overcome by the superior might of the Hebrew God, as  monstrous Leviathans maimed and destroyed by him. 
Ophioneus, in the old Greek Theology, warred against 
Kronos, and was overcome and cast into his proper element,  the sea. There he is installed as the Sea-God Oannes or 
Dragon, the Leviathan of the watery half of creation, the  dragon who vomited a flood of water after the persecuted  woman of the Apocalypse, the monster who threatened to  devour Hesione and Andromeda, and who for a time became  the grave of Hercules and  p. 499

[paragraph continues] Jonah; and he corresponds with the obscure  name of Rahab, whom Jehovah is said in Job to have  transfixed and overcome.

In the Spring, the year or Sun-God appears as Mithras or 
Europa mounted on the Bull; but in the opposite half of the 
Zodiac he rides the emblem of the waters, the winged horse of 
Nestor or Poseidon: and the Serpent, rising heliacally at the 
Autumnal Equinox, besetting with poisonous influence the  cold constellation Sagittarius, is explained as the reptile in the  path who "bites the horse's heels, so that his rider falls  backward." The same serpent, the Oannes Aphrenos or 
Musaros of Syncellus, was the Midgard Serpent which Odin  sunk beneath the sea, but which grew to such a size as to  encircle the whole earth.

For these Asiatic symbols of the contest of the Sun-God with  the Dragon of darkness and Winter were imported not only  into the Zodiac, but into the more homely circle of European  legend; and both Thor and Odin fight with dragons, as Apollo  did with Python, the great scaly snake, Achilles with the

Scamander, and Bellerophon with the Chimasra. In the  apocryphal book of Esther, dragons herald "a day of darkness  and obscurity"; and St. George of England, a problematic 
Cappadocian Prince, was originally only a varying form of 
Mithras. Jehovah is said to have "cut Rahab and wounded the  dragon." The latter is not only the type of earthly desolation,  the dragon of the deep waters, but also the leader of the  banded conspirators of the sky, of the rebellious stars, which,  according to Enoch, "came not at the right time"; and his tail  drew a third part of the Host of Heaven, and cast them to the  earth. Jehovah "divided the sea by his strength, and broke the  heads of the Dragons in the waters." And according to the 
Jewish and Persian belief, the Dragon would, in the latter  days, the Winter of time, enjoy a short period of licensed  impunity, which would be a season of the greatest suffering to  the people of the earth; but he would finally be bound or  destroyed in the great battle of Messiah; or, as it seems  intimated by the Rabbinical figure of being eaten by the  faithful, be, like Ahriman or Vasouki, ultimately absorbed by  and united with the Principle of good.

Near the image of Rhea, in the Temple of Bel at Babylon,  were two large serpents of silver, says Diodorus, each  weighing thirty talents; and in the same temple was an image  of Juno, holding in her right hand the head of a serpent. The 
Greeks called Bel  p. 500

[paragraph continues] Beliar, and Hesychius interprets that word to  mean a dragon or great serpent. We learn from the book of 
Bel and the Dragon, that in Babylon was kept a great, live  serpent, which the people worshipped.

The Assyrians, the Emperors of Constantinople, the Parthians, 
Scythians, Saxons, Chinese, and Danes all bore the serpent as  a standard, and among the spoils taken by Aurelian from 
Zenobia were such standards, Persici Dracones. The Persians  represented Ormuzd and Ahriman by two serpents,  contending for the mundane egg. Mithras is represented with  a lion's head and human body, encircled by a serpent. In the 
Sadder is this precept: "When you kill serpents, you will  repeat the Zend-Avesta, and thence you will obtain great  merit; for it is the same as if you had killed so many devils."

Serpents encircling rings and globes, and issuing from globes,  are common in the Persian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian  monuments. Vishnu is represented reposing on a coiled  serpent, whose folds form a canopy over him. Mahadeva is  represented with a snake around his neck, one around his hair,  and armlets of serpents on both arms. Bhairava sits on the  coils of a serpent, whose head rises above his own. Parvati  has snakes about her neck and waist. Vishnu is the Preserving 
Spirit, Mahadeva is Siva, the Evil Principle, Bhairava is his  son, and Parvati his consort. The King of Evil Demons was  called in Hindu Mythology, Naga, the King of Serpents, in  which name we trace the Hebrew Nachash, serpent.

In Cashmere were seven hundred places where carved images  of serpents were worshipped; and in Thibet the great Chinese 
Dragon ornamented the Temples of the Grand Lama. In 
China, the dragon was the stamp and symbol of royalty,  sculptured in all the Temples, blazoned on the furniture of the  houses, and interwoven with the vestments of the chief  nobility. The Emperor bears it as his armorial device; it is  engraved on his sceptre and diadem, and on all the vases of  the imperial palace. The Chinese believe that there is a dragon  of extraordinary strength and sovereign power, in Heaven, in  the air, on the waters, and on the mountains. The God Fohi is  said to have had the form of a man, terminating in the tail of a  snake, a combination to be more fully explained to you in a  subsequent Degree.

The dragon and serpent are the 5th and 6th signs of the 
Chinese  p. 501

[paragraph continues] Zodiac; and the Hindus and Chinese believe  that, at every eclipse, the sun or moon is seized by a huge  serpent or dragon, the serpent Asootee of the Hindus, which  enfolds the globe and the constellation Draco; to which also  refers "the War in Heaven, when Michael and his Angels  fought against the dragon."

Sanchoniathon says that Taaut was the author of the worship  of serpents among the Phoenicians. He "consecrated," he says, 
"the species of dragons and serpents; and the Phoenicians and 
Egyptians followed him in this superstition." He was "the first  who made an image of Coelus"; that is; who represented the 
Heavenly Hosts of Stars by visible symbols; and was  probably the same as the Egyptian Thoth. On the Tyrian coins  of the age of Alexander, serpents are represented in many  positions and attitudes, coiled around trees, erect in front of  altars, and crushed by the Syrian Hercules.

The seventh letter of the Egyptian alphabet, called Zeuta or 
Life, was sacred to Thoth, and was expressed by a serpent  standing on his tail; and that Deity, the God of healing, like 
/Esculapius, to whom the serpent was consecrated, leans on a  knotted stick around which coils a snake. The Isiac tablet,  describing the Mysteries of Isis, is charged with serpents in  every part, as her emblems. Th eAsp was specially dedicated  to her, and is seen on the heads of her statues, on the bonnets  of her priests, and on the tiaras of the Kings of Egypt. Serapis  was sometimes represented with a human head and serpentine  tail: and in one engraving two minor Gods are represented  with him, one by a serpent with a bull's head, and the other by  a serpent with the radiated head of a lion.

On an ancient sacrificial vessel found in Denmark, having  several compartments, a serpent is represented attacking a  kneeling boy, pursuing him, retreating before him, appealed  to beseechingly by him, and conversing with him. We are at  once reminded of the Sun at the new year represented by a  child sitting on a lotus, and of the relations of the Sun of 
Spring with the Autumnal Serpent, pursued by and pursuing  him, and in conjunction with him. Other figures on this vessel  belong to the Zodiac.

The base of the tripod of the Pythian Priestess was a triple¬  headed serpent of brass, whose body, folded in circles  growing wider and wider toward the ground, formed a conical  column, while the three heads, disposed triangularly, upheld  the tripod  p. 502  of gold. A similar column was placed on a pillar in the 
Hippodrome at Constantinople, by the founder of that city;  one of the heads of which is said to have been broken off by 
Mahomet the Second, by a blow with his iron mace.

The British God Hu was called "The Dragon—Ruler of the 
World," and his car was drawn by serpents. His ministers  were styled adders. A Druid in a poem of Taliessin says, "I  am a Druid, I am an Architect, I am a Prophet, I am a Serpent 
(Gnadi)." The Car of the Goddess Ceridwen also was drawn  by serpents.

In the elegy of Uther Pendragon, this passage occurs in a  description of the religious rites of the Druids: "While the 
Sanctuary is earnestly invoking The Gliding King, before  whom the Fair One retreats, upon the evil that covers the  huge stones; whilst the Dragon moves round over the places  which contain vessels of drink-offering, whilst the drink-  offering is in the Golden Horns'” in which we readily  discover the mystic and obscure allusion to the Autumnal

Serpent pursuing the Sun along the circle of the Zodiac, to the  celestial cup or crater, and the Golden horns of Virgil's milk-  white Bull; and, a line or two further on, we find the Priest  imploring the victorious Beli, the Sun-God of the 
Babylonians.

With the serpent, in the Ancient Monuments, is very often  found associated the Cross. The Serpent upon a Cross was an 
Egyptian Standard. It occurs repeatedly upon the Grand Stair¬  case of the Temple of Osiris at Phi he; and on the pyramid of 
Ghizeh are represented two kneeling figures erecting a Cross,  on the top of which is a serpent erect. The Crux Ansata was a 
Cross with a coiled Serpent above it; and it is perhaps the  most common of all emblems on the Egyptian Monuments,  carried in the hand of almost every figure of a Deity or a 
Priest. It was, as we learn by the monuments, the form of the  iron tether-pins, used for making fast to the ground the cords  by which young animals were confined: and as used by  shepherds, became a symbol of Royalty to the Shepherd 
Kings.

A Cross like a Teutonic or Maltese one, formed by four  curved lines within a circle, is also common on the 
Monuments, and represented the Tropics and the Colures.

The Caduceus, borne by Elermes or Mercury, and also by 
Cybele, Minerva, Anubis, Elercules Ogmius the God of the 
Celts, and the personified Constellation Virgo, was a winged  wand, entwined by  p. 503  two serpents. It was originally a simple Cross, symbolizing  the equator and equinoctial Colure, and the four elements  proceeding from a common centre. This Cross, surmounted  by a circle, and that by a crescent, became an emblem of the 
Supreme Deity—or of the active power of generation and the  passive power of production conjoined,-and was  appropriated to Thoth or Mercury. It then assumed an  improved form, the arms of the Cross being changed into  wings, and the circle and crescent being fonned by two  snakes, springing from the wand, forming a circle by crossing  each other, and their heads making the horns of the crescent;  in which form it is seen in the hands of Anubis.

The triple Tau, in the centre of a circle and a triangle, typifies  the Sacred Name; and represents the Sacred Triad, the 
Creating, Preserving, and Destroying Powers; as well as the  three great lights of Masonry. If to the Masonic point within a 
Circle, and the two parallel lines, we add the single Tau 
Cross, we have the Ancient Egyptian Triple Tau.

A column in the form of a cross, with a circle over it, was  used by the Egyptians to measure the increase of the  inundations of the Nile. The Tau and Triple Tau are found in  many Ancient Alphabets.

With the Tau or the Triple Tau may be connected, within two  circles, the double cube, or perfection; or the perfect ashlar.

The Crux Ansata is found on the sculptures of Khorsabad; on  the ivories from Nimroud, of the same age, carried by an 
Assyrian Monarch; and on cylinders of the later Assyrian  period.

As the single Tau represents the one God, so, no doubt, the 
Triple Tau, the origin of which cannot be traced, was meant to  represent the Trinity of his attributes, the three Masonic  pillars, WISDOM, STRENGTH, and HARMONY.

The Prophet Ezekiel, in the 4th verse of the 9th chapter, says: 
"And the Lord said unto him, 'Go through the midst of the  city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and mark the letter TAU  upon the foreheads of those that sigh and mourn for all the  abominations that be done in the midst thereof." So the Latin 
Vulgate, and the probably most ancient copies of the 
Septuagint translate the passage. This Tau was in the form of  the cross of this Degree, and it was the emblem of life and  salvation. The Samaritan Tau and the Ethiopic Tavvi are the  evident prototype of the Greek x; and we learn from 
Tertullian, Origen, and St. Jerome,  p. 504  that the Hebrew Tau was anciently written in the form of a 
Cross.

In ancient times the mark Tau was set on those who had been  acquitted by their judges, as a symbol of innocence. The  military commanders placed it on soldiers who escaped  unhurt from the field of battle, as a sign of their safety under  the Divine Protection.

It was a sacred symbol among the Druids. Divesting a tree of  part of its branches, they left it in the shape of a Tau Cross,  preserved it carefully, and consecrated it with solemn  ceremonies. On the tree they cut deeply the word THAU, by  which they meant God. On the right arm of the Cross, they  inscribed the word HESULS, on the left BELEN or 
BELENUS, and on the middle of the trunk THARAMIS. This  represented the sacred Triad.

It is certain that the Indians, Egyptians, and Arabians paid  veneration to the sign of the Cross, thousands of years before  the coming of Christ. Everywhere it was a sacred symbol. The 
Hindus and the Celtic Druids built many of their Temples in  the form of a Cross, as the ruins still remaining clearly show,  and particularly the ancient Druidical Temple at Classemiss in  the Island of Lewis in Scotland. The Circle is of 12 Stones.

On each of the sides, east, west, and south, are three. In the  centre was the image of the Deity; and on the north an avenue  of twice nineteen stones, and one at the entrance. The 
Supernal Pagoda at Benares is in the form of a Cross; and the 
Druidical subterranean grotto at New Grange in Ireland.

The Statue of Osiris at Rome had the same emblem. Isis and 
Ceres also bore it; and the caverns of initiation were  constructed in that shape with a pyramid over the Sacellum.

Crosses were cut in the stones of the Temple of Serapis in 
Alexandria; and many Tau Crosses are to be seen in the  sculptures of Alabastion and Esne, in Egypt. On coins, the  symbol of the Egyptian God Kneph was a Cross within a 
Circle.

The Crux Ansata was the particular emblem of Osiris, and his  sceptre ended with that figure. It was also the emblem of 
Hermes, and was considered a Sublime Hieroglyphic,  possessing mysterious powers and virtues, as a wonder¬  working amulet.

The Sacred Tau occurs in the hands of the mummy-shaped  figures between the forelegs of the row of Sphynxes, in the  great avenue leading from Luxor to Karnac. By the Tau Cross  the  p. 505

[paragraph continues] Cabalists expressed the number 10, a perfect  number, denoting Heaven, and the Pythagorean Tetractys, or  incommunicable name of God. The Taft Cross is also found  on the stones in front of the door of the Temple of Amunoth 
III, at Thebes, who reigned about the time when the Israelites  took possession of Canaan: and the Egyptian Priests carried it  in all the sacred processions.

Tertullian, who had been initiated, informs us that the Tau  was inscribed on the forehead of every person who had been  admitted into the Mysteries of Mithras.

As the simple Tau represented Life, so, when the Circle,  symbol of Eternity, was added, it represented Eternal Life.

At the Initiation of a King, the Tau, as the emblem of life and  key of the Mysteries, was impressed upon his lips.

In the Indian Mysteries, the Tau Cross, under the name of 
Tiluk, was marked upon the body of the candidate, as a sign  that he was set apart for the Sacred Mysteries.

On the upright tablet of the King, discovered at Nimroud, are  the names of thirteen Great Gods (among which are YAV and 
BEL); and the left-hand character of every one is a cross  composed of two cuneiform characters.

The Cross appears upon an Ancient Phoenician medal found  in the mins of Citium; on the very ancient Buddhist Obelisk  near Ferns in Ross-shire; on the Buddhist Round Towers in 
Ireland, and upon the splendid obelisk of the same era at 
Forres in Scot-land.

Upon the facade of a temple at Kalabche in Nubia are three  regal figures, each holding a Crux Ansata.

Like the Subterranean Mithriatic Temple at New Grange in 
Scotland, the Pagodas of Benares and Mathura were in the  form of a Cross. Magnificent Buddhist Crosses were erected,  and are still standing, at Clonmacnoise, Finglas, and Kilcullen  in Ireland. Wherever the monuments of Buddhism are found,  in India, Ceylon, or Ireland, we find the Cross: for Buddha or 
Boudh was represented to have been crucified.

All the planets known to the Ancients were distinguished by  the Mystic Cross, in conjunction with the solar or lunar  symbols; Saturn by a cross over a crescent, Jupiter by a cross  under a crescent, Mars by a cross resting obliquely on a circle, 
Venus by a cross under a circle, and Mercury by a cross  surmounted by a circle and that by a crescent.  p. 506

The Solstices, Cancer and Capricorn, the two Gates of 
Heaven, are the two pillars of Hercules, beyond which he, the 
Sun, never journeyed: and they still appear in our Lodges, as  the two great columns, Jachin and Boaz, and also as the two  parallel lines that bound the circle, with a point in the centre,  emblem of the Sun, between the two tropics of Cancer and 
Capricorn.

The Blazing Star in our Lodges, we have already said,  represents Sirius, Anubis, or Mercury, Guardian and Guide of 
Souls. Our Ancient English brethren also considered it an  emblem of the Sun. In the old Lectures they said: "The 
Blazing Star or Glory in the centre refers us to that Grand 
Luminary the Sun, which enlightens the Earth, and by its  genial influence dispenses blessings to mankind." It is also  said in those lectures to be an emblem of Prudence. The word 
Prudentia means, in its original and fullest signification, 
Foresight, and accordingly the Blazing Star has been regarded  as an emblem of Omniscience, or the All-Seeing Eye, which  to the Ancients was the Sun.

Even the Dagger of the Elu of Nine is that used in the 
Mysteries of Mithras; which, with its blade black and hilt  white, was an emblem of the two principles of Light and 
Darkness.

Isis, the same as Ceres, was, as we learn from Eratosthenes,  the Constellation Virgo, represented by a woman holding an  ear of wheat. The different emblems which accompany her in  the description given by Apuleius, a serpent on either side, a  golden vase, with a serpent twined round the handle, and the  animals that marched in procession, the bear, the ape, and 
Pegasus, represented the Constellations that, rising with the. 
Virgin, when on the day of the Vernal Equinox she stood in  the Oriental gate of Heaven, brilliant with the rays of the full  moon, seemed to march in her train.

The cup, consecrated in the Mysteries both of Isis and Eleusis,  was the Constellation Crater or the Cup. The sacred vessel of  the Isiac ceremony finds its counterpart in the Heavens. The 
Olympic robe presented to the Initiate, a magnificent mantle,  covered with figures of serpents and animals, and under  which were twelve other sacred robes, wherewith he was  clothed in the sanctuary, alluded to the starry Heaven and the  twelve signs: while the seven preparatory immersions in the  sea alluded to the seven spheres, through which the soul  plunged, to arrive here below and take up its abode in a body.  p. 507

The Celestial Virgin, during the last three centuries that  preceded the Christian era, occupied the horoscope or 
Oriental point, and that gate of Heaven through which the Sun  and Moon ascended above the horizon at the two equinoxes. 
Again it occupied it at midnight, at the Winter Solstice, the  precise moment when the year commenced. Thus it was  essentially connected with the march of times and seasons, of  the Sun, the Moon, and day and night, at the principal epochs  of the year. At the equinoxes were celebrated the greater and  lesser Mysteries of Ceres. When souls descended past the 
Balance, at the moment when the Sun occupied that point, the 
Virgin rose before him; she stood at the gates of day and  opened them to him. Her brilliant Star, Spica Virginis, and 
Arcturus, in Bootes, northwest of it, heralded his coming. 
When he had returned to the Vernal Equinox, at the moment  when souls were generated, again it was the Celestial Virgin  that led the march of the signs of night; and in her stars came  the beautiful full moon of that month. Night and day were in  succession introduced by her, when they began to diminish in  length; and souls, before arriving at the gates of Hell, were  also led by her. In going through these signs, they passed the 
Styx in the 8th Degree of Libra. She was the famous Sibyl  who initiated Eneas, and opened to him the way to the  infernal regions.

This peculiar situation of the Constellation Virgo, has caused  it to enter into all the sacred fables in regard to nature, under  different names and the most varied fonus. It often takes the  name of Isis or the Moon, which, when at its full at the Vernal 
Equinox, was in union with it or beneath its feet. Mercury (or 
Anubis) having his domicile and exaltation in the sign Virgo,  was, in all the sacred fables and Sanctuaries, the inseparable  companion of Isis, without whose counsels she did nothing.

This relation between the emblems and mysterious recitals of  the initiations, and the Heavenly bodies and order of the  world, was still more clear in the Mysteries of Mithras, adored  as the Sun in Asia Minor, Cappadocia, Armenia, and Persia,  and whose Mysteries went to Rome in the time of Sylla. This  is amply proved by the descriptions we have of the Mithriac  cave, in which were figured the two movements of the 
Heavens, that of the fixed Stars and that of the Planets, the 
Constellations, the eight mystic gates of the spheres, and the  symbols of the elements. So on a celebrated monument of that  religion, found at Rome, were figured,  p. 508  the Serpent or Hydra under Leo, as in the Heavens, the 
Celestial Dog, the Bull, the Scorpion, the Seven Planets,  represented by seven altars, the Sun, Moon, and emblems  relating to Light, to Darkness, and to their succession during  the year, where each in turn triumphs for six months.

The Mysteries of Atys were celebrated when the Sun entered 
Aries; and among the emblems was a ram at the foot of a tree  which was being cut down.

Thus, if not the whole truth, it is yet a large part of it, that the 
Heathen Pantheon, in its infinite diversity of names and  personifications, was but a multitudinous, though in its origin  unconscious allegory, of which physical phenomena, and  principally the Heavenly Bodies, were the fundamental types. 
The glorious images of Divinity which formed Jehovah's 
Host, were the Divine Dynasty or real theocracy which  governed the early world; and the men of the golden age,  whose looks held commerce with the skies, and who watched  the radiant rulers bringing Winter and Summer to mortals,  might be said with poetic truth to live in immediate  communication with Heaven, and, like the Hebrew Patriarchs,  to see God face to face. Then the Gods introduced their own  worship among mankind: then Oannes, Oe or Aquarius rose  from the Red Sea to impart science to the Babylonians; then  the bright Bull legislated for India and Crete; and the Lights  of Heaven, personified as Liber and Ceres, hung the Boeotian  hills with vine-yards, and gave the golden sheaf to Eleusis. 
The children of men were, in a sense, allied or married, to  those sons of God who sang the jubilee of creation; and the  encircling vault with its countless Stars, which to the excited  imagination of the solitary Chakkean wanderer appeared as  animated intelligences, might naturally be compared to a  gigantic ladder, on which, in their rising and setting, the 
Angel luminaries appeared to be ascending and descending  between earth and Heaven. The original revelation died out of  men's memories; they worshipped the Creature instead of the 
Creator; and holding all earthly things as connected by eternal  links of harmony and sympathy with the heavenly bodies,  they united in one view astronomy, astrology, and religion.

Long wandering thus in error, they at length ceased to look  upon the Stars and .external nature as Gods; and by directing  their attention to the microcosm or narrower world of self,  they again became acquainted with the True Ruler and Guide  of the Universe,  p. 509  and used the old fables and superstitions as symbols and  allegories, by which to convey and under which to hide the  great truths which had faded out of most men's remembrance.

In the Hebrew writings, the term "Heavenly Hosts" includes  not only the counsellors and emissaries of Jehovah, but also  the celestial luminaries; and the stars, imagined in the East to  be animated intelligences, presiding over human weal and  woe, are identified with the more distinctly impersonated  messengers or angels, who execute the Divine decrees, and  whose predominance in Heaven is in mysterious  correspondence and relation with the powers and dominions  of the earth. In Job, the Morning Stars and the Sons of God  are identified; they join in the same chorus of praise to the 
Almighty; they are both susceptible of joy; they walk in  brightness, and are liable to impurity and imperfection in the  sight of God. The Elohim originally included not only foreign  superstitious forms, but also all that host of Heaven which  was revealed in poetry to the shepherds of the desert, now as  an encampment of warriors, now as careering in chariots of  fire, and now as winged messengers, ascending and  descending the vault of Heaven, to communicate the will of

God to mankind.

"The Eternal," says the Bereshith Rabba to Genesis, "called  forth Abraham and his posterity out of the dominion of the  stars; by nature, the Israelite was a servant to the stars, and  bom under their influence, as are the heathen; but by virtue of  the law given on Mount Sinai, he became liberated from this  degrading servitude." The Arabs had a similar legend. The 
Prophet Amos explicitly asserts that the Israelites, in the  desert, worshipped, not Jehovah, but Moloch, or a Star-God,  equivalent to Saturn. The Gods El or Jehovah were not merely  planetary or solar. Their symbolism, like that of every other 
Deity, was coextensive with nature, and with the mind of  man. Yet the astrological character is assigned even to 
Jehovah. He is described as seated on the pinnacle of the 
Universe, leading forth the Hosts of Heaven, and telling them  unerringly by name and number. His stars are His sons and 
His eyes, which ran through the whole world, keeping watch  over men's deeds. The stars and planets were properly the  angels. In Pharisaic tradition, as in the phraseology of the 
New Testament, the Heavenly Host appears as an Angelic 
Army, divided into regiments and brigades, under the  command  p. 510  of imaginary chiefs, such as Massaloth, Legion, Kartor Gistra,  etc.,—each Gistra being captain of 365,000 myriads of stars. 
The Seven Spirits which stand before the throne, spoken of by  several Jewish writers, and generally presumed to have been  immediately derived from the Persian Amshaspands, were  ultimately the seven planetary intelligences, the original  model of the seven-branched golden candlestick exhibited to 
Moses on God's mountain. The stars were imagined to have  fought in their courses against Sisera. The heavens were  spoken of as holding a predominance over earth, as governing  it by signs and ordinances, and as containing the elements of  that astrological wisdom, more especially cultivated by the 
Babylonians and Egyptians.

Each nation was supposed by the Hebrews to have its own  guardian angel, and its own provincial star. One of the chiefs  of the Celestial Powers, at first Jehovah Himself in the  character of the Sun, standing in the height of Heaven,  overlooking and governing all things, afterward one of the  angels or subordinate planetary genii of Babylonian or Persian  mythology, was the patron and protector of their own nation, 
"the Prince that standeth for the children of thy people." The  discords of earth were accompanied by a warfare in the sky;  and no people underwent the visitation of the Almighty,  without a corresponding chastisement being inflicted on its  tutelary angel.

The fallen Angels were also fallen Stars; and the first allusion  to a feud among the spiritual powers in early Hebrew 
Mythology, where Rahab and his confederates are defeated,  like the Titans in a battle against the Gods, seems to identify  the rebellious Spirits as part of the visible Heavens, where the 
"high ones on high" are punished or chained, as a signal proof  of God's power and justice. God, it is said-

"Stirs the sea with His might by His understanding He smote 
Rahab—His breath clears the face of Heaven—His hand  pierced the crooked Serpent.... God withdraws not His  anger; beneath Him bow the confederates of Rahab."

Rahab always means a sea-monster: probably some such  legendary monstrous dragon, as in almost all mythologies is  the adversary of Heaven and demon of eclipse, in whose  belly, significantly called the belly of Hell, Hercules, like 
Jonah, passed three days, ultimately escaping with the loss of  his hair or rays. Chesil, the rebellious giant Orion, represented  in Job as riveted to the sky,  p. 511  was compared to Ninus or Nimrod, the mythical founder of 
Nineveh (City of Fish) the mighty hunter, who slew lions and  panthers before the Lord. Rahab's confederates are probably  the "High ones on High," the Chesilim or constellations in 
Isaiah, the Heavenly Host or Heavenly Powers, among whose  number were found folly and disobedience.

"I beheld," says Pseudo-Enoch, "seven stars like great blazing  mountains, and like Spirits, entreating me. And the angel said, 
This place, until the consummation of Heaven and Earth, will  be the prison of the Stars and of the Host of Heaven. These  are the Stars which overstepped God's command before their  time arrived; and came not at their proper season; therefore  was he offended with them, and bound them, until the time of  the consummation of their crimes in the secret year." And  again: "These Seven Stars are those which have transgressed  the commandment of the Most High God, and which are here  bound until the number of the days of their crimes be  completed."

The Jewish and early Christian writers looked on the worship  of the sun and the elements with comparative indulgence. 
Justin Martyr and Clemens of Alexandria admit that God had  appointed the stars as legitimate objects of heathen worship,  in order to preserve throughout the world some tolerable  notions of natural religion. It seemed a middle point between 
Heathenism and Christianity; and to it certain emblems and  ordinances of that faith seemed to relate. The advent of Christ  was announced by a Star from the East; and His nativity was  celebrated on the shortest day of the Julian Calendar, the day  when, in the physical commemorations of Persia and Egypt, 
Mithras or Osiris was newly found. It was then that the  acclamations of the Host of Heaven, the unfailing attendants  of the Sun, surrounded, as at the spring-dawn of creation, the  cradle of His birth-place, and that, in the words of Ignatius, "a  star, with light inexpressible, shone forth in the Heavens, to  destroy the power of magic and the bonds of wickedness; for 
God Himself had appeared, in the form of man, for the  renewal of eternal life."

But however infinite the variety of objects which helped to  develop the notion of Deity, and eventually assumed its place,  substituting the worship of the creature for that of the creator;  of parts of the body, for that of the soul, of the Universe, still  the notion itself was essentially one of unity. The idea of one  p. 512

[paragraph continues] God, of a creative, productive, governing unity,  resided in the earliest exertion of thought: and this  monotheism of the primitive ages, makes every succeeding  epoch, unless it be the present, appear only as a stage in the  progress of degeneracy and aberration. Everywhere in the old  faiths we find the idea of a supreme or presiding Deity. Amun  or Osiris presides among the many gods of Egypt; Pan, with  the music of his pipe, directs the chorus of the constellations,  as Zeus leads the solemn procession of the celestial troops in  the astronomical theology of the Pythagoreans. "Amidst an  infinite diversity of opinions on all other subjects," says 
Maximus Tyrius, "the whole world is unanimous in the belief  of one only almighty King and Father of all."

There is always a Sovereign Power, a Zeus or Deus, 
Mahadeva or Adideva, to whom belongs the maintenance of  the order of the Universe. Among the thousand gods of India,  the doctrine of Divine Unity is never lost sight of; and the  ethereal Jove, worshipped by the Persian in an age long  before Xenophanes or Anaxagoras, appears as supremely  comprehensive and independent of planetary or elemental  subdivisions, as the "Vast One" or "Great Soul" of the Vedas.

But the simplicity of belief of the patriarchs did not exclude  the employment of symbolical representations. 'FI mind never  rests satisfied with a mere feeling. That feeling ever strives to  assume precision and durability as an idea, by some outward  delineation of its thought. Even the ideas that are above and  beyond the senses, as all ideas of God are, require the aid of  the senses for their expression and communication. Hence  come the representative forms and symbols which constitute  the external investiture of every religion; attempts to express a  religious sentiment that is essentially one, and that vainly  struggles for adequate external utterance, striving to tell to  one man, to paint to him, an idea existing in the mind of  another, and essentially incapable of utterance or description,  in a language all the words of which have a sensuous  meaning. Thus, the idea being perhaps the same in all, its  expressions and utterances are infinitely various, and branch  into an infinite diversity of creeds and sects.

All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe  only what we see; and the true objects of religion are unseen. 
The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they  and all other religious forms differed and still differ according  to  p. 513  external circumstances and imagery, and according to  differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. To present a  visible symbol to the eye of another is not to inform him of  the meaning which that symbol has to you. Hence the  philosopher soon super-added to these symbols, explanations  addressed to the ear, susceptible of more precision, but less  effective, obvious, and impressive than the painted or  sculptured forms which he despised. Out of these  explanations grew by degrees a variety of narratives, whose  true object and meaning were gradually forgotten. And when  these were abandoned, and philosophy resorted to definitions  and fonnulas, its language was but a more refined symbolism,  grappling with and attempting to picture ideas impossible to  be expressed. For the most abstract expression for Deity  which language can supply, is but a sign or symbol for an  object unknown, and no more truthful and adequate than the  terms Osiris and Vishnu, except as being less sensuous and  explicit. To say that He is a Spirit, is but to say that He is not  matter. What spirit is, we can only define as the Ancients did,  by resorting, as if in despair, to some sublimized species of  matter, as Light, Fire, or Ether.

No symbol of Deity can be appropriate or durable except in a  relative or moral sense. We cannot exalt words that have only  a sensuous meaning, above sense. To call Him a Power or a 
Force, or an Intelligence, is merely to deceive ourselves into  the belief that we use words that have a meaning to us, when  they have none, or at least no more than the ancient visible  symbols had. To call Him Sovereign, Father, Grand Architect  of the Universe, Extension, Time, Beginning, Middle, and 
End, whose face is turned on all sides, the Source of life and  death, is but to present other men with symbols by which we  vainly endeavor to communicate to them 'the same vague  ideas which men in all ages have impotently struggled to  express. And it may be doubted whether we have succeeded  either in communicating, or in forming in our own minds, any  more distinct and definite and true and adequate idea of the 
Deity, with all our metaphysical conceits and logical  subtleties, than the rude ancients did, who endeavored to  symbolize and so to express His attributes, by the Fire, the 
Light, the Sun and Stars, the Lotus and the Scarabaeus; all of  them types of what, except by types, more or less sufficient,  could not be expressed at all.

The primitive man recognized the Divine Presence under a  p. 514  variety of appearances, without losing his faith in this unity  and Supremacy. The invisible God, manifested and on one of 
His many sides visible, did not cease to be God to him. He  recognized Him in the evening breeze of Eden, in the  whirlwind of Sinai, in the Stone of Beth-El: and identified 
Him with the fire or thunder or the immovable rock adored in 
Ancient Arabia. To him the image of the Deity was reflected  in all that was pre-eminent in excellence. He saw Jehovah,  like Osiris and Bel, in the Sun as well as in the Stars, which  were His children, His eyes, "which run through the whole  world, and watch over the Sacred Soil of Palestine, from the  year's commencement to its close." He was the sacred fire of 
Mount Sinai, of the burning bush, of the Persians, those 
Puritans of Paganism.

Naturally it followed that Symbolism soon became more  complicated, and all the, powers of Heaven were reproduced  on earth, until a web of fiction and allegory was woven,  which the wit of man, with his limited means of explanation,  will never unravel. Hebrew Theism itself became involved in  symbolism and image-worship, to which all religions ever  tend. We have already seen what was the symbolism of the 
Tabernacle, the Temple, and the Ark. The Hebrew  establishment tolerated not only the use of emblematic  vessels, vestments, and cherubs, of Sacred Pillars and 
Seraphim, but symbolical representations of Jehovah Himself,  not even confined to poetical or illustrative language.

"Among the Adityas," says Chrishna, in the Bagvat Ghita, "I  am Vishnu, the radiant Sun among the Stars; among the  waters, I am ocean; among the mountains, the Himalaya; and  among the mountain-tops, Mem." The Psalms and Isaiah are  frill of similar attempts to convey to the mind ideas of God, by  ascribing to Him sensual proportions. He rides on the clouds,  and sits on the wings of the wind. Heaven is His pavilion, and  out of His mouth issue lightnings. Men cannot worship a mere  abstraction. They require some outward form in which to  clothe their conceptions, and invest their sympathies. If they  do not shape and carve or paint visible images, they have  invisible ones, perhaps quite as inadequate and unfaithful,  within their own minds.

The incongruous and monstrous in the Oriental images came  from the desire to embody the Infinite, and to convey by  multi-plied, because individually inadequate symbols, a  notion of the Divine Attributes to the understanding. Perhaps  we should find  p. 515  that we mentally do the same thing, and make within  ourselves images quite as incongruous, if judged of by our  own limited conceptions, if we were to undertake to analyze  and gain a clear idea of the mass of infinite attributes which  we assign to the Deity; and even of His infinite Justice and  infinite Mercy and Love.

We may well say, in the language of Maximus Tyrius: "If, in  the desire to obtain some faint conception of the Universal 
Father, the Nameless Lawgiver, men had recourse to words or  names, to silver or gold, to animals or plants, to mountain-  tops or flowing rivers, every one inscribing the most valued  and most beautiful things with the name of Deity, and with  the fondness of a lover clinging with rapture to each trivial  reminiscence of the Beloved, why should we seek to reduce  this universal practice of symbolism, necessary, indeed, since  the mind often needs the excitement of the imagination to  rouse it into activity, to one monotonous standard of formal  propriety? Only let the image duly perform its task, and bring  the divine idea with vividness and truth before the mental eye;  if this be effected, whether by the art of Phidias, the poetry of 
Homer, the Egyptian Hieroglyph, or the Persian element, we  need not cavil at external differences, or lament the seeming  fertility of unfamiliar creeds, so long as the great essential is  attained , THAT MEN ARE MADE TO REMEMBER, TO

UNDERSTAND, AND TO LOVE.

Certainly, when men regarded Light and Fire as something  spiritual, and above all the corruptions and exempt from all  the decay of matter; when they looked upon the Sun and Stars  and Planets as composed of this finer element, and as  themselves great and mysterious Intelligences, infinitely  superior to man, living Existences, gifted with mighty powers  and wielding vast influences, those elements and bodies  conveyed to them, when used as symbols of Deity, a far more  adequate idea than they can now do to us, or than we can  comprehend, now that Fire and Light are familiar to us as air  and water, and the Heavenly Luminaries are lifeless worlds  like our own. Perhaps they gave them ideas as adequate as we  obtain from the mere words by which we endeavor to  symbolize and shadow forth the ineffable mysteries and  infinite attributes of God.

There are, it is true, dangers inseparable from symbolism,  which countervail its advantages, and afford an impressive  lesson in regard to the similar risks attendant on the use of  language. The  p. 516  imagination, invited to assist the reason, usurps its place, or  leaves its ally helplessly entangled in its web. Names which  stand for things are confounded with them; the means are  mistaken for the end: the instrument of interpretation for the  object; and thus symbols come to usurp an independent  character as truths and persons. Though perhaps a necessary  path, they were a dangerous one by which to approach the 
Deity; in which "many," says Plutarch, "mistaking the sign for  the thing signified, fell into a ridiculous superstition; while  others, in avoiding one extreme, plunged into the no less  hideous gulf of irreligion and impiety."

All great Reformers have warred against this evil, deeply  feeling the intellectual mischief arising out of a degraded idea  of the Supreme Being: and have claimed for their own God an  existence or personality distinct from the objects of ancient  superstition; disowning in His name the symbols and images  that had profaned His Temple. But they have not seen that the  utmost which can be effected by human effort, is to substitute  impressions relatively correct, for others whose falsehood has  been detected, and to re-place a gross symbolism by a purer  one. Every man, without being aware of it, worships a  conception of his own mind; for all symbolism, as well as all  language, shares the subjective character of the ideas it  represents. The epithets we apply to God only recall either  visible or intellectual symbols to the eye or mind. The modes  or forms of manifestation of the reverential feeling that  constitutes the religious sentiment, are incomplete and  progressive; each term and symbol predicates a partial truth,  remaining always amenable to improvement or modification,  and, in its turn, to be superseded by others more accurate and  comprehensive.

Idolatry consists in confounding the symbol with the thing  signified, the substitution of a material for a mental object of  worship, after a higher spiritualism has become possible; an  ill-judged preference of the inferior to the superior symbol, an  inadequate and sensual conception of the Deity: and every  religion and every conception of God is idolatrous, in so far as  it is imperfect, and as it substitutes a feeble and temporary  idea in the shrine of that Undiscoverable Being who can be  known only in part, and who can therefore be honored, even  by the most enlightened among His worshippers, only in  proportion to their limited powers of understanding and  imagining to themselves His perfections,  p. 517

Like the belief in a Deity, the belief in the soul's immortality  is rather a natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness,  than a dogma belonging to any particular age or country. It  gives eternity to man's nature, and reconciles its seeming  anomalies and contradictions; it makes him strong in  weakness and perfectible in imperfection; and it alone gives  an adequate object for his hopes and energies, and value and  dignity to his pursuits. It is concurrent with the belief in an  infinite, eternal Spirit, since it is chiefly through  consciousness of the dignity of the mind within us, that we  learn to appreciate its evidences in the Universe.

To fortify, and as far as possible to impart this hope, was the  great aim of ancient wisdom, whether expressed in forms of  poetry or philosophy; as it was of the Mysteries, and as it is of 
Masonry. Life rising out of death was the great mystery,  which symbolism delighted to represent under a thousand  ingenious forms. Nature was ransacked for attestations to the  grand truth which seems to transcend all other gifts of  imagination, or rather to be their essence and consummation. 
Such evidences were easily discovered. They were found in  the olive and the lotus, in the evergreen myrtle of the Mystce  and of the grave of Polydorus, in the deadly but self-renewing  serpent, the wonderful moth emerging from the coffin of the  worm, the phenomena of germination, the settings and risings  of the sun and stars, the darkening and growth of the moon,  and in sleep, "the minor mystery of death."

The stories of the birth of Apollo from Latona, and of dead  heroes, like Glaucus, resuscitated in caves, were allegories of  the natural alternations of life and death in nature, changes  that are but expedients to preserve her virginity and purity  inviolable in the general sum of her operations, whose  aggregate presents only a majestic calm, rebuking alike man's  presumption and his despair. The typical death of the Nature- 
God, Osiris, Atys, Adonis, Hiram, was a profound but  consolatory mystery: the heating charms of Orpheus were  connected with his destruction; and his bones, those valued  pledges of fertility and victory, were, by a beautiful  contrivance, often buried within the sacred precincts of his  immortal equivalent.

In their doctrines as to the immortality of the soul, the Greek 
Philosophers merely stated with more precision ideas long  before extant independently among themselves, in the form of  symbolical suggestion. Egypt and Ethiopia in these matters  learned from  p. 518

[paragraph continues] India, where, as everywhere else, the origin of  the doctrine was as remote and untraceable as the origin of  man himself. Its natural expression is found in the language of 
Chrishna, in the Bagvat Ghita: "I myself never was non¬  existent, nor thou, nor these princes of the Earth; nor shall we  ever hereafter cease to be. .. The soul is not a thing of which  a man may say, it hath been, or is about to be, or is to be  hereafter; for it is a thing without birth; it is pre-existent,  changeless, eternal, and is not to be destroyed with this mortal  frame."

According to the dogma of antiquity, the thronging forms of  life are a series of purifying migrations, through which the  divine principle re-ascends to the unity of its source.

Inebriated in the bowl of Dionusos, and dazzled in the mirror  of existence, the souls, those fragments or sparks of the 
Universal Intelligence, forgot their native dignify, and passed  into the terrestrial frames they coveted. The most usual type  of the spirit's descent was suggested by the sinking of the Sun  and Stars from the upper to the lower hemisphere. When it  arrived within the portals of the proper empire of Dionusos,  the God of this World, the scene of delusion and change, its  individuality became clothed in a material fonn; and as  individual bodies were compared to a garment, the world was  the investiture of the Universal Spirit. Again, the body was  compared to a vase or urn, the soul's recipient; the world  being the mighty bowl which received the descending Deity. 
In another image, ancient as the Grottoes of the Magi and the  denunciations of Ezekiel, the world was as a dimly  illuminated cavern, where shadows seem realities, and where  the soul becomes forgetful of its celestial origin in proportion  to its proneness to material fascinations. By another, the  period of the Soul's embodiment is as when exhalations are  condensed, and the aerial element assumes the grosser form of  water.

But if vapor falls in water, it was held, water is again the birth  of vapors, which ascend and adorn the Heavens. If our mortal  existence be the death of the spirit, our death may be the  renewal of its life; as physical bodies are exalted from earth to  water, from water to air, from air to fire, so the man may rise  into the Hero, the Hero into the God. In the course of Nature,  the soul, to re-cover its lost estate, must pass through a series  of trials and migrations. The scene of those trials is the Grand 
Sanctuary of Initiations, the world: their primary agents are  the elements; and Dionusos, as Sovereign of Nature, or the  sensuous world personified,  p. 519  is official Arbiter of the Mysteries, and guide of the soul,  which he introduces into the body and dismisses from it. He is  the Sun, that liberator of the elements, and his spiritual  mediation was suggested by the same imagery which made  the Zodiac the supposed path of the spirits in their descent and  their return, and Cancer and Capricorn the gates through  which they passed.

He was not only Creator of the World, but guardian, liberator,  and Saviour of the Soul. Ushered into the world amidst  lightning and thunder, he became the Liberator celebrated in  the Mysteries of Thebes, delivering earth from Winter's chain,  conducting the nightly chorus of the Stars and the celestial  revolution of the year. His symbolism was the inexhaustible  imagery employed to fill up the stellar devices of the Zodiac:  he was the Vernal Bull, the Lion, the Ram, the Autumnal 
Goat, the Serpent: in short, the varied Deity, the resulting  manifestation personified, the all in the many, the varied year,  life passing into innumerable forms; essentially inferior to  none, yet changing with the seasons, and undergoing their  periodical decay.

He mediates and intercedes for man, and reconciles the 
Universal Unseen Mind with the individualized spirit of  which he is emphatically the Perfecter; a consummation  which he effects, first through the vicissitudes of the  elemental ordeal, the alternate fire of Summer and the  showers of Winter, "the trials or test of an immortal Nature";  and secondarily and symbolically through the Mysteries. He  holds not only the cup of generation, but also that of wisdom  or initiation, whose influence is contrary to that of the former,  causing the soul to abhor its material bonds, and to long for its  return. The first was the Cup of Forgetfulness; while the  second is the Urn of Aquarius, quaffed by the returning spirit,  as by the returning Sun at the Winter Solstice, and  emblematic of the exchange of worldly impressions for the  recovered recollections of the glorious sights and enjoyments  of its pre-existence. Water nourishes and purifies; and the um  from which it flows was thought worthy to be a symbol of 
Deity, as of the Osiris-Canobus who with living water  irrigated the soil of Egypt; and also an emblem of Hope that  should cheer the dwellings of the dead.

The second birth of Dionusos, like the rising of Osiris and 
Atys from the dead, and the raising of Khurum, is a type of  the spiritual regeneration of man. Psyche (the Soul), like 
Ariadne, had  p. 520  two lovers, an earthly and an immortal one. The immortal  suitor is Dionusos, the Eros-Phanes of the Orphici, gradually  exalted by the progress of thought, out of the symbol of 
Sensuality into the torch-bearer of the Nuptials of the Gods;  the Divine Influence which physically called the world into  being, and which, awakening the soul from its Stygian trance,  restores it from earth to Heaven.

Thus the scientific theories of the ancients, expounded in the 
Mysteries, as to the origin of the soul, its descent, its sojourn  here below, and its return, were not a mere barren  contemplation of the nature of the world, and of the intelligent  beings existing there. They were not an idle speculation as to  the order of the world, and about the soul, but a study of the  means for arriving at the great object proposed, the perfecting  of the soul; and, as a necessary consequence, that of morals  and society. This Earth, to them, was not the Soul's home, but  its place of exile. Heaven was its home, and there was its  birth-place. To it, it ought incessantly to turn its eyes. Man  was not a terrestrial plant. His roots were in Heaven. The soul  had lost its wings, clogged by the viscosity of matter. It would  recover them when it extricated itself from matter and  commenced its upward flight.

Matter being, in their view, as it was in that of St. Paul, the  principle of all the passions that trouble reason, mislead the  intelligence, and stain the purity of the soul, the Mysteries  taught man how to enfeeble the action of matter on the soul,  and to restore to the latter its natural dominion. And lest the  stains so contracted should continue after death, lustrations  were used, fastings, expiations, macerations, continence, and  above all, initiations. Many of these practices were at first  merely symbolical,—material signs indicating the moral purity  required of the Initiates; but they afterward came to be  regarded as actual productive causes of that purity.

The effect of initiation was meant to be the same as that of  philosophy, to purify the soul of its passions, to weaken the  empire of the body over the divine portion of man, and to give  him here below a happiness anticipatory of the felicity to be  one day enjoyed by him, and of the future vision by him of  the Divine Beings. And therefore Proclus and the other 
Platonists taught "that the Mysteries and initiations withdrew  souls from this mortal and material life, to re-unite them to the  gods; and dissipated  p. 521  for the adepts the shades of ignorance by the splendors of the 
Deity." Such were the precious fruits of the last Degree of the 
Mystic Science,-to see Nature in her springs and sources, and  to become familiar with the causes of things and with real  existences.

Cicero says that the soul must exercise itself in the practice of  the virtues, if it would speedily return to its place of origin. It  should, while imprisoned in the body, free itself therefrom by  the contemplation of superior beings, and in some sort be  divorced from the body and the senses. Those who remain  enslaved, subjugated by their passions and violating the  sacred laws of religion and society, will re-ascend to Heaven,  only after they shall have been purified through a long  succession of ages.

The Initiate was required to emancipate himself from his  passions, and to free himself from the hindrances of the  senses and of matter, in order that he might rise to the  contemplation of the Deity, or of that incorporeal and  unchanging light in which live and subsist the causes of  created natures. "We must," says Porphyry, "flee from  everything sensual, that the soul may with ease re-unite itself  with God, and live happily with Him." "This is the great work  of initiation," says Hierocles;—"to recall the soul to what is  truly good and beautiful, and make it familiar therewith, and  they its own; to deliver it from the pains and ills it endures  here below, enchained in matter as in a dark prison; to  facilitate its return to the celestial splendors, and to establish it  in the Fortunate Isles, by restoring it to its first estate.

Thereby, when the hour of death arrives, the soul, freed of its  mortal garmenting, which it leaves behind it as a legacy to  earth, will rise buoyantly to its home among the Stars, there to  re-take its ancient condition, and approach toward the Divine  nature as far as man may do."

Plutarch compares Isis to knowledge, and Typhon to  ignorance, obscuring the light of the sacred doctrine whose 
'blaze lights the soul of the Initiate. No gift of the gods, he  holds, is so precious as the knowledge of the Truth, and that  of the Nature of the gods, so far as our limited capacities  allow us to rise toward them. The Valentinians termed  initiation LIGHT. The Initiate, says Psellus, becomes an 
Epopt, when admitted to see THE DIVINE LIGHTS.

Clemens of Alexandria, imitating the language of an Initiate  in the Mysteries of Bacchus, and inviting this Initiate, whom  he terms blind like Tiresias, to come to see Christ, Who will  p. 522  blaze upon his eyes with greater glory than the Sun, exclaims: 
"Oh Mysteries most truly holy! Oh pure Light! When the  torch of the Dadoukos gleams, Heaven and the Deity are  displayed to my eyes! I am initiated, and become holy!" This  was the true object of initiation; to be sanctified, and TO SEE,  that is, to have just and faithful conceptions of the Deity, the  knowledge of Whom was THE LIGHT of the Mysteries. It  was promised the Initiate at Samothrace, that he should  become pure and just. Clemens says that by baptism, souls are  illuminated, and led to the pure light with which mingles no  darkness, nor anything material. The Initiate, become an 
Epopt, was called A SEER. "HAIL, NEW-BORN LIGHT!"  the Initiates cried in the Mysteries of Bacchus.

Such was held to be the effect of complete initiation. It lighted  up the soul with rays from the Divinity, and became for it, as  it were, the eye with which, according to the Pythagoreans, it  con-templates the field of Truth; in its mystical abstractions,  wherein it rises superior to the body, whose action on it, it  annuls for the time, to re-enter into itself, so as entirely to  occupy itself with the view of the Divinity, and the means of  coming to resemble Him.

Thus enfeebling the dominion of the senses and the passions  over the soul, and as it were freeing the latter from a sordid  slavery, and by the steady practice of all the virtues, active  and contemplative, our ancient brethren strove to fit  themselves to return to the bosom of the Deity. Let not our  objects as Masons fall below theirs. We use the symbols  which they used; and teach the same great cardinal doctrines  that they taught, of the existence of an intellectual God, and  the immortality of the soul of man. If the details of then-  doctrines as to the soul seem to us to verge on absurdity, let us  compare them with the common notions of our own day, and  be silent. If it seems to us that they regarded the symbol in  some cases as the thing symbolized, and worshipped the sign  as if it were itself Deity, let us reflect how insufficient are our  own ideas of Deity, and how we worship those ideas and  images formed and fashioned in our own minds, and not the 
Deity Himself: and if we are inclined to smile at the  importance they attached to lustrations and fasts, let us pause  and inquire whether the same weakness of human nature does  not exist to-day, causing rites and ceremonies to be regarded  as actively efficient for the salvation of souls.  p. 523

And let us ever remember the words of an old writer, with  which we conclude this lecture: "It is a pleasure to stand on  the shore, and to see ships tossed upon the sea: a pleasure to  stand in the window of a castle, and see a battle and the  adventures thereof: but no pleasure is comparable to the  standing on the vantage-ground of TRUTH (a hill not to be  commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene),  and to see the errors and wanderings, and mists and tempests,  in the vale below; so always that this prospect be with pity,  and not with swelling or pride. Certainly it is Heaven upon 
Earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in 
Providence, AND TURN UPON THE POLES OF TRUTH."

XXVI.

PRINCE OF MERCY, OR SCOTTISH 
TRINITARIAN.

WHILE you were veiled in darkness, you heard repeated by  the Voice of the Great Past its most ancient doctrines. None  has the right to object, if the Christian Mason sees  foreshadowed in Chrishna and Sosiosch, in Mithras and 
Osiris, the Divine WORD that, as he believes, became Man,  and died upon the cross to redeem a fallen race. Nor can he  object if others see reproduced, in the WORD of the beloved 
Disciple, that was in the beginning with God, and that was 
God, and by Whom everything was made, only the LOGOS  of Plato, and the WORD or Uttered THOUGHT or first 
Emanation of LIGHT, Or the Perfect REASON of the Great, 
Silent, Supreme, Uncreated Deity, believed in and adored by  all.

We do not undervalue the importance of any Truth. We utter  no word that can be deemed irreverent by any one of any  faith. We do not tell the Moslem that it is only important for  him to believe that there is but one God, and wholly  unessential whether Mahomet was His prophet. We do not tell  the Hebrew that the Messiah whom he expects was born in 
Bethlehem nearly two thousand years ago; and that he is a  heretic because he will not so believe. And as little do we tell  the sincere Christian that Jesus of Nazareth was but a man  like us, or His history but the unreal revival of an older  legend. To do either is beyond our jurisdiction. Masonry, of  no one age, belongs to all time; of no one religion, it finds its  great truths in all.

To every Mason, there is a GOD; ONE, Supreme, Infinite in 
Goodness, Wisdom, Foresight, Justice, and Benevolence; 
Creator, Disposer, and Preserver of all things. How, or by  what intermediates He creates and acts, and in what way He  unfolds and manifests Himself, Masonry leaves to creeds and 
Religions to inquire.

To every Mason, the soul of man is immortal. Whether it  p. 525  emanates from and will return to God, and what its continued  mode of existence hereafter, each judges for himself. Masonry  was not made to settle that.

To every Mason, WISDOM or INTELLIGENCE, FORCE or 
STRENGTH, and HARMONY, or FITNESS and BEAUTY,  are the Trinity of the attributes of God. With the subtleties of 
Philosophy concerning them Masonry does not meddle, nor  decide as to the reality of the supposed Existences which are  their Personifications: nor whether the Christian Trinity be  such a personification, or a Reality of the gravest import and  significance.

To every Mason, the Infinite Justice and Benevolence of God  give ample assurance that Evil will ultimately be dethroned,  and the Good, the True, and the Beautiful reign triumphant  and eternal. It teaches, as it feels and knows, that Evil, and 
Pain, and Sorrow exist as part of a wise and beneficent plan,  all the parts of which work together under God's eye to a  result which shall be perfection. Whether the existence of evil  is rightly explained in this creed or in that, by Typhon the 
Great Serpent, by Ahriman and his Armies of Wicked Spirits,  by the Giants and Titans that war against Heaven, by the two  co-existent Principles of Good and Evil, by Satan's temptation  and the fall of Man, by Lok and the Serpent Fenris, it is  beyond the domain of Masonry to decide, nor does it need to  inquire. Nor is it within its Province to determine how the  ultimate triumph of Light and Truth and Good, over Darkness  and Error and Evil, is to be achieved; nor whether the 
Redeemer, looked and longed for by all nations, hath  appeared in Judea, or is yet to come.

It reverences all the great reformers. It sees in Moses, the 
Lawgiver of the Jews, in Confucius and Zoroaster, in Jesus of 
Nazareth, and in the Arabian Iconoclast, Great Teachers of 
Morality, and Eminent Reformers, if no more: and allows  every brother of the Order to assign to each such higher and  even Divine Character as his Creed and Truth require.

Thus Masonry disbelieves no truth, and teaches unbelief in no  creed, except so far as such creed may lower its lofty estimate  of the Deity, degrade Him to the level of the passions of  humanity, deny the high destiny of man, impugn the goodness  and benevolence of the Supreme God, strike at those great  columns of Masonry, Faith, Hope, and Charity, or inculcate  immorality, and disregard of the active duties of the Order.  p. 526

Masonry is a worship; but one in which all civilized men can  unite; for it does not undertake to explain or dogmatically to  settle those great mysteries, that are above the feeble  comprehension of our human intellect. It trusts in God, and 
HOPES; it BELIEVES, like a child, and is humble. It draws  no sword to compel others to adopt its belief, or to be happy  with its hopes. And it WAITS with patience to understand the  mysteries of Nature and Nature's God hereafter.

The greatest mysteries in the Universe are those which are  ever going on around us; so trite and common to us that we  never note them nor reflect upon them. Wise men tell us of  the laws that regulate the motions of the spheres, which,  flashing in huge circles and spinning on their axes, are also  ever darting with inconceivable rapidity through the infinities  of Space; while we atoms sit here, and dream that all was  made for us. They tell us learnedly of centripetal and  centrilugal forces, gravity and attraction, and all the other  sounding terms invented to hide a want of meaning. There are  other forces in the Universe than those that are mechanical.

Here are two minute seeds, not much unlike in appearance,  and two of larger size. Hand them to the learned Pundit, 
Chemistry, who tells us how combustion goes on in the lungs,  and plants are fed with phosphorus and carbon, and the  alkalies and silex. Let her decompose them, analyze them,  torture them in all the ways she knows. The net result of each  is a little sugar, a little fibrin, a little water—carbon,  potassium, sodium, and the like—one cares not to know what.

We hide them in the ground: and the slight rains moisten  them, and the Sun shines upon them, and little slender shoots  spring up and grow;—and what a miracle is the mere growth! —  the force, the power, the capacity by which the little feeble  shoot, that a small worm can nip off with a single snap of its  mandibles, extracts from the earth and air and water the  different elements, so learnedly catalogued, with which it  increases in stature, and rises imperceptibly toward the sky.

One grows to be a slender, fragile, feeble stalk, soft of texture,  like an ordinary weed; another a strong bush, of woody fibre,  armed with thorns, and sturdy enough to bid defiance to the  winds: the third a tender tree, subject to be blighted by the  frost, and looked down upon by all the forest; while another  spreads its  p. 527  rugged arms abroad, and cares for neither frost nor ice, nor  the snows that for months lie around its roots.

But lo! out of the brown foul earth, and colorless invisible air,  and limpid rain-water, the chemistry of the seeds has  extracted colors —four different shades of green, that paint the  leaves which put forth in the spring upon our plants, our  shrubs, and our trees. Later still come the flowers—the vivid  colors of the rose, the beautiful brilliance of the carnation, the  modest blush of the apple; and the splendid white of the  orange. Whence come the colors of the leaves and flowers?

By what process of chemistry are they extracted from the  carbon, the phosphorus, and the lime? Is it any greater miracle  to make something out of nothing?

Pluck the flowers. Inhale the delicious perfumes', each perfect,  and all delicious. Whence have they come? By what  combination of acids and alkalies could the chemist's  laboratory produce them?

And now on two comes the fruit—the ruddy apple and the  golden orange. Pluck them—open them! The texture and  fabric how totally different! The taste how entirely dissimilar- 
-the perfume of each distinct from its flower and from the  other. Whence the taste and this new perfume? The same  earth and air and water have been made to furnish a different  taste to each fruit, a different perfume not only to each fruit,  but to each fruit and its own flower.

Is it any more a problem whence come thought and will and  perception and all the phenomena of the mind, than this,  whence come the colors, the perfumes, the taste, of the fruit  and flower?

And lo! in each fruit new seeds, each gifted with the same  wondrous power of reproduction-each with the same  wondrous forces wrapped up in it to be again in turn evolved. 
Forces that had lived three thousand years in the grain of  wheat found in the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy; forces  of which learning and science and wisdom know no more  than they do of the nature and laws of action of God. What  can we know of the nature, and how can we understand the  powers and mode of operation of the human soul, when the  glossy leaves, the pearl-white flower, and the golden fruit of  the orange are miracles wholly beyond our comprehension?

We but hide our ignorance in a cloud of words;-and the  words too often are mere combinations of sounds without any  meaning.  p. 528

[paragraph continues] What is the centrifugal force? A tendency to go  in a particular direction! What external "force" then,  produces that tendency?

What force draws the needle round to the north? What force  moves the muscle that raises the arm, when the will  determines it shall rise? Whence comes the will itself? Is it  spontaneous—a first cause, or an effect? These too are  miracles; inexplicable as the creation, or the existence and  self-existence of God.

Who will explain to us the passion, the peevishness, the  anger, the memory, and affections of the small canary-wren?  the consciousness of identity and the dreams of the dog? the  reasoning powers of the elephant? the wondrous instincts,  passions, government, and civil policy, and modes of  communication of ideas of the ant and bee?

Who has yet made us to understand, with all his learned  words, how heat comes to us from the Sun, and light from the  remote Stars, setting out upon its journey earthward from  some, at the time the Chalcheans commenced to build the 
Tower of Babel? Or how the image of an external object  comes to and fixes itself upon the retina of the eye; and when  there, how that mere empty, unsubstantial image becomes  transmuted into the wondrous thing that we call SIGHT? Or  how the waves of the atmosphere striking upon the tympanum  of the ear—those thin, invisible waves—produce the equally  wondrous phenomenon of HEARING, and become the roar of  the tornado, the crash of the thunder, the mighty voice of the  ocean, the chirping of the cricket, the delicate sweet notes and  exquisite trills and variations of the wren and mocking-bird,  or the magic melody of the instrument of Paganini?

Our senses are mysteries to us, and we are mysteries to  ourselves. Philosophy has taught us nothing as to the nature  of our sensations, our perceptions, our cognizances, the origin  of our thoughts and ideas, but words. By no effort or degree  of reflection, never so long continued, can man become  conscious of a personal identity in himself, separate and  distinct from his body and his brain. We torture ourselves in  the effort to gain an idea of ourselves, and weary with the  exertion. Who has yet made us understand how, from the  contact with a foreign body, the image in the eye, the wave of  air impinging on the ear, particular particles entering the  nostrils, and coming in contact with the palate, come  sensations in the nerves, and from that, perception in the  mind, of the animal or the man?  p. 529

What do we know of Substance? Men even doubt yet whether  it exists. Philosophers tell us that our senses make known to  us only the attributes of substance, extension, hardness, color,  and the like; but not the thing itself that is extended, solid,  black or white; as we know the attributes of the Soul, its  thoughts and its perceptions, and not the Soul itself which  perceives and thinks.

What a wondrous mystery is there in heat and light, existing,  we know not how, within certain limits, narrow in comparison  with infinity, beyond which on every side stretch out infinite  space and the blackness of unimaginable darkness, and the  intensity of inconceivable cold! Think only of the mighty 
Power required to maintain warmth and light in the central  point of such an infinity, to whose darkness that of Midnight,  to whose cold that of the last Arctic Island is nothing. And yet 
GOD is everywhere.

And what a mystery are the effects of heat and cold upon the  wondrous fluid that we call water! What a mystery lies hidden  in every flake of snow and in every crystal of ice, and in their  final transformation into the invisible vapor that rises from the  ocean or the land, and floats above the summits of the  mountains!

What a multitude of wonders, indeed, has chemistry unveiled  to our eyes! Think only that if some single law enacted by 
God were at once repealed, that of attraction or affinity or  cohesion, for example, the whole material world, with its  solid granite and adamant, its veins of gold and silver, its trap  and porphyry, its huge beds of coal, our own frames and the  very ribs and bones of this apparently indestructible earth,  would instantaneously dissolve, with all Suns and Stars and 
Worlds throughout all the Universe of God, into a thin  invisible vapor of infinitely minute particles or atoms,  diffused throughout infinite space; and with them light and  heat would disappear; unless the Deity Himself be, as the 
Ancient Persians thought, the Eternal Light and the Immortal 
Fire.

The mysteries of the Great Universe of God! How can we  with our limited mental vision expect to grasp and  comprehend them! Infinite SPACE, stretching out from us  every way, without limit: infinite TIME, without beginning or  end; and WE, HERE, and NOW, in the centre of each! An  infinity of suns, the nearest of which only diminish in size,  viewed with the most powerful telescope: each with its  retinue of worlds; infinite numbers of such suns, so remote  from us that their light would not reach us, journeying during  an infinity of time, while the light that has  p. 530  reached us, from some that we seem to see, has been upon its  journey for fifty centuries: our world spinning upon its axis,  and rushing ever in its circuit round the sun; and it, the sun,  and all our system revolving round some great central point;  and that, and suns, stars, and worlds evermore flashing  onward with incredible rapidity through illimitable space: and  then, in every drop of water that we drink, in every morsel of  much of our food, in the air, in the earth, in the sea, incredible  multitudes of living creatures, invisible to the naked eye, of a  minuteness beyond belief, yet organized, living, feeding,  perhaps with consciousness of identity, and memory and  instinct.

Such are some of the mysteries of the great Universe of God. 
And yet we, whose life and that of the world on which we live  form but a point in the centre of infinite Time: we, who  nourish animalcule within, and on whom vegetables grow  without, would fain learn "how God created this Universe,  would understand His Powers, His Attributes, His 
Emanations, His Mode of Existence and of Action; would fain  know the plan according to which all events proceed, that  plan profound as God Himself; would know the laws by  which He controls His Universe; would fain see and talk to 
Him face to face, as man talks to man: and we try not to  believe, because we do not understand.

He commands us to love one another, to love our neighbor as  ourself; and we dispute and wrangle, and hate and slay each  other, because we cannot be of one opinion as to the Essence  of His Nature, as to His Attributes; whether He became man  bom of a woman, and was crucified; whether the Holy Ghost  is of the same substance with the Father, or only of a similar  substance; whether a feeble old man is God's Vicegerent;  whether some are elected from all eternity to be saved, and  others to be condemned and punished; whether punishment of  the wicked after death is to be eternal; whether this doctrine  or the other be heresy or truth;— drenching the world with  blood, depopulating realms, and turning fertile lands into  deserts; until, for religious war, persecution, and bloodshed,  the Earth for many a century has rolled round the Sun, a  charnel-house, steaming and reeking with human gore, the  blood of brother slain by brother for opinion's sake, that has  soaked into and polluted all her veins, and made her a horror  to her sisters of the Universe.

And if men were all Masons, and obeyed with all their heart  p. 531  her mild and gentle teachings, that world would be a paradise;  while intolerance and persecution make of it a hell. For this is  the Masonic Creed: BELIEVE, in God's Infinite Benevolence, 
Wisdom, and Justice: HOPE, for the final triumph of Good  over Evil, and for Perfect Harmony as the final result of all  the concords and discords of the Universe: and be 
CHARITABLE as God is, toward the unfaith, the errors, the  follies, and the faults of men: for all make one great  brotherhood.

INSTRUCTION.

Sen W- ■ Brother Junior Warden, are you a Prince of 
Mercy?

Jun ■ ■ W- ■ I have seen the Delta and the Holy NAMES upon  it, and am an AMETH like yourself, in the TRIPLE 
COVENANT, of which we bear the mark.

Qu What is the first Word upon the Delta?

Ans The Ineffable Name of Deity, the true mystery of  which is known to the Ameth alone.

Qu What do the three sides of the Delta denote to us?

Ans To us, and to all Masons, the three Great Attributes or 
Developments of the Essence of the Deity; WISDOM, or the 
Reflective and Designing Power, in which, when there was  naught but God, the Plan and Idea of the Universe was shaped  and formed: FORCE, or the Executing and Creating Power,  which instantaneously acting, realized the Type and Idea  framed by Wisdom; and the Universe, and all Stars and 
Worlds, and Light and Life, and Men and Angels and all  living creatures WERE; and HARMONY, or the Preserving 
Power, Order, and Beauty, maintaining the Universe in its

State, and constituting the law of Harmony, Motion, 
Proportion, and Progression:—WISDOM, which thought the  plan; STRENGTH, which created : HARMONY, which  upholds and preserves:— the Masonic Trinity, three Powers  and one Essence: the three columns which support the 
Universe, Physical, Intellectual, and Spiritual, of which every 
Masonic Lodge is a type and symbol:—while to the Christian 
Mason, they represent the Three that bear record in Heaven,  the FATHER, the WORD, and the HOLY SPIRIT, which  three are ONE.

Qu What do the three Greek letters upon the Delta, I H-'- 
X [Iota, Eta, and Sigma] represent?

Arts Three of the Names of the Supreme Deity among the

Syrians, Phoenicians, and Hebrews ... IHUH [YHWH]; Self- 
Existence  p. 532

[paragraph continues] . . . AL [?N]: the Nature-God, or Soul of the 
Universe.. . SHADAI [‘IS’] Supreme Power. Also three of the 
Six Chief At-tributes of God, among the Kabbalists:— 
WISDOM [IEH], the Intellect, (Node) of the Egyptians, the 
Word (Aoyoi;) of the Platonists, and the Wisdom (Xocpia) of  the Gnostics: . . MAGNIFICENCE [AL], the Symbol of  which was the Lion's Head: . . and VICTORY and GLORY 
[Tsabaoth ], which are the two columns JACHIN and BOAZ,  that stand in the Portico of the Temple of Masonry. To the 
Christian Mason they are the first three letters of the name of  the Son of God, Who died upon the cross to redeem mankind.

Qu What is the first of the THREE COVENANTS, of  which we bear the mark?

A ns That which God made with Noah; when He said, "I  will not again curse the earth any more for man's sake, neither  will I smite any more everything living as I have done. While  the Earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat,  and Winter and Summer, and day and night shall not cease. I  will establish My covenant with you, and with your seed after  you, and with every living creature. All mankind shall no  more be cut off by the waters of a flood, nor shall there any  more be a flood to destroy the earth. This is the token of My  covenant: I do set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a  token of a covenant between Me and the earth: an everlasting  covenant between Me and every living creature on the earth."

Qu What is the second of the Three Covenants?

A ns That which God made with Abraham; when He said, "I  am the Absolute Uncreated God. I will make My covenant  between Me and thee, and thou shalt be the Father of Many 
Nations, and Kings shall come from thy loins. I will establish 
My covenant between Me and thee, and thy descendants after  thee, to the remotest generations, for an everlasting covenant;  and I will be thy God and their God, and will give thee the  land of Canaan for an everlasting possession."

Qu What is the third Covenant?

Ans That which God made with all men by His prophets;  when He said: "I will gather all nations and tongues, and they  shall come and see My Glory. I will create new Heavens and  a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered, nor  come into mind. The Sun shall no more shine by day, nor the 
Moon by night; but the Lord shall be an everlasting light and  splendor.  p. 533

[paragraph continues] His Spirit and His Word shall remain with men  forever. The heavens shall vanish away like vapor, and the  earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein  shall die; but my salvation shall be forever, and my  righteousness shall not end; and there shall be Light among  the Gentiles, and salvation unto the ends of the earth. The  redeemed of the Lord shall return, and everlasting joy be on  their heads, and sorrow and mourning shall flee away."

Qu What is the symbol of the Triple Covenant?

Ans The Triple Triangle.

Qu Of what else is it the symbol to us?

Ans Of the Trinity of Attributes of the Deity; and of the  triple essence of Man, the Principle of Life, the Intellectual

Power, and the Soul or Immortal Emanation from the Deity.

Qu What is the first great Truth of the Sacred Mysteries?

A ns •‘•No man hath seen God at any time. He is One, Eternal, 
All-Powerful, All-Wise, Infinitely Just, Merciful, Benevolent,  and Compassionate, Creator and Preserver of all things, the 
Source of Light and Life, coextensive with Time and Space; 
Who thought, and with the Thought created the Universe and  all living things, and the souls of men: THAT IS:—the 
PERMANENT; while everything beside is a perpetual  genesis.

Qu What is the second great Truth of the Sacred Mysteries?

A ns The Soul of Man is Immortal; not the result of  organization, nor an aggregate of modes of action of matter,  nor a succession of phenomena and perceptions; but an 
EXISTENCE, one and identical, a living spirit, a spark of the 
Great Central Light, that hath entered info and dwells in the  body; to be separated therefrom at death, and return to God  who gave it: that doth not disperse nor vanish at death, like  breath or a smoke, nor can be annihilated; but still exists and  possesses activity and intelligence, even as it existed in God,  before it was enveloped in the body.

Qu What is the third great Truth in Masonry?

Ans The impulse which directs to right conduct, and deters  from crime, is not only older than the ages of nations and  cities, but coeval with that Divine Being Who sees and rules  both Heaven and earth. Nor did Tarquin less violate that 
Eternal Law, though in his reign there might have been no  written law at Rome against such violence; for the principle  that impels us to right conduct, and warns us against guilt,  springs out of the nature of things. It did not begin to be law  when it was first written, nor  p. 534  was it originated ; but it is coeval with the Divine Intelligence  itself. The consequence of virtue is not to be made the end  thereof; and laudable performances must have deeper roots,  motives, and instigations, to give them the stamp of virtues.

Qu What is the fourth great Truth in Masonry?

Ans The moral truths are as absolute as the metaphysical  truths. Even the Deity cannot make it that there should be  effects without a cause, or phenomena without substance. As  little could He make it to be sinful and evil to respect our  pledged word, to love truth, to moderate our passions. The  principles of Morality are axioms, like the principles of 
Geometry. The moral laws are the necessary relations that  flow from the nature of things, and they are not created by,  but have existed eternally in God. Their continued existence  does not depend upon the exercise of His WILL. Truth and 
Justice are of His ESSENCE. Not because we are feeble and 
God omnipotent, is it our duty to obey His law. We may be  forced, but are not under obligation, to obey the stronger. God  is the principle of Morality, but not by His mere will, which,  abstracted from all other of His attributes, would be neither  just nor unjust. Good is the expression of His will, in so far as  that will is itself the expression of eternal, absolute, uncreated  justice, which is in God, which His will did not create; but  which it executes and promulgates, as our will proclaims and  promulgates and executes the idea of the good which is in us. 
He has given us the law of Truth and Justice; but He has not  arbitrarily instituted that law. Justice is inherent in His will,  because it is contained in His intelligence and wisdom, in His  very nature and most intimate essence.

Qu What is the fifth great Truth in Masonry?

Ans There is an essential distinction between Good and 
Evil, what is just and what is unjust; and to this distinction is  attached, for every intelligent and free creature, the absolute  obligation of conforming to what is good and just. Man is an  intelligent and free being,—free, because he is conscious that  it is his duty, and because it is made his duty, to obey the  dictates of truth and justice, and therefore he must necessarily  have the power of doing so, which involves the power of not  doing so;-capable of comprehending the distinction between  good and evil, justice and injustice, and the obligation which  accompanies it, and of naturally adhering to that obligation,  independently of any contract  p. 535  or positive law; capable also of resisting the temptations  which urge him toward evil and injustice, and of complying  with the sacred law of eternal justice.

That man is not governed by a resistless Fate or inexorable 
Destiny; but is free to choose between the evil and the good:  that Justice and Right, the Good and Beautiful, are of the  essence of the Divinity, like His Infinitude; and therefore they  are laws to man: that we are conscious of our freedom to act,  as we are conscious of our identity, and the continuance and  connectedness of our existence; and have the same evidence  of one as of the other; and if we can put one in doubt, we have  no certainty of either, and everything is unreal: that we can  deny our free will and free agency, only upon the ground that  they are in the nature of things impossible; which would be to  deny the Omnipotence of God.

Qu What is the sixth great Truth of Masonry?

Ans The necessity of practising the moral truths, is  obligation. The moral truths; necessary in the eye of reason,  are obligatory on the will. The moral obligation, like the  moral truth that is its foundation, is absolute. As the necessary  truths are not more or less necessary, so the obligation is not  more or less obligatory. There are degrees of importance  among different obligations; but none in the obligation itself. 
We are not nearly obliged, almost obliged. We are wholly so,  or not at all. If there be any place of reluge to which we can  escape from the obligation, it ceases to exist. If the obligation  is absolute, it is immutable and universal. For if that of to-day  may not be that of to-morrow, if what is obligatory on me  may not be obligatory on you, the obligation would differ  from itself, and be variable and contingent. This fact is the  principle of all morality. That every act contrary to right and  justice, deserves to be repressed by force, and punished when  committed, equally in the absence of any law or contract: that  man naturally recognizes the distinction between the merit  and demerit of actions, as he does that between justice and  injustice, honesty and dishonesty; and feels, without being  taught, and in the absence of law or contract, that it is wrong  for vice to be rewarded or go unpunished, and for virtue to be  punished or left unrewarded: and that, the Deity being  infinitely just and good, it must follow as a necessary and  inflexible law that punishment shall be the result of Sin, its  inevitable and natural effect and corollary, and not a mere  arbitrary vengeance.  p. 536

Qu What is the seventh great Truth in Masonry?

Ans The immutable law of God requires, that besides  respecting the absolute rights of others, and being merely just,  we should do good, be charitable, and obey the dictates of the  generous and noble sentiments of the soul. Charity is a law,  because our conscience is not satisfied nor at ease if we have  not relieved the suffering, the distressed, and the destitute. It  is to give that which he to whom you give has no right to take  or demand. To be charitable is obligatory on us. We are the

Almoners of God's bounties. But the obligation is not so  precise and inflexible as the obligation to be just. Charity  knows neither rale nor limit. It goes beyond all obligation. Its  beauty consists in its liberty. "He that loveth not, knoweth not 
God; FOR GOD IS LOVE. If we love one another, God  dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us. God is love;  and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in  him." To be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly  love; to relieve the necessities of the needy, and be generous,  liberal, and hospitable; to return to no man evil for evil; to  rejoice at the good fortune of others, and sympathize with  them in their sorrows and reverses; to live peaceably with all  men, and repay injuries with benefits and kindness; these are  the sublime dictates of the Moral Law, taught from the  infancy of the world, by Masonry.

Qu What is the eighth great Truth in Masonry?

Arts That the laws which control and regulate the Universe  of God, are those of motion and harmony. We see only the  isolated incidents of things, and with our feeble and limited  capacity and vision cannot discern their connection, nor the  mighty chords that make the apparent discord perfect  harmony. Evil is merely apparent, and all is in reality good  and perfect. For pain and sorrow, persecution and hardships,  affliction and destitution, sickness and death are but the  means, by which alone the noblest virtues could be  developed. Without them, and without sin and error, and  wrong and outrage, as there can be no effect without an  adequate cause, there could be neither patience under  suffering and distress; nor prudence in difficulty; nor  temperance to avoid excess; nor courage to meet danger; nor  truth, when to speak the truth is hazardous; nor love, when it  is met with ingratitude; nor charity for the needy and  destitute; nor forbearance and forgiveness of injuries; nor  toleration of erroneous opinions; nor charitable judgment and  construction of men's motives and  p. 537  actions; nor patriotism, nor heroism, nor honor, nor self-  denial, nor generosity. These and most other virtues and  excellencies would have no existence, and even their names  be unknown; and the poor virtues that still existed, would  scarce deserve the name; for life would be one fiat, dead, low  level, above which none of the lofty elements of human  nature would emerge; and man would lie lapped in contented  indolence and idleness, a mere worthless negative, instead of  the brave, strong soldier against the grim legions of Evil and  mde Difficulty.

Qu What is the ninth great Truth in Masonry?

Ans The great leading doctrine of this Degree;—that the 
JUSTICE, the WISDOM, and the MERCY of God are alike  infinite, alike perfect, and yet do not in the least jar nor  conflict one with the other; but form a Great Perfect Trinity of 
Attributes, three and yet one: that, the principle of merit and  demerit being absolute, and every good action deserving to be  rewarded, and every bad one to be punished, and God being  as just as He is good; and yet the cases constantly recurring in  this world, in which crime and cruelty, oppression, tyranny,  and injustice are prosperous, happy, fortunate, and self-  contented, and rule and reign, and enjoy all the blessings of 
God's beneficence, while the virtuous and good are  unfortunate, miserable, destitute, pining away in dungeons,  perishing with cold, and famishing with hunger, slaves of  oppression, and instruments and victims of the miscreants that  govern; so that this world, if there were no existence beyond  it, would be one great theatre of wrong and injustice, proving 
God wholly disregardful of His own necessary law of merit  and demerit;—it follows that there must be another life in  which these apparent wrongs shall be repaired: That all the  powers of man's soul tend to infinity; and his indomitable  instinct of immortality, and the universal hope of another life,  testified by all creeds, all poetry, all traditions, establish its  certainty; for man is not an orphan; but hath a Father near at  hand: and the day must come when Light and Tiuth, and the 
Just and Good shall be victorious, and Darkness, Error, 
Wrong, and Evil be annihilated, and known no more forever: 
That the Universe is one great Harmony, in which, according  to the faith of all nations, deep-rooted in all hearts in the  primitive ages, Light will ultimately prevail over Darkness,  and the Good Principle over the Evil: and the myriad souls  that have emanated from the Divinity, purified and ennobled  by the struggle  p. 538  here below, will again return to perfect bliss in the bosom of 
God, to offend against Whose laws will then be no longer  possible.

Qu What, then, is the one great lesson taught to us, as 
Masons, in this Degree?

Ans That to that state and realm of Light and Truth and 
Perfection, which is absolutely certain, all the good men on  earth are tending; and if there is a law from whose operation  none are exempt, which inevitably conveys their bodies to  darkness and to dust, there is another not less certain nor less  powerful, which conducts their spirits to that state of 
Happiness and Splendor and Perfection, the bosom of their 
Father and their God. The wheels of Nature are not made to  roll backward. Everything presses on to Eternity. From the  birth of Time an impetuous current has set in, which bears all  the sons of men toward that interminable ocean. Meanwhile, 
Heaven is attracting to itself whatever is congenial to its  nature, is enriching itself by the spoils of the Earth, and  collecting within its capacious bosom whatever is pure,  permanent, and divine, leaving nothing for the last fire to  consume but the gross matter that creates concupiscence;  while everything fit for that good fortune shall be gathered  and selected from the mins of the world, to adorn that Eternal 
City.

Let every Mason then obey the voice that calls him thither. 
Let us seek the things that are above, and be not content with  a world that must shortly perish, and which we must speedily  quit, while we neglect to prepare for that in which we are  invited to dwell forever. While everything within us and  around us reminds us of the approach of death, and concurs to  teach us that this is not our rest, let us hasten our preparations  for another world, and earnestly implore that help and  strength from our Father, which alone can put an end to that  fatal war which our desires have too long waged with our  destiny. When these move in the same direction, and that  which God's will renders unavoidable shall become our  choice, all things will be ours; life will be divested of its  vanity, and death disarmed of its 'terrors.

Qu What are the symbols of the purification necessary to  make us perfect Masons?

Ans Lavation with pure water, or baptism; because to  cleanse the body is emblematical of purifying the soul; and  because it conduces to the bodily health, and virtue is the  health of the soul, as sin and vice are its malady and  sickness:—unction, or anointing  p. 539  with oil; because thereby we are set apart and dedicated to the  service and priesthood of the Beautiful, the True, and the 
Good:—and robes of white, emblems of candor, purity, and  truth.

Qu What is to us the chief symbol of man's ultimate  redemption and regeneration?

A ns -'.The fraternal supper, of bread which nourishes, and of  wine which refreshes and exhilarates, symbolical of the time  which is to come, when all mankind shall be one great  harmonious brotherhood; and teaching us these great lessons:  that as matter changes ever, but no single atom is annihilated,  it is not rational to suppose that the far nobler soul does not  continue to exist beyond the grave: that many thousands who  have died before us might claim to be joint owners with  ourselves of the particles that compose our mortal bodies; for  matter ever forms new combinations; and the bodies of the  ancient dead, the patriarchs before and since the flood, the  kings and common people of all ages, resolved into their  constituent elements, are carried upon the wind over all  continents, and continually enter into and form part of the  habitations of new souls, creating new bonds of sympathy and  brotherhood between each man that lives and all his race. And  thus, in the bread we eat, and in the wine we drink to-night  may enter into and form part of us the identical particles of  matter that once formed parts of the material bodies called 
Moses, Confucius, Plato, Socrates, or Jesus of Nazareth. In  the truest sense, we eat and drink the bodies of the dead; and  cannot say that there is a single atom of our blood or body, the  ownership of which some other soul might not dispute with  us. It teaches us also the infinite beneficence of God who  sends us seed-time and harvest, each in its season, and makes 
His showers to fall and His sun to shine alike upon the evil  and the good: bestowing upon us unsolicited His innumerable  blessings, and asking no return. For there are no angels  stationed upon the watch-towers of creation to call the world  to prayer and sacrifice; but He bestows His benefits in silence,  like a kind friend who comes at night, and, leaving his gifts at  the door, to be found by us in the morning, goes quietly away  and asks no thanks, nor ceases his kind offices for our  ingratitude. And thus the bread and wine teach us that our 
Mortal Body is no more WE than the house in which we live,  or the gannents that we wear; but the Soul is I, the ONE,  identical, unchangeable, immortal emanation from the Deity ,  to  p. 540  return to God and be forever happy, in His good time; as our  mortal bodies, dissolving, return to the elements from which  they came, their particles coming and going ever in perpetual  genesis. To our Jewish Brethren, this supper is symbolical of  the Passover: to the Christian Mason, of that eaten by Christ  and His Disciples, when, celebrating the Passover, He broke  bread and gave it to them, saying, "Take! eat! this is My  body:" and giving them the cup, He said, "Drink ye all of it!  for this is My blood of the New Testament, which is shed for  many for the remission of sins;" thus symbolizing the perfect  harmony and union between Himself and the faithful; and His  death upon the cross for the salvation of man.

The history of Masonry is the history of Philosophy. Masons  do not pretend to set themselves up for instructors of the  human race: but, though Asia produced and preserved the

Mysteries, Masonry has, in Europe and America, given  regularity to their doctrines, spirit, and action, and developed  the moral advantages which mankind may reap from them. 
More consistent, and more simple in its mode of procedure, it  has put an end to the vast allegorical pantheon of ancient  mythologies, and itself become a science.

None can deny that Christ taught a lofty morality. "Love one  another: forgive those that despitefully use you and persecute  you: be pure of heart, meek, humble, contented: lay not up  riches on earth, but in Heaven: submit to the powers lawfully  over you: become like these little children, or ye cannot be  saved, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven: forgive the  repentant; and cast no stone at the sinner, if you too have  sinned: do unto others as ye would have others do unto you:"  such, and not abstruse questions of theology, were His simple  and sublime teachings.

The early Christians followed in His footsteps. The first  preachers of the faith had no thought of domination. Entirely  animated by His saying, that he among them should be first,  who should serve with the greatest devotion, they were  humble, modest, and charitable, and they knew how to  communicate this spirit of the inner man to the churches  under their direction. These churches were at first but  spontaneous meetings of all Christians inhabiting the same  locality. A pure and severe morality, mingled with religious  enthusiasm, was the characteristic of each, and excited the  admiration even of their persecutors. Everything was  p. 541  in common among them; their property, their joys, and their  sorrows. In the silence of night they met for instruction and to  pray together. Their love-feasts, or fraternal repasts, ended  these reunions, in which all differences in social position and  rank were effaced in the presence of a paternal Divinity. Their  sole object was to make men better, by bringing them back to  a simple worship, of which universal morality was the basis;  and to end those numerous and cruel sacrifices which  everywhere inundated with blood the altars of the gods. Thus  did Christianity reform the world, and obey the teachings of  its founder. It gave to woman her proper rank and influence; it  regulated domestic life; and by admitting the slaves to the  love-feasts, it by degrees raised them above that oppression  under which half of mankind had groaned for ages.

This, in its purity, as taught by Christ Himself, was the true  primitive religion, as communicated by God to the Patriarchs. 
It was no new religion, but the reproduction of the oldest of  all; and its true and perfect morality is the morality of 
Masonry, as is the morality of every creed of antiquity.

In the early days of Christianity, there was an initiation like  those of the pagans. Persons were admitted on special  conditions only. To arrive at a complete knowledge of the  doctrine, they had to pass three degrees of instruction. The  initiates were consequently divided into three classes; the  first, Auditors, the second, Catechumens, and the third, the 
Faithful. The Auditors were a sort of novices, who were  prepared by certain ceremonies and certain instruction to  receive the dogmas of Christianity. A portion of these dogmas  was made known to the Catechumens; who, after particular  purifications, received baptism, or the initiation of the  theogenesis (divine generation ); but in the grand mysteries of  that religion, the incarnation, nativity, passion, and  resurrection of Christ, none were initiated but the Faithful. 
These doctrines, and the celebration of the Holy Sacraments,  particularly the Eucharist, were kept with profound secrecy. 
These Mysteries were divided into two parts; the first styled  the Mass of the Catechumens; the second, the Mass of the 
Faithful. The celebration of the Mysteries of Mithras was also  styled a mass', and the ceremonies used were the same. There  were found all the sacraments of the Catholic Church, even  the breath of confirmation. The Priest of Mithras promised the 
Initiates deliverance from sin, by means  p. 542  of confession and baptism, and a future life of happiness or  misery. He celebrated the Oblation of bread, image of the  resurrection. The baptism of newly-born children, extreme  unction, confession of sins,—all belonged to the Mithriac rites. 
The candidate was purified by a species of baptism, a mark  was impressed upon his forehead, he offered bread and water,  pronouncing certain mysterious words.

During the persecutions in the early ages of Christianity, the 
Christians took refuge in the vast catacombs which stretched  for miles in every direction under the city of Rome, and are  supposed to have been of Etruscan origin. There, amid  labyrinthine windings, deep caverns, hidden chambers,  chapels, and tombs, the persecuted fugitives found refuge, and  there they performed the ceremonies of the Mysteries.

The Basilideans, a sect of Christians that arose soon after the  time of the Apostles, practised the Mysteries, with the old 
Egyptian legend. They symbolized Osiris by the Sun, Isis by  the Moon, and Typhon by Scorpio; and wore crystals bearing  these emblems, as amulets or talismans to protect them from  danger; upon which were also a brilliant star and the serpent. 
They were copied from the talismans of Persia and Arabia,  and given to every candidate at his initiation.

I re me us tells us that the Simonians, one of the earliest sects of  the Gnostics, had a Priesthood of the Mysteries.

Tertullian tells us that the Valentinians, the most celebrated of  all the Gnostic schools, imitated, or rather perverted, the 
Mysteries of Eleusis. I re me us informs us, in several curious  chapters, of the Mysteries practised by the Marcosians; and 
Origen gives much information as to the Mysteries of the 
Ophites; and there is no doubt that all the Gnostic sects had 
Mysteries and an initiation. They all claimed to possess a  secret doctrine, coming to them directly from Jesus Christ,  different from that of the Gospels and Epistles, and superior  to those communications, which in their eyes, were merely  exoteric. This secret doctrine they did not communicate to  every one; and among the extensive sect of the Basilideans  hardly one in a thousand knew it, as we learn from Irenaeus. 
We know the name of only the highest class of their Initiates. 
They were styled Elect or Elus ['Eic/.ektoi] Strangers to the 
World and [iisvoi ev kocjuoj]. They had at least three Degrees- 
-the Material, the Intellectual, and the Spiritual,  p. 543  and the lesser and greater Mysteries; and the number of those  who attained the highest Degree was quite small.

Baptism was one of their most important ceremonies; and the 
Basilideans celebrated the 10th of January, as the anniversary  of the day on which Christ was baptized in Jordan.

They had the ceremony of laying on of hands, by way of  purification; and that of the mystic banquet, emblem of that to  which they believed the Heavenly Wisdom would one day  admit them, in the fullness of things [nkf|po>pa].

Their ceremonies were much more like those of the Christians  than those of Greece; but they mingled with them much that  was borrowed from the Orient and Egypt: and taught the  primitive truths, mixed with a multitude of fantastic errors and  fictions.

The discipline of the secret was the concealment ( occultatio )  of certain tenets and ceremonies. So says Clemens of 
Alexandria.

To avoid persecution, the early Christians were compelled to  use great precaution, and to hold meetings of the Faithful [of  the Household of Faith] in private places, under concealment  by darkness. They assembled in the night, and they guarded  against the intrusion of false brethren and profane persons,  spies who might cause their arrest. They conversed together  figuratively, and by the use of symbols, lest cowans and  eavesdroppers might overhear: and there existed among them  a favored class, or Order, who were initiated into certain 
Mysteries which they were bound by solemn promise not to  disclose, or even converse about, except with such as had  received them under the same sanction. They were called 
Brethren, the Faithful, Stewards of the Mysteries, 
Superintendents, Devotees of the Secret, and ARCHITECTS.

In the Hierarchies, attributed to St. Dionysius the Areopagite,  the first Bishop of Athens, the tradition of the sacrament is  said to have been divided into three Degrees, or grades,  purification, initiation, and accomplishment or perfection', and  it mentions also, as part of the ceremony, the bringing to  sight.

The Apostolic Constitutions, attributed to Clemens, Bishop of 
Rome, describe the early church, and say: "These regulations  must on no account be communicated to all sorts of persons,  because of the Mysteries contained in them." They speak of  the Deacon's duty to keep the doors, that none uninitiated  should enter at the oblation. Ostiarii, or doorkeepers, kept  guard, and gave notice of the time of prayer and church-  assemblies; and also by private  p. 544  signal, in times of persecution, gave notice to those within, to  en-able them to avoid danger. The Mysteries were open to the 
Fideles or Faithful only; and no spectators were allowed at  the communion.

Tertullian, who died about A. D. 216, says in his Apology. 
"None are admitted to the religious Mysteries without an oath  of secrecy. We appeal to your Thracian and Eleusinian 
Mysteries; and we are especially bound to this caution,  because if we prove faithless, we should not only provoke 
Heaven, but draw upon our heads the utmost rigor of human  displeasure. And should strangers betray us? They know  nothing but by report and hearsay. Far hence, ye Profane! is  the prohibition from all holy Mysteries."

Clemens, Bishop of Alexandria, bom about A. D. 191, says,  in his Stromata, that he cannot explain the Mysteries, because  he should thereby, according to the old proverb, put a sword  into the hands of a child. He frequently compares the 
Discipline of the Secret with the heathen Mysteries, as to their  internal and recondite wisdom.

Whenever the early Christians happened to be in company  with strangers, more properly termed the Profane, they never  spoke of their sacraments, but indicated to one another what  they meant by means of symbols and secret watchwords,  disguisedly, and as by direct communication of mind with  mind, and by enigmas.

Origen, bom A. D. 134 or 135, answering Celsus, who had  objected that the Christians had a concealed doctrine said: 
"Inasmuch as the essential and important doctrines and  principles of Christianity are openly taught, it is foolish to  object that there are other things that are recondite; for this is  common to Christian discipline with that of those  philosophers in whose teaching some things were exoteric and  some esoteric: and it is enough to say that it was so with some  of the disciples of Pythagoras."

The formula which the primitive church pronounced at the  moment of celebrating its Mysteries, was this: "Depart, ye 
Profane! Let the Catechumens, and those who have not been  admitted or initiated, go forth."

Archelaus, Bishop of Cascara in Mesopotamia, who, in the  year 278, conducted a controversy with the ManicIncans, said: 
"These Mysteries the church now communicates to him who  has passed through the introductory Degree. They are not  explained to the Gentiles at all; nor are they taught openly in  the hearing of Catechumens; but much that is spoken is in  disguised terms, that the  p. 545

[paragraph continues] Faithful [Ilioxoi], who possess the knowledge,  may be still more informed, and those who are not acquainted  with it, may suffer no disadvantage.

Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, was bom in the year 315, and died  in 386. In his Catechesis he says: "The Lord spake in parables  to His hearers in general; but to His disciples He explained in  private the parables and allegories which He spoke in public. 
The splendor of glory is for those who are early enlightened:  obscurity and darkness are the portion of the unbelievers and  ignorant. Just so the church discovers its Mysteries to those  who have advanced beyond the class of Catechumens: we  employ obscure terms with others."

St. Basil, the Great Bishop of Caesarea, bom in the year 326,  and dying in the year 376, says: "We receive the dogmas  transmitted to us by writing, and those which have descended  to us from the Apostles, beneath the mystery of oral tradition:  for several things have been handed to us without writing, lest  the vulgar, too familiar with our dogmas, should lose a due  respect for them.... This is what the uninitiated are not  permitted to contemplate; and how should it ever be proper to  write and circulate among the people an account of them?"

St. Gregory Nazianzen, Bishop of Constantinople, A. D. 379,  says: "You have heard as much of the Mystery as we are  allowed to speak openly in the ears of all; the rest will be  communicated to you in private; and that you must retain  within yourself. . . . Our Mysteries are not to be made known  to strangers."

St. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, who was bom in 340, and  died in 393, says in his work De Mysteriis : "All the Mystery  should be kept concealed, guarded by faithful silence, lest it  should be inconsiderately divulged to the ears of the Profane.. 
. .. It is not given to all to contemplate the depths of our 
Mysteries .... that they may not be seen by those who ought  not to behold them; nor received by those who cannot  preserve them." And in another work: "He sins against God,  who divulges to the unworthy the Mysteries confided to him. 
The danger is not merely in violating truth, but in telling truth,  if he allow himself to give hints of them to those from whom  they ought to be concealed .... Beware of casting pearls  before swine! .... Every Mystery ought to be kept secret;  and, as it were, to be covered over by silence, lest it should  rashly  p. 546  be divulged to the ears of the Profane. Take heed that you do  not incautiously reveal the Mysteries!"

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who was bom in 347, and  died in 430, says in one of his discourses: "Having dismissed  the Catechumens, we have retained you only to be our  hearers; because, besides those things which belong to all 
Christians in common, we are now to discourse to you of  sublime Mysteries, which none are qualified to hear, but those  who, by the Master's favor, are made partakers of them.

To have taught them openly, would have been to betray  them." And he refers to the Ark of the Covenant, and says that 
it signified a Mystery, or secret of God, shadowed over by the  cherubim of glory, and honored by being veiled.

St. Chrysostom and St. Augustine speak of initiation more  than fifty times. St. Ambrose writes to those who are initiated;  and initiation was not merely baptism, or admission into the  church, but it referred to initiation into the Mysteries. To the  baptized and initiated the Mysteries of religion were unveiled;  they were kept secret from the Catechumens; who were  permitted to hear the Scriptures read and the ordinary  discourses delivered, in which the Mysteries, reserved for the 
Faithful, were never treated of. When the services and prayers  were ended, the Catechumens and spectators all withdrew.

Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, was bom in 354, and  died in 417. He says: "I wish to speak openly: but I dare not,  on account of those who are not initiated. I shall therefore  avail myself of disguised terms, discoursing in a shadowy  manner... Where the holy Mysteries are celebrated, we drive  away all uninitiated persons, and then close the doors." He  mentions the acclamations of the initiated; "which," he says,

"I here pass over in silence; for it is forbidden to disclose such  things to the Profane." Palladius, in his life of Chrysostom,  records, as a great outrage, that, a tumult having been excited  against him by his enemies, they forced their way into the  penetralia, where the uninitiated beheld what was not proper  for them to see; and Chrysostom mentions the same  circumstance in his epistle to Pope Innocent.

St. Cyril of Alexandria, who was made Bishop in 412, and  died in 444, says in his 7th Book against Julian: "These 
Mysteries are so profound and so exalted, that they can be  comprehended by those only who are enlightened. I shall not,  therefore, attempt to speak of what is so admirable in them,  lest by discovering them to  p. 547  the uninitiated, I should offend against the injunction not to  give what is holy to the impure, nor cast pearls before such as  cannot estimate their worth. ... I should say much more, if I  were not afraid of being heard by those who are uninitiated:  because men are apt to deride what they do not understand. 
And the ignorant, not being aware of the weakness of their  minds, condemn what they ought most to venerate."

Theodoret, Bishop of Cyropolis in Syria, was bom in 393, and  made Bishop in 420. In one of his three Dialogues, called the 
Immutable, he introduces Orthodoxus, speaking thus:

"Answer me, if you please, in mystical or obscure terms: for  perhaps there are some persons present who are not initiated  into the Mysteries." And in his preface to Ezekiel, tracing up  the secret discipline to the commencement of the Christian  era, he says: "These Mysteries are so august, that we ought to  keep them with the greatest caution."

Minucius Felix, an eminent lawyer of Rome, who lived in 
212, and wrote a defence of Christianity, says: "Many of them 
[the Christians] know each other by tokens and signs (notis et  insignibus ), and they form a friendship for each other, almost  before they become acquainted."

The Latin Word, tessera, originally meant a square piece of  wood or stone, used in making tesselated pavements;  afterward a tablet on which anything was written, and then a  cube or die. Its most general use was to designate a piece of  metal or wood, square in shape, on which the watchword of  an Army was inscribed; whence tessera came to mean the  watchword itself. There was also a tessera hospitalis, which  was a piece of wood cut into two parts, as a pledge of  friendship. Each party kept one of the parts; and they swore  mutual fidelity by Jupiter. To break the tessera was  considered a dissolution of the friendship. The early 
Christians used it as a Mark, the watchword of friendship. 
With them it was generally in the shape of a fish, and made of  bone. On its face was inscribed the word Ix0u<g, a fish, the  initials of which represented the Greek words, Iqoouc 
Xpioxoc 0eou Yioc Lojirip; Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the 
Saviour.

St. Augustine (de Fide et Symbolis) says: "This is the faith  which in a few words is given to the Novices to be kept by a  symbol; these few words are known to all the Faithful; that by  believing they may be submissive to God; by being thus  submissive, they  p. 548  may live rightly; by living rightly, they may purify their  hearts and with a pure heart may understand what they  believe."

Maximus Taurinus says: "The tessera is a symbol and sign by  which to distinguish between the Faithful and the Profane."

There are three Degrees in Blue Masonry; and in addition to  the two words of two syllables each, embodying the binary,  three, of three syllables each. There were three Grand 
Masters, the two Kings, and Khir-Om the Artificer. The  candidate gains admission by three raps, and three raps call up  the Brethren. There are three principal officers of the Lodge,  three lights at the Altar, three gates of the Temple, all in the 
East, West, and South. The three lights represent the Sun, the 
Moon, and Mercury; Osiris, Isis, and Horus; the Father, the 
Mother, and the Child; Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty; 
Hakamah, Binah, and Daath; Gedulah, Geburah, and 
Tepareth. The candidate makes three circuits of the Lodge:  there were three assassins of Khir-Om, and he was slain by  three blows while seeking to escape by the three gates of the 
Temple. The ejaculation at his grave was repeated three times. 
There are three divisions of the Temple, and three, five, and  seven Steps. A Master works with Chalk, Charcoal, and a  vessel of Clay; there are three movable and three immovable  jewels. The Triangle appears among the Symbols: the two  parallel lines enclosing the circle are connected at top, as are  the Columns Jachin and Boaz, symbolizing the equilibrium  which explains the great Mysteries of Nature.

This continual reproduction of the number three is not  accidental, nor without a profound meaning: and we shall find  the same repeated in all the Ancient philosophies.

The Egyptian Gods formed Triads, the third member in each  proceeding from the other two. Thus we have the Triad of 
Thebes, Amun, Maut, and Kharso; that of Philae, Osiris, Isis,  and Homs; that of Elephantine and the Cataracts, Neph, Sate,  and Anouke.

Osiris, Isis, and Homs were the Father, Mother, and Son; the  latter being Light, the Soul of the World, the Son, the 
Protogonos or First-Begotten.

Sometimes this Triad was regarded as SPIRIT, or the active 
Principle or Generative Power; MATTER, or the PASSIVE 
Principle or Productive Capacity; and the Universe, which  proceeds from the two Principles.

We also find in Egypt this Triad or Trinity; Ammon-Ra, the 
Creator; Osiris-Ra, the Giver of Fruitfulness; Homs-Ra, the  p. 549

[paragraph continues] Queller of Light; symbolized by the Summer, 
Autumn, and Spring Sun. For the Egyptians had but three 
Seasons, the three gates of the Temple; and on account of the  different effects of the Sun on those three Seasons, the Deity  appears in these three forms.

The Phoenician Trinity was Ulomos, Chusoros, and the Egg  out of which the Universe proceeded.

The Chaldaean Triad consisted of Bel, [the Persian Zervana 
Akherana], Oromasdes, and Ahriman; the Good and Evil 
Principle alike outflowing from the Father, by their  equilibrium and alternating preponderance to produce  harmony. Each was to rule, in turn, for equal periods, until  finally the Evil Principle should itself become good.

The Chaldaean and Persian oracles of Zoroaster give us the 
Triad, Fire, Light, and Ether.

Orpheus celebrates the Triad of Phanes, Ouranos, and Kronos. 
Corry says the Orphic Trinity consisted of Metis, Phanes, and 
Ericapaeus; Will, Light or Love, and Life. Acusilaus makes it  consist of Metis, Eros, and /Ether: Will, Love, and Ether. 
Phereycides of Syros, of Fire, Water, and Air or Spirit. In the  two former we readily recognize Osiris and Isis, the Sun and  the Nile.

The first three of the Persian Amshaspands were BAHMAN,  the Lord of LIGHT; Ardibehest, the Lord of FIRE; and 
Shariver, the Lord of SPLENDOR. These at once lead us back  to the Kabala.

Plutarch says: "The better and diviner nature consists of three;  the Intelligible (i.e. that which exists within the Intellect only  as yet), and Matter; to Noqxoc and 'YZq, and that which  proceeds from these, which the Greeks call Kosmos: of which 
Plato calls the Intelligible, the Idea, the Exemplar, the Father: 
Matter, the Mother, the Nurse, and the receptacle and place of  generation: and the issue of these two, the Offspring and 
Genesis."

The Pythagorean fragments say: "Therefore, before the 
Heaven was made, there existed Idea and Matter, and God the 
Demiourgos [workman or active instrument], of the former. 
He made the world out of matter, perfect, only-begotten, with  a soul and intellect, and constituted it a divinity."

Plato gives us Thought, the Father; Primitive Matter, the 
Mother; and Kosmos, the Son, the issue of the two Principles. 
Kosmos is the ensouled Universe.

With the later Platonists, the Triad was Potence, Intellect, and 
Spirit, Philo represents Sanchoniathon's as Fire, Light, and  p. 550

[paragraph continues] Flame, the three Sons of Genos; but this is the 
Alexandrian, not the Phoenician idea.

Aurelius says the Demiourgos or Creator is triple, and the  three Intellects are the three Kings: He who exists; He who  possesses; He who beholds. The first is that which exists by  its essence; the second exists in the first, and contains or  possesses in itself the Universal of things; all that afterward  becomes: the third beholds this Universal, formed and  fashioned intellectually, and so having a separate existence. 
The Third exists in the Second, and the Second in the First.

The most ancient Trinitarian doctrine on record is that of the 
Brahmins. The Eternal Supreme Essence, called 
PARABRAHMA, BRAHM, PARATMA, produced the 
Universe by self-reflection, and first revealed himself as 
BRAHMA, the Creating Power, then as VISHNU, the 
Preserving Power, and lastly as SIVA, the Destroying and 
Renovating Power; the three Modes in which the Supreme 
Essence reveals himself in the material Universe; but which  soon came to be regarded as three distinct Deities. These three 
Deities they styled the TRIMURTI, or TRIAD.

The Persians received from the Indians the doctrine of the  three principles, and changed it to that of a principle of Life,  which was individualized by the Sun, and a principle of 
Death, which was symbolized by cold and darkness; parallel  of the moral world; and in which the continual and alternating  struggle between light and darkness, life and death, seemed  but a phase of the great struggle between the good and evil  principles, embodied in the legend of ORMUZD and 
AHRIMAN. MITHRAS, a Median reformer, was deified after  his death, and invested with the attributes of the Sun; the  different astronomical phenomena being figuratively detailed  as actual incidents of his life; in the same manner as the  history of BUDDHA was invented among the Hindus.

The Trinity of the Hindus became among the Ethiopians and

Abyssinians NEPH-AMON, PHTHA, and NEITH—the God 
CREATOR, whose emblem was a ram—MATTER, or the  primitive mud, symbolized by a globe or an egg, and 
THOUGHT, or the LIGHT which contains the germ of  everything; triple manifestation of one and the same God 
(ATHOM), considered in three aspects, as the creative power,  goodness, and wisdom. Other Deities were speedily invented;  and among them OSIRIS, represented by the Sun, Isis, his  wife, by the Moon or Earth, TYPHON, his Brother, the 
Principle  p. 551  of Evil and Darkness, who was the son of Osiris and Isis. And  the Trinity of OSIRIS, ISIS, and HORUS became  subsequently the Chief Gods and objects of worship of the 
Egyptians.

The ancient Etruscans (a race that emigrated from the 
Rhcetian Alps into Italy, along whose route evidences of their  migration have been discovered, and whose language none  have yet succeeded in reading) acknowledged only one 
Supreme God; but they had images for His different  attributes, and temples to these images. Each town had one 
National Temple, dedicated to the three great attributes of 
God, STRENGTH, RICHES, and WISDOM, or Tina, Talna,  and Minerva. The National Deity was always a Triad under  one roof; and it was the same in Egypt, where one Supreme 
God alone was acknowledged, but was worshipped as a Triad,  with different names in each different home. Each city in

Etruria might have as many gods and gates and temples as it  pleased; but three sacred gates, and one Temple to three 
Divine Attributes were obligatory, wherever the laws of 
Tages (or Taunt or Thoth) were received. The only gate that  remains in Italy, of the olden time, undestroyed, is the Porta  del Circo at Volterra; and it has upon it the three heads of the  three National Divinities, one upon the keystone of its  magnificent arch, and one above each side-pillar.

The Buddhists hold that the God SAKYA of the Hindus,  called in Ceylon, GAUTAMA, in India beyond the Ganges, 
SOMONAKODOM, and in China, CHY-KIA, or FO,  constituted a Trinity [TRIRATNA], of BUDDHA,

DHARMA, and SANGA Intelligence, Law, and Union or 
Harmony.

The Chinese Sabteans represented the Supreme Deity as  composed of CHANG-TI, the Supreme Sovereign ; TIEN, the 
Heavens', and TAO, the Universal Supreme Reason and 
Principle of Faith', and that from Chaos, an immense silence,  an immeasurable void, without perceptible forms, alone,  infinite, immutable, moving in a circle in illimitable space,  without change or alteration, when vivified by the Principle of 
Truth, issued all Beings, under the influence of TAO,

Principle of Faith, who produced one, one produced two, two  produced three, and three produced all that is.

The Sclavono-Vendes typified the Trinity by the three heads  of the God TRIGLAV; and the Pmczi or Prussians by the Tri-  une God, PERKOUN, PIKOLLOS, and POTRIMPOS, the 
Deities of Light  p. 552  and Thunder, of Hell and the Earth, its fruits and animals: and  the Scandinavians by ODIN, FREA, and THOR.

In the KABALAH, or the Hebrew traditional philosophy, the 
Infinite Deity, beyond the reach of the Human Intellect, and  without Name, Form, or Limitation, was represented as  developing Himself, in order to create, and by self-limitation,  in ten emanations or out-flowings, called SEPHIROTH, or  rays. The first of these, in the world AZILUTH, that is, within  the Deity, was KETHER, or the Crown, by which we  understand the Divine Will or Potency. Next came, as a pair, 
HAKEMAH and BAINAH, ordinarily translated "Wisdom"  and "Intelligence," the former termed the FATHER, and the  latter the MOTHER. HAKEMAH is the active Power or 
Energy of Deity, by which He produces within Himself 
Intellection or Thinking: and BAINAH, the passive Capacity,  from which, acted on by the Power, the Intellection flows. 
This Intellection is called DAATH: and it is the "WORD," of 
Plato and the Gnostics; the unuttered word, within the Deity. 
Here is the origin of the Trinity of the Father, the Mother or 
Holy Spirit, and the Son or Word.

Another Trinity was composed of the fourth Sephirah, 
GEDULAH or KHASED, Benignity or Mercy, also termed 
FATHER (Aba); the fifth, GEBURAH, Severity or Strict

Justice, also termed the MOTHER ( Imma ); and the sixth, the 
SON or Issue of these, TIPHARETH, Beauty or Harmony. 
"Everything," says the SOHAR, "proceeds according to the 
Mystery of the Balance"—that is, by the equilibrium of 
Opposites: and thus from the Infinite Mercy and the Infinite 
Justice, in equilibrium, flows the perfect Harmony of the 
Universe. Infinite POWER, which is Lawless, and Infinite 
WISDOM, in Equilibrium, also produce BEAUTY or 
HARMONY, as Son, Issue, or Result-the Word, or utterance  of the Thought of God. Power and Justice or Severity are the  same'. Wisdom and Mercy or Benignity are the same;—in the 
Infinite Divine Nature.

According to Philo of Alexandria, the Supreme Being, 
Primitive Light or Archetype of Light, uniting with WISDOM 
[Eocpia], the mother of Creation, forms in Himself the types of  all things, and acts upon the Universe through the WORD 
[ Aoyoc .. Logos], who dwells in God, and in whom all His  powers and attributes develop themselves; a doctrine  borrowed by him from Plato.

Simon Magus and his disciples taught that the Supreme Being  or Centre of Light produced first of all, three couples of  united  p. 553

[paragraph continues] Existences, of both sexes, [En^nyiat;;... 
Suzugias], which were the origins of all things: REASON and 
INVENTIVENESS; SPEECH and THOUGHT;

CALCULATION and REFLECTION: [NoG<; and Emvoia, 
Ocovrj and Evvoia, Aoyiapoc; and EvOuur|oic; .. . Nous and 
Epinoia, Phone and Ennoia, Logismos and Enthumesis]; of  which Ennoia or WISDOM was the first produced, and 
Mother of all that exists.

Other Disciples of Simon, and with them most of the 
Gnostics, adopting and modifying the doctrine, taught that the  nLipcopa .. Pleroma, or PLENITUDE of Superior 
Intelligences, having the Supreme Being at their head, was  composed of eight Eons [Aio'ivr|c .. Aiones] of different  sexes; .. PROFUNDITY and SILENCE; SPIRIT and 
TRUTH; the WORD and LIFE; MAN and the CHURCH: 
[Bu06c; and Eiyr); 11 vs uuu and ALf|0eia; Aoyoc; and Zcof|; 
'Av0pcojro<;; and EicK/.r|oia .... Buthos and Sige; Pneuma and 
Aletheia; Logos and Zoe; Anthropos and Ekklesia].

Bardesanes, whose doctrines the Syrian Christians long  embraced, taught that the unknown Father, happy in the 
Plenitude of His Life and Perfections, first produced a 
Companion for Himself [LuCuyoc ... Suzugos], whom He  placed in the Celestial Paradise and who became, by Him, the 
Mother of CHRISTOS, Son of the Living God: i.e. (laying  aside the allegory), that the Eternal conceived, in the silence  of His decrees, the Thought of revealing Himself by a Being  who should be His image or His Son: that to the Son  succeeded his Sister and Spouse, the Holy Spirit, and they  produced four Spirits of the elements, male and female, Maio  and Jabseho, Nouro and Rucho; then Seven Mystic Couples  of Spirits, and Heaven and Earth, and all that is; then seven  spirits governing the planets, twelve governing the 
Constellations of the Zodiac, and thirty-six Starry 
Intelligences whom he called Deacons: while the Holy Spirit 
[Sophia Achamoth ], being both the Holy Intelligence and the 
Soul of the physical world, went from the Pleroma into that  material world and there mourned her degradation, until 
CHRISTOS, her former spouse, coming to her with his 
Divine Light and Love, guided her in the way to purification,  and she again united herself with him as his primitive 
Companion.

Basilides, the Christian Gnostic, taught that there were seven  emanations from the Supreme Being: The First-born,

Thought, the Word, Reflection, Wisdom, Power, and 
Righteousness [I Iponoyovoc, Now;, Aoyoc, Opovpoic, Eoipia, 
Auvapu;,  p. 554  and Aucuioouvq Protogonos, Nous, Logos, Phronesis, Sophia, 
Dunamis, and Dikarosune]; from whom emanated other 
Intelligences in succession, to the number, in all, of three  hundred and sixty-five; which were God manifested, and  composed the Plenitude of the Divine Emanations, or the God 
Abraxas; of which the Thought [or Intellect, Now;.. Nous]  united itself, by baptism in the river Jordan, with the man 
Jesus, servant [Akxkovo; .. . Diakonos] of the human race;  but did not suffer with Him; and the disciples of Basilides  taught that the Nouc. put on the appearance only of humanity,  and that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in His stead and  ascended into Heaven.

Basilides held that out of the unrevealed God, who is at the  head of the world of emanations, and exalted above all  conception or designation [O dicaTOvOLiuciTOC, appproc] were  evolved seven living, self-subsistent, ever-active hypostatized  powers:

FIRST: THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS.

1st. Nous

Noui;

The Mind.

2d. Logos

Aoyo<;

The Reason.

3d. Phronesis

Opovpan;

The Thinking 
Power.

4th. Sophia

Soipia

Wisdom.

SECOND: THE ACTIVE OR OPERATIVE POWER.

5th. Dunamis Auvuluc Might, accomplishing  the purposes of 
Wisdom.

THIRD: THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES.

6th. Dikaiosune Aucaioouvp

Holiness or Moral 
Perfection.

7th. Eirene

Eipnvri

Inward Tranquility.

These Seven Powers (Auvdpsic .. Dunameis), with the Primal 
Ground out of which they were evolved, constituted in his  scheme the I Ipouq 'Oydodc [Prote Ogdoas], or First Octave,  the root of all Existence. From this point, the spiritual life  proceeded to evolve out of itself continually many gradations  of existence, each lower one being still the impression, the  cmtetype, of the immediate higher one. He supposed there  were 365 of these regions or gradations, expressed by the  mystical word Afipuiiac [Abraxas].

The Afipuduc is thus interpreted, by the usual method of  reckoning Greek letters numerically. . .. a, 1 . . [3, 2 .. p, 100 . 
. a, 1 . . £,, 60 .. a, 1 .. q, 200=365:  p. 555  which is the whole Emanation-World, as the development of  the Supreme Being.

In the system of Basilides, Light, Life, Soul, and Good were  opposed to Darkness, Death, Matter, and Evil, throughout the  whole course of the Universe.

According to the Gnostic view, God was represented as the  immanent, incomprehensible and original source of all  perfection; the unfathomable ABYSS (Pu0o<;.. buthos),  according to Valentinus, exalted above all possibility of  designation; of whom, properly speaking, nothing can be  predicated; the dKaxovopaoxoi; of Basilides, the tov of Philo. 
From this incomprehensible Essence of God, an immediate  transition to finite things is inconceivable. Self-limitation is  the first beginning of a communication of life on the part of 
God—the first passing of the hidden Deity into manifestation;  and from this proceeds all further self-developing  manifestation of the Divine Essence. From this primal link in  the chain of life there are evolved, in the first place, the  manifold powers or attributes inherent in the divine Essence,  which, until that first self-comprehension, were all hidden in  the Abyss of Elis Essence. Each of these attributes presents  the whole divine Essence under one particular aspect; and to  each, therefore, in this respect, the title of God may  appropriately be applied. These Divine Powers evolving  themselves to self-subsistence, become thereupon the germs  and principles of all further developments of life. The life  contained in them unfolds and individualizes itself more and  more, but in such a way that the successive grades of this  evolution of life continually sink lower and lower; the spirits  become feebler, the further they are removed from the first  link in the series.

The first manifestation they termed jrpujxri ic«xu/.ip|/tc eanxoO 
[prote katalepsis heautou\ or jxpdixov Kaxalpjrxov xou 0eou 
L proton Katalepton ton Theou]; which was hypostatically  represented in a voOi; or /.oyoc, [Nous or Logos],

In the Alexandrian Gnosis, the Platonic notion of the u/,r| 
[Hule] predominates. This is the dead, the unsubstantial—the  boundary that limits from without the evolution of life in its  gradually advancing progression, whereby the Perfect is ever  evolving itself into the less Perfect. This u/.p again, is  represented under various images;—at one time as the  darkness that exists alongside of the light; at another, as the  void [Kevcopa, kevov. .. . Kenoma, Kenon],  p. 556  in opposition to the Fullness, [I ILipcopa .... Pleroma] of the 
Divine Life; or as the shadow that accompanies the light; or  as the chaos, or the sluggish, stagnant, dark water. This  matter, dead in itself, possesses by its own nature no inherent  tendency; as life of every sort is foreign to it, itself makes no  encroachment on the Divine. As, however, the evolutions of  the Divine Life (the essences developing themselves out of  the progressive emanation) become feebler, the further they  are removed from the first link in the series; and as their  connection with the first becomes looser at each successive  step, there arises at the last step of the evolution, an imperfect,  defective product, which, unable to retain its connection with  the chain of Divine Life, sinks from the World of Eons into  the material chaos: or, according to the same notion,  somewhat differently expressed [according to the Ophites and  to Bardesanes], a drop from the fullness of the Divine life  bubbles over into the bordering void. Hereupon the dead  matter, by commixture with the living principle, which it  wanted, first of all receives animation. But, at the same time,  also, the divine, the living, becomes corrupted by mingling  with the chaotic mass. Existence now multiplies itself. There  arises a subordinate, defective life; there is ground for a new  world; a creation starts into being, beyond the confines of the  world of emanation. But, on the other hand, since the chaotic  principle of matter has acquired vitality, there now arises a  more distinct and more active opposition to the God-like—a  barely negative, blind, ungodly nature-power, which  obstinately resists all influence of the Divine; hence, as  products of the spirit of the u/.q, (of the 7rveupa u/.lkov .. 
Pneuma Hulikon), are Satan, malignant spirits, wicked men,  in none of whom is there any reason-able or moral principle,  or any principle of a rational will; but blind passions alone  have the ascendancy . In them there is the same conflict, as the  scheme of Platonism supposes, between the soul under the  guidance of Divine reason [the voOi;.. . Nous], and the soul  blindly resisting reason-between the 7ipovoia [pronoia] and  the uvuyq [anage], the Divine Principle and the natural.

The Syrian Gnosis assumed the existence of an active,  turbulent kingdom of evil, or of darkness, which, by its  encroachments on the kingdom of light, brought about a  commixture of the light with the darkness, of the God-like  with the ungodlike.

Even among the Platonists, some thought that along with an  p. 557  organized, inert matter, the substratum of the corporeal world,  there existed from the beginning a blind, lawless motive  power, an ungodlike soul, as its original motive and active  principle. As the inorganic matter was organized into a  corporeal world, by the plastic power of the Deity, so, by the  same power, law and reason were communicated to that  turbulent, irrational soul. Thus the chaos of the ulq was  transformed into an organized world, and that blind soul into  a rational principle, a mundane soul, animating the Universe. 
As from the latter proceeds all rational, spiritual life in  humanity, so from the former proceeds all that is irrational, all  that is under the blind sway of passion and appetite; and all  malignant spirits are its progeny.

In one respect all the Gnostics agreed: they all held; that there  was a world purely emanating out of the vital development of 
God, a creation evolved directly out of the Divine Essence, far  exalted above any outward creation produced by God's plastic  power, and conditioned by pre-existing matter. They agreed in  holding that the framer of this lower world was not the Father  of that higher world of emanation; but the Demiurge 
[Aepioupyo<;], a being of a kindred nature with the Universe  framed and governed by him, and far inferior to that higher  system and the Father of it.

But some, setting out from ideas which had long prevailed  among certain Jews of Alexandria, supposed that the Supreme 
God created and governed the world by His ministering  spirits, by the angels. At the head of these angels stood one  who had the direction and control of all; therefore called the

Artificer and Governor of the World. This Demiurge they  compared with the plastic, animating mundane spirit of Plato  and Platonists [the dsuiepoc Oeoc . . Deuteros Theos; the 0so<g  ycvpioc; Theos Genetos], who, moreover, according to the 
Ti uncus of Plato, strives to represent the IDEA of the Divine 
Reason, in that which is becoming (as contradistinguished  from that which is) and temporal. This angel is a  representative of the Supreme God, on the lower stage of  existence: he does not act independently, but merely  according to the ideas inspired in him by the Supreme God;  just as the plastic, mundane soul of the Platonists creates all  things after the pattern of the ideas communicated by the 
Supreme Reason [Nouc;.. . . Nous-the 6 eon c(I)ov .... ho  esti zoon-the; 7rapa6eiypa .. . paradeigma, of the Divine 
Reason hypostatized].  p. 558

[paragraph continues] But these ideas transcend his limited essence;  he cannot understand them; he is merely their unconscious  organ; and therefore is unable himself to comprehend the  whole scope and meaning of the work which he performs. As  an organ under the guidance of a higher inspiration, he reveals  higher truths than he himself can comprehend. The mass of  the Jews, they held, recognized not the angel, by whom, in all  the Theophanies of the Old Testament, God revealed Himself;  they knew not the Demiurge in his true relation to the hidden 
Supreme God, who never reveals Himself in the sensible  world. They confounded the type and the archetype, the  symbol and the idea. They rose no higher than the Demiurge;  they took him to be the Supreme God Himself. But the  spiritual men among them, on the contrary, clearly perceived,  or at least divined, the ideas veiled under Judaism; they rose  beyond the Demiurge, to a knowledge of the Supreme God;  and are therefore properly His worshippers [Oepajrsuxai.. 
Therapeutai].

Other Gnostics, who had not been followers of the Mosaic  religion, but who had, at an earlier period, framed to  themselves an oriental Gnosis, regarded the Demiurge as a  being absolutely hostile to the Supreme God. He and his  angels, notwithstanding their finite nature, wish to establish  their independence: they will tolerate no foreign rule within  their realm. Whatever of a higher nature descends into their  kingdom, they seek to hold imprisoned there, lest it should  raise itself above their narrow precincts. Probably, in this  system, the kingdom of the Demiurgic Angels corresponded,  for the most part, with that of the deceitful Star-Spirits, who  seek to rob man of his freedom, to beguile him by various arts  of deception, and who exercise a tyrannical sway over the  things of this world. Accordingly, in the system of these 
Sabasans, the seven Planet-Spirits, and the twelve Star-Spirits  of the zodiac, who sprang from an irregular connection  between the cheated Fetahil and the Spirit of Darkness, play  an important part in everything that is bad. The Demiurge is a  limited and limiting being, proud, jealous, and revengeful;  and this his character betrays itself in the Old Testament,  which, the Gnostics held, came from him. They transferred to  the Demiurge himself, whatever in the idea of God, as  presented by the Old Testament, appeared to them defective. 
Against his will and rule the uAp was continually rebelling,  revolting without control against the dominion which he, the  fashioner, would exercise over it,  p. 559  casting off the yoke imposed on it, and destroying the work he  had begun. The same jealous being, limited in his power,  ruling with despotic sway, they imagined they saw in nature. 
He strives to check the germination of the divine seeds of life  which the Supreme God of Holiness and Love, who has no  connection whatever with the sensible world, has scattered  among men. That perfect God was at most known and  worshipped in Mysteries by a few spiritual men.

The Gospel of St. John is in great measure a polemic against  the Gnostics, whose different sects, to solve the great  problems, the creation of a material world by an immaterial 
Being, the fall of man, the incarnation, the redemption and  restoration of the spirits called men, admitted a long series of  intelligences, intervening in a series of spiritual operations;  and which they designated by the names, The Beginning, the 
Word, the Only-Begotten, Life, Light, and Spirit [Ghost]: in 
Greek, Apicrj, Aoyoc, Movoyevn*;, Zcnij, Owcand 1 Ivsupa 
[Arche, Logos, Monogenes, Zoe, Ph5s, and Pneuma]. St.

John, at the beginning of his Gospel, avers that it was Jesus 
Christ who existed in the Beginning; that He was the WORD  of God by which everything was made; that He was the Only- 
Begotten, the Life and the Light, and that He diffuses among  men the Holy Spirit [or Ghost], the Divine Life and Light.

So the Pleroma [I ILiipcopa], Plenitude or Fullness, was a  favorite term with the Gnostics, and Truth and Grace were the 
Gnostic Eons; and the Simonians, Doketes, and other 
Gnostics held that the Eon Christ Jesus was never really, but  only apparently clothed with a human body: but St. John  replies that the Word did really become Flesh, and dwelt  among us; and that in Him were the Pleroma and Truth and 
Grace.

In the doctrine of Valentinus, reared a Christian at 
Alexandria, God was a perfect Being, an Abyss [BnOoi;.. 
Buthos], which no intelligence could sound, because no eye  could reach the invisible and ineffable heights on which He  dwelt, and no mind could comprehend the duration of His  existence; He has always been; He is the Primitive Father and 
Beginning [the npo7rdm)pand 1 Ipoup/n . . Propator and 
Proarche]: He will BE always, and does not grow old. The  development of His Perfections produced the intellectual  world. After having passed infinite ages in repose and silence, 
He manifested Himself by His Thought, source of all His  manifestations, and which received from Him the germ of His  p. 560  creations. Being of His Being, His Thought [ 'Ewoia . . 
Ennoia] is also termed Xdpic; [Charis], Grace or Joy, and 
2iyf| or 'Apppiov [Sige or Arreton], Silence or the Ineffable. 
Its first manifestation was None; [Nous], the Intelligence, first  of the Eons, commencement of all things, first revelation of  the Divinity, the Movoyevf|g [Monogenes], or Only-Begotten:  next, Truth [Alf)0eia .. Aletheia], his companion. Their  manifestations were the Word [Aoyo<;.. Logos] and Life 
[Zcor).. Zoe]; and theirs, Man and the Church [AvOpoiroc and 
’EKKZqcria .. Anthropos and Ekklesia]: and from these, other  twelve, six of whom were Hope, Faith, Charity, Intelligence, 
Happiness, and Wisdom; or, in the Hebrew, Kesten, Kina, 
Amphe, Ouananim, Thaedes, and Oubina. The harmony of the 
Eons, struggling to know and be united to the Primitive God,  was disturbed, and to redeem and restore them, the 
Intelligence [Nouq] produced Christ and the Holy Spirit His  companion; who restored them to their first estate of  happiness and harmony; and thereupon they formed the Eon 
Jesus, born of a Virgin, to whom the Christos united himself  in baptism, and who, with his Companion Sophia-Achamoth,  saved and redeemed the world.

The Marcosians taught that the Supreme Deity produced by 
His words the Aoyo<; [Logos] or Plenitude of Eons: His first  utterance was a syllable of four letters, each of which became  a being; His second of four, His third of ten, and His fourth of  twelve: thirty in all, which constituted the nZipcopa 
[Pleroma].

The Valentinians, and others of the Gnostics, distinguished  three orders of existences:—1st. The divine germs of life,  exalted by their nature above matter, and akin to the Soipia 
[Sophia], to the mundane soul and to the Pleroma:—the  spiritual natures, (puoeic Tivaupurucui [Phuseis Pneumatikai]: 
2d. The natures originating in the life, divided from the  former by the mixture of the u/.p-lhe psychical natures, 
<puoac v|/uxiKui [Phuseis Psuchikai]; with which begins a  perfectly new order of existence, an image of that higher mind  and system, in a subordinate grade; and finally, 3d. The 
Ungodlike or Hylic Nature, which resists all amelioration, and  whose tendency is only to destroy—the nature of blind lust and  passion.

The nature of the jrveupaxiKOv [pneumatikon], the spiritual, is  essential relationship with God (the opouotov x(I) Onto .. 
Homoousion to Theo): hence the life of Unity, the undivided,  the  p. 561  absolutely simple (ouoia Evucf] novosi8r)c .. Ousia henike,  monoeides).

The essence of the \|/uxncoi [psuchikoi] is disruption into  multiplicity, manifoldness; which, however, is subordinate to  a higher unity, by which it allows itself to be guided, first  unconsciously, then consciously.

The essence of the uIiko! [Hulikoi] (of whom Satan is the  head), is the direct opposite to all unity; disruption and  disunion in itself, without the least sympathy, without any  point of coalescence whatever for unity; together with an  effort to destroy all unity, to extend its own inherent disunion  to everything, and to rend everything asunder. This principle  has no power to posit anything; but only to negative: it is  unable to create, to produce, to form, but only to destroy, to  decompose.

By Marcus, the disciple of Valentinus, the idea of a Aoyo<;  xou ovxoc [Logos Tou Ontos], of a WORD, manifesting the  hidden Divine Essence, in the Creation, was spun out into the  most subtle details—the entire creation being, in his view, a  continuous utterance of the Ineffable. The way in which the  germs of divine life [the ojxeppaxa jrveupaxiKa . . spermata  pneumatika], which lie shut up in the Eons, continually unfold  and individualize themselves more and more, is represented  as a spontaneous analysis of the several names of the 
Ineffable, into their several sounds. An echo of the Pleroma  falls down into the uLq [Hule], and becomes the forming of a  new but lower creation.

One formula of the pneumatical baptism among the Gnostics  ran thus: "In the NAME which is hidden from all the 
Divinities and Powers" [of the Demiurge], "The Name of 
Truth" [the ALf|0eia [Aletheia], self-manifestation of the 
Buthos], which Jesus of Nazareth has put on in the light-zones  of Christ, the living Christ, through the Holy Ghost, for the  redemption of the angels,—the Name by which all things  attain to Perfection." The candidate then said: "I am  established and redeemed; I am redeemed in my soul from  this world, and from all that belongs to it, by the name of mrr,  who has redeemed the Soul of Jesus by the living Christ." The  assembly then said: "Peace (or Salvation) to all on whom this  name rests!"

The boy Dionusos, tom in pieces, according to the Bacchic 
Mysteries, by the Titans, was considered by the Manicheans  as simply representing the Soul, swallowed up by the powers  of darkness,—the  p. 562  divine life rent into fragments by matter:—that part of the  luminous essence of the primitive man [the Jtpukoc; dvOpomoc 
[Protos Anthropos] of Mani, the upacov dvOpomoc [Praon 
Anthropos] of the Valentinians, the Adam Kadmon of the 
Kabalah; and the Kaiomorts of the Zendavesta], swallowed up  by the powers of darkness; the Mundane Soul, mixed with  matter—the seed of divine life, which had fallen into matter,  and had thence to undergo a process of purification and  development.

The Ivdiaic [Gnosis] of Carpocrates and his son Epiphanes  consisted in the knowledge of one Supreme Original being,  the highest unity, from whom all existence has emanated, and  to whom it strives to return. The finite spirits that rule over  the several portions of the Earth, seek to counteract this  universal tendency to unity; and from their influence, their  laws, and arrangements, proceeds all that checks, disturbs, or  limits the original communion, which is the basis of nature, as  the outward manifestation of that highest Unity. These spirits,  moreover, seek to retain under their dominion the souls  which, emanating from the highest Unity, and still partaking  of its nature, have lapsed into the corporeal world, and have  there been imprisoned in bodies, in order, under their  dominion, to be kept within the cycle of migration. From  these finite spirits, the popular religions of different nations  derive their origin. But the souls which, from a reminiscence  of their former condition, soar upward to the contemplation of  that higher Unity, reach to such perfect freedom and repose,  as nothing afterward can disturb or limit, and rise superior to  the popular deities and religions. As examples of this sort,  they named Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Christ. They  made no distinction between the latter and the wise and good  men of every nation. They taught that any other soul which  could soar to the same height of contemplation, might be  regarded as equal with Him.

The Ophites commenced their system with a Supreme Being,  long unknown to the Human race, and still so the greater  number of men; the BuOoq [Buthos], or Profundity, Source of 
Light, and of Adam-Kadmon, the Primitive Man, made by the 
Demiourgos, but perfected by the Supreme God by the  communication to him of the Spirit [I Iveuuu .. Pneuma]. The  first emanation was the Thought of the Supreme Deity [the 
'Ewota . . Ennoia], the conception of the Universe in the 
Thought of God.  p. 563

[paragraph continues] This Thought, called also Silence (Etyr|. .

Sige), produced the Spirit [I Ivsupa .. Pneuma], Mother of the

Living, and Wisdom of God. Together with this Primitive 
Existence, Matter existed also (the Waters, Darkness, Abyss,  and Chaos), eternal like the Spiritual Principle. Buthos and 
His Thought, uniting with Wisdom, made her fruitful by the 
Divine Light, and she produced a perfect and an imperfect  being, Christos, and a Second and inferior wisdom, Sophia- 
Achamoth, who falling into chaos remained entangled there,  became enfeebled, and lost all knowledge of the Superior 
Wisdom that gave her birth. Communicating movement to 
Chaos, she produced Ialdabaoth, the Demiourgos, Agent of 
Material Creation, and then ascended toward her first place in  the scale of creation. Ialdabaoth produced an angel that was  his image, and this a second, and so on in succession to the  sixth after the Demiourgos: the seven being reflections one of  the other, yet different and inhabiting seven distinct regions. 
The names of the six thus produced were IAO, SABAOTH, 
ADONAI, ELOI, ORAL, and ASTAPHAI. Ialdabaoth, to  become independent of his mother, and to pass for the 
Supreme Being, made the world, and man, in his own image;  and his mother caused the Spiritual principle to pass from him  into man so made; and henceforward the contest between the 
Demiourgos and his mother, between light and darkness, good  and evil, was concentrated in man; and the image of 
Ialdabaoth, reflected upon matter, became the Serpent-Spirit, 
Satan, the Evil Intelligence. Eve, created by Ialdabaoth, had  by his Sons children that were angels like themselves. The 
Spiritual light was withdrawn from man by Sophia, and the  world surrendered to the influence of evil; until the Spirit,  urged by the entreaties of Wisdom, induced the Supreme 
Being to send Christos to redeem it. Compelled, despite  himself, by his Mother, Ialdabaoth caused the man Jesus to be  bom of a Virgin, and the Celestial Saviour, uniting with his 
Sister, Wisdom, descended through the regions of the seven  angels, appeared in each under the form of its chief, concealed  his own, and entered with his sister into the man Jesus at the  baptism in Jordan. Ialdabaoth, finding that Jesus was  destroying his empire and abolishing his worship, caused the 
Jews to hate and crucify Him; before which happened, 
Christos and Wisdom had ascended to the celestial regions. 
They restored Jesus to life and gave Him an ethereal body, in  which He remained eighteen months on earth, and receiving  from Wisdom the perfect  p. 564  knowledge fl vwoic .. Gnosis], communicated it to a small  number of His apostles, and then arose to the intermediate  region inhabited by Ialdabaoth, where, unknown to him, He  sits at his right hand, taking from him the Souls of Light  purified by Christos. When nothing of the Spiritual world  shall remain subject to Ialdabaoth, the redemption will be  accomplished, and the end of the world, the completion of the  return of Light into the Plenitude, will occur.

Tatian adopted the theory of Emanation, of Eons, of the  existence of a God too sublime to allow Himself to be known,  but displaying Himself by Intelligences emanating from His  bosom. The first of these was His spirit [nveupa .. Pneuma], 
God Himself, God thinking, God conceiving the Universe.

The second was the Word [Aoyo<;. . Logos], no longer merely  the Thought or Conception, but the Creative Utterance,  manifestation of the Divinity, but emanating from the 
Thought or Spirit; the First-Begotten, author of the visible  creation. This was the Trinity, composed of the Father, Spirit,  and Word.

The Elxai'tes adopted the Seven Spirits of the Gnostics; but  named them Heaven, Water, Spirit, The Holy Angels of 
Prayer, Oil, Salt, and the Earth.

The opinion of the Doketes as to the human nature of Jesus 
Christ, was that most generally received among the Gnostics. 
They deemed the intelligences of the Superior World too pure  and too much the antagonists of matter, to be willing to unite  with it: and held that Christ, an Intelligence of the first rank,  in appearing upon the earth, did not become confounded with  matter, but took upon Himself only the appearance of a body,  or at the most used it only as an envelope.

Noetus termed the Son the first Utterance of the Father; the 
Word, not by Himself, as an Intelligence, and unconnected  with the flesh, a real Son; but a Word, and a perfect Only- 
Begotten; light emanated from the Light; water flowing from  its spring; a ray emanated from the Sun.

Paul of Samosata taught that Jesus Christ was the Son of 
Joseph and Mary; but that the Word, Wisdom, or Intelligence  of God, the Nou<; [Nous] of the Gnostics, had united itself  with Him, so that He might be said to be at once the Son of

God, and God Himself.

Arius called the Saviour the first of creatures, non-emanated  from God, but really created, by the direct will of God, before  time  p. 565  and the ages. According to the Church, Christ was of the same  nature as God; according to some dissenters, of the same  nature as man. Arius adopted the theory of a nature analogous  to both. When God resolved to create the Human race, He  made a Being which He called THE WORD, THE SON, 
WISDOM [Aoyoc, Yioi;, loipiu .. Logos, Uios, Sophia], to  the end that He might give existence to men. This WORD is  the Ormuzd of Zoroaster, the Ensoph of the Kabalah, the 
NoG<; [Nous] of Platonism and Philonism, and the Eocpia or 
Aepioupyoc [Sophia or Demiourgos] of the Gnostics. He  distinguished the Inferior Wisdom, or the daughter, from the 
Superior Wisdom; the latter being in God, inherent in His  nature, and incapable of communication to any creature: the  second, by which the Son was made, communicated itself to 
Him, and therefore He Himself was entitled to be called the 
Word and the Son.

Manes, founder of the Sect of the Manicheans, who had lived  and been distinguished among the Persian Magi, profited by  the doctrines of Scythianus, a Kabalist or ludaizing Gnostic ol  the times of the Apostles; and knowing those of Bardesanes  and Harmonius, derived his doctrines from Zoroasterism,

Christianity, and Gnosticism. He claimed to be the 
I IapaK>.i]ioc [Parakletos] or Comforter, in the Sense of a 
Teacher, organ of the Deity, but not in that of the Holy Spirit  or Holy Ghost: and commenced his Epistola Fundamenti in  these words: "Manes, Apostle of Jesus Christ, elect of God  the Father; Behold the Words of Salvation, emanating from  the living and eternal fountain." The dominant idea of his  doctrine was Pantheism, derived by him from its source in the  regions of India and on the confines of China: that the cause  of all that exists is in God; and at last, God is all in all. All  souls are equal—God is in all, in men, animals, and plants. 
There are two Gods, one of Good and the other of Evil, each  independent, eternal, chief of a distinct Empire; necessarily,  and of their very natures, hostile to one another. The Evil 
God, Satan, is the Genius of matter alone. The God of Good is  infinitely his Superior, the True God; while the other is but  the chief of all that is the Enemy of God, and must in the end  succumb to His Power. The Empire of Light alone is eternal  and true; and this Empire is a great chain of Emanations, all  connected with the Supreme Being which they make  manifest; all HIM, under different forms, chosen for one end,  the triumph of the Good. In each  p. 566  of His members lie hidden thousands of ineffable treasures. 
Excellent in His Glory, incomprehensible in His Greatness,  the Father has joined to Himself those fortunate and glorious 
Eons [Aicovec .. Aiones], whose Power and Number it is  impossible to determine. This is Spinoza's Infinity of Infinite

Attributes of God. Twelve Chief Eons, at the head of all, were  the Genii of the twelve Constellations of the Zodiac, and  called by Manes, Olamin. Satan, also, Lord of the Empire of 
Darkness, had an Army of Eons or Demons, emanating from  his Essence, and reflecting more or less his image, but divided  and inharmonious among themselves. A war among them  brought them to the confines of the Realm of Light.

Delighted, they sought to conquer it. But the Chief of the 
Celestial Empire created a Power which he placed on the  frontiers of Eleaven to protect his Eons, and destroy the 
Empire of Evil. This was the Mother of Life, the Soul of the 
World, an Emanation from the Supreme Being, too pure to  come in immediate contact with matter. It remained in the  highest region; but produced a Son, the first Man [the 
Kaiomorts, Adam-Kadmon, Ilpojxoi; AvOpomoc [Protos 
Anthropos,] and Hivil-Zivah; of the Zend-Avesta, the 
Kabalah, the Gnosis, and Sabeism]; who commenced the  contest with the Powers of Evil, but, losing part of his  panoply, of his Light, his Son and many souls bom of the 
Light, who were devoured by the darkness, God sent to his  assistance the living Spirit, or the Son of the First Man [Yioc 
AvOpo'mou .. Uios Anthropou], or Jesus Christ. The Mother  of Life, general Principle of Divine Life, and the first Man, 
Primitive Being that reveals the Divine Life, are too sublime  to be connected with the Empire of Darkness. The Son of 
Man or Soul of the World, enters into the Darkness, becomes  its captive, to end by tempering and softening its savage  nature. The Divine Spirit, after having brought back the 
Primitive Man to the Empire of Light, raises above the world  that part of the Celestial Soul that remained unaffected by  being mingled with the Empire of Darkness. Placed in the  region of the Sun and Moon, this pure soul, the Son of Man,  the Redeemer or Christ, labors to deliver and attract to 
Himself that part of the Light or of the Soul of the First Man  diffused through matter; which done, the world will cease to  exist. To retain the rays of Light still remaining among his 
Eons, and ever tending to escape and return, by concentrating  them, the Prince of Darkness, with their consent, made  p. 567

[paragraph continues] Adam, whose soul was of the Divine Light,  contributed by the Eons, and his body of matter, so that he  belonged to both Empires, that of Light and that of Darkness. 
To prevent the light from escaping at once, the Demons  forbade Adam to eat the fruit of "knowledge of good and  evil," by which he would have known the Empire of Light  and that of Darkness. He obeyed; an Angel of Light induced  him to transgress, and gave him the means of victory; but the 
Demons created Eve, who seduced him into an act of 
Sensualism, that enfeebled him, and bound him anew in the  bonds of matter. This is repeated in the case of every man that  lives.

To deliver the soul, captive in darkness, the Principle of 
Light, or Genius of the Sun, charged to redeem the 
Intellectual World, of which he is the type, came to manifest 
Himself among men. Light appeared in the darkness, but the  darkness comprehended it not; according to the words of St. 
John. The Light could not unite with the darkness. It but put  on the appearance of a human body, and took the name of 
Christ in the Messiah, only to accommodate itself to the  language of the Jews. The Light did its work, turning the Jews  from the adoration of the Evil Principle, and the Pagans from  the worship of Demons. But the Chief of the Empire of 
Darkness caused Him to be crucified by the Jews. Still He  suffered in appearance only, and His death gave to all souls  the symbol of their enfranchisement. The person of Jesus  having disappeared, there was seen in His place a cross of 
Light, over which a celestial voice pronounced these words: 
"The cross of Light is called The Word, Christ, The Gate, Joy, 
The Bread, The Sun, The Resurrection, Jesus, The Father, The 
Spirit, Life, Truth, and Grace."

With the Priscillianists there were two principles, one the 
Divinity, the other, Primitive Matter and Darkness; each  eternal. Satan is the son and lord of matter; and the secondary  angels and demons, children of matter. Satan created and  governs the visible world. But the soul of man emanated from 
God, and is of the same substance with God. Seduced by the  evil spirits, it passes through various bodies, until, purified  and reformed, it rises to God and is strengthened by His light. 
These powers of evil hold mankind in pledge; and to redeem  this pledge, the Saviour, Christ the Redeemer, came and died  upon the cross of expiation, thus discharging the written  obligation. He, like all souls, was of the  p. 568  same substance with God, a manifestation of the Divinity, not  forming a second person; unborn, like the Divinity, and  nothing else than the Divinity under another form.

It is useless to trace these vagaries further; and we stop at the  frontiers of the realm of the three hundred and sixty-five  thousand emanations of the Mandaltes from the Primitive 
Light, Fira or Ferho and Yavar; and return contentedly to the  simple and sublime creed of Masonry.

Such were some of the ancient notions concerning the Deity;  and taken in connection with what has been detailed in the  pre-ceding Degrees, this Lecture affords you a true picture of  the ancient speculations. From the beginning until now, those  who have undertaken to solve the great mystery of the  creation of a material universe by an Immaterial Deity, have  interposed between the two, and between God and man,  divers manifestations of, or emanations from, or personified  attributes or agents of, the Great Supreme God, who is  coexistent with Time and coextensive with Space.

The universal belief of the Orient was, that the Supreme 
Being did not Himself create either, the earth or man. The  fragment which commences the Book of Genesis, consisting  of the first chapter and the three first verses of the second,  assigns the creation or rather the formation or modelling of  the world from matter already existing in confusion, not to 
IHUH, but to the ALHIM, well known as Subordinate Deities, 
Forces, or Manifestations, among the Phoenicians. The second  fragment imputes it to IHUH-ALHIM, 1 and St. John assigns  the creation to the Aoyo<; or WORD; and asserts that CHRIST  was that WORD, as well as LIGHT and LIFE, other  emanations from the Great Primeval Deity, to which other  faiths had assigned the work of creation.

An absolute existence, wholly immaterial, in no way within  the reach of our senses; a cause, but not an effect, that never  was not, but existed during an infinity of eternities, before  there was anything else except Time and Space, is wholly  beyond the reach of our conceptions. The mind of man has  wearied itself in speculations as to His nature, His essence,

His attributes; and ended in being no wiser than it began. In  the impossibility of conceiving of immateriality, we feel at  sea and lost whenever we go beyond the domain of matter. 
And yet we know that there are Powers,  p. 569

[paragraph continues] Forces, Causes, that are themselves not matter. 
We give them names, but what they really are, and what their  essence, we are wholly ignorant.

But, fortunately, it does not follow that we may not believe, or  even know, that which we cannot explain to ourselves, or that  which is beyond the reach of our comprehension: If we  believed only that which our intellect can grasp, measure,  comprehend, and have distinct and clear ideas of, we should  believe scarce anything. The senses are not the witnesses that  bear testimony to us of the loftiest truths.

Our greatest difficulty is, that language is not adequate to  express our ideas; because our words refer to things, and are  images of what is substantial and material. If we use the word 
"emanation," our mind involuntarily recurs to something  material, flowing out of some other thing that is material; and  if we reject this idea of materiality, nothing is left of the  emanation but an unreality. The word "thing" itself suggests  to us that which is material and within the cognizance and  jurisdiction of the senses. If we cut away from it the idea of  materiality, it presents itself to us as no thing, but an  intangible unreality, which the mind vainly endeavors to  grasp. Existence and Being are terms that have the same color  of materiality; and when we speak of a Power or Force, the  mind immediately images to itself one physical and material  thing acting upon another. Eliminate that idea; and the Power  or Force, devoid of physical characteristics, seems as unreal  as the shadow that dances on a wall, itself a mere absence of  light; as spirit is to us merely that which is not matter.

Infinite space and infinite time are the two primary ideas. We  formulize them thus: add body to body and sphere to sphere,  until the imagination wearies; and still there will remain  beyond, a void, empty, unoccupied SPACE, limitless, because  it is void. Add event to event in continuous succession,  forever and forever, and there will still remain, before and  after, a TIME in which there was and will be no event, and  also endless because it too is void.

Thus these two ideas of the boundlessness of space and the  endlessness of time seem to involve the ideas that matter and  events are limited and finite. We cannot conceive of an  infinity of worlds or of events; but only of an indefinite  number of each; for, as we struggle to conceive of their  infinity, the thought ever occurs in despite of all our efforts—  there must be space in which  p. 570  there are no worlds; there must have been time when there  were no events.

We cannot conceive how, if this earth moves millions of  millions of miles a million times repeated, it is still in the  centre of space', nor how, if we lived millions of millions of  ages and centuries, we should still be in the centre of eternity- 
-with still as much space on one side as on the other; with still  as much time before us as behind; for that seems to say that  the world has not moved nor we lived at all.

Nor can we comprehend how an infinite series of worlds,  added together, is no larger than an infinite series of atoms; or  an infinite series of centuries no longer than an infinite series  of seconds; both being alike infinite, and therefore one series  containing no more nor fewer units than the other.

Nor have we the capacity to form in ourselves any idea of that  which is immaterial. We use the word, but it conveys to us  only the idea of the absence and negation of materiality;  which vanishing, Space and Time alone, infinite and  boundless, seem to us to be left.

We cannot form any conception of an effect without a cause. 
We cannot but believe, indeed we know, that, how far soever  we may have to run back along the chain of effects and  causes, it cannot be infinite', but we must come at last to  something which is not an effect, bur the first cause: and yet  the fact is literally beyond our comprehension. The mind  refuses to grasp the idea of .se//-existence, of existence  without a beginning. As well expect the hair that grows upon  our head to understand the nature and immortality of the soul.

It does not need to go so far in search of mysteries; nor have  we any right to disbelieve or doubt the existence of a Great 
First Cause, itself no effect, because we cannot comprehend  it; because the words we use do not even express it to us  adequately.

We mb a needle for a little while, on a dark, inert mass of iron  ore, that had lain idle in the earth for many centuries. 
Something is thereby communicated to the steel—we term it a  virtue, a power, or a quality —and then we balance it upon a  pivot; and, lo! drawn by some invisible, mysterious Power,  one pole of the needle turns to the North, and there the same 
Power keeps the same pole for days and years; will keep it  there, perhaps, as long as the world lasts, carry the needle  where you will, and no matter what seas or  p. 571  mountains intervene between it and the North Pole of the  world. And this Power, thus acting, and indicating to the  mariner his course over the trackless ocean, when the stars  shine not for many days, saves vessels from shipwreck,  families from distress, and those from sudden death on whose  lives the fate of nations and the peace of the world depend.

But for it, Napoleon might never have reached the ports of 
France on his return from Egypt, nor Nelson lived to fight and  win at Trafalgar. Men call this Power Magnetism, and then  complacently think that they have explained it all; and yet  they have but given a new name to an unknown thing, to hide  their ignorance. What is this wonderful Power? It is a real,  actual, active Power: that we know and see. But what its  essence is, or how it acts, we do not know, any more than we  know the essence or the mode of action of the Creative 
Thought and Word of God.

And again, what is that which we term galvanism and  electricity,— which, evolved by the action of a little acid on  two metals, aided by a magnet, circles the earth in a second,  sending from land to land the Thoughts that govern the  transactions of individuals and nations? The mind has formed  no notion of matter, that will include if, and no name that we  can give it, helps us to understand its essence and its being. It  is a Power, like Thought and the Will. We know no more.

What is this power of gravitation that makes everything upon  the earth tend to the centre? How does it reach out its invisible  hands toward the erratic meteor-stones, arrest them in their  swift course, and draw them down to the earth's bosom? It is a  power. We know no more.

What is that heat which plays so wonderful a part in the  world's economy?—that caloric, latent everywhere, within us  and without us, produced by combustion, by intense pressure,  and by swift motion? Is it substance, matter, spirit, or  immaterial, a mere Force or State of Matter?

And what is light ? A substance, say the books,— matter, that  travels to us from the sun and stars, each ray separable into  seven, by the prism, of distinct colors, and with distinct  peculiar qualities and actions. And if a substance, what is its  essence, and what power is inherent in it, by which it journeys  incalculable myriads of miles, and reaches us ten thousand  years or more after it leaves the stars?  p. 572

All power is equally a mystery. Apply intense cold to a drop  of water in the centre of a globe of iron, and the globe is  shattered as the water freezes. Confine a little of the same  limpid element in a cylinder which Enceladus or Typhon  could not have riven asunder, and apply to it intense heat, and  the vast power that couched latent in the water shivers the  cylinder to atoms. A little shoot from a minute seed, a shoot  so soft and tender that the least bruise would kill it, forces its  way downward into the hard earth, to the depth of many feet,  with an energy wholly incomprehensible. What are these  mighty forces, locked up in the small seed and the drop of  water?

Nay, what is LIFE itself, with all its wondrous, mighty  energies,—that power which maintains the heat within us, and  prevents our bodies, that decay so soon without it, from  resolution into their original elements—Life, that constant  miracle, the nature and essence whereof have eluded all the  philosophers; and all their learned dissertations on it are a  mere jargon of words?

No wonder the ancient Persians thought that Light and Life  were one; both emanations from the Supreme Deity, the  archetype of light. No wonder that in their ignorance they  worshipped the Sun. God breathed into man the spirit of life;  not matter, but an emanation from Himself; not a creature  made by Him, nor a distinct existence, but a Power, like His  own Thought: and light, to those great-souled ancients, also  seemed no creature, and no gross material substance, but a  pure emanation from the Deity, immortal and indestructible  like Himself.

What, indeed, is REALITY? Our dreams are as real, while  they last, as the occurrences of the daytime. We see, hear,  feel, act, experience pleasure and suffer pain, as vividly and  actually in a dream as when awake. The occurrences and  transactions of a year are crowded into the limits of a second:  and the dream remembered is as real as the past occurrences  of life.

The philosophers tell us that we have no cognizance of  substance itself, but only of its attributes', that when we see  that which we call a block of marble, our perceptions give us  information only of something extended, solid, colored,  heavy, and the like; but not of the very thing itself, to which  these attributes belong. And vet the attributes do not exist  without the substance. They are not substances, but  adjectives. There is no such thing or existence as hardness,  weight or color, by itself, detached from any  p. 573  subject, moving first here, then there, and attaching itself to  this and to the other subject. And yet, they say, the attributes  are not the subject.

So Thought, Volition, and Perception are not the soul, but its  attributes', and we have no cognizance of the soul itself, but  only of them, its manifestations. Nor of God; but only of His 
Wisdom, Power, Magnificence, Truth, and other attributes.

And yet we know that there is matter, a soul within our body,  a God that lives in the Universe.

Take, then, the attributes of the soul. I am conscious that I  exist and am the same identical person that I was twenty years  ago. I am conscious that my body is not I,—that if my arms  were lopped away, this person that I call ME, would still  remain, complete, entire, identical as before. But I cannot  ascertain, by the most intense and long-continued reflection,  what I am, nor where within my body I reside, nor whether I  am a point, or an expanded substance. I have no power to  examine and inspect. I exist, will, think, perceive. That I  know, and nothing more. I think a noble and sublime 
Thought. What is that Thought? It is not Matter, nor Spirit. It  is not a Thing; but a Power and Force. I make upon a paper  certain conventional marks, that represent that Thought.

There is no Power or Virtue in the marks I write, but only in  the Thought which they tell to others. I die, but the Thought  still lives. It is a Power. It acts on men, excites them to  enthusiasm, inspires patriotism, governs their conduct,  controls their destinies, disposes of life and death. The words 
I speak are but a certain succession of particular sounds, that  by conventional arrangement communicate to others the 
Immaterial, Intangible, Eternal Thought. The fact that 
Thought continues to exist an instant, after it makes its  appearance in the soul, proves it immortal: for there is nothing  conceivable that can destroy it. The spoken words, being mere  sounds, may vanish into thin air, and the written ones, mere  marks, be burned, erased, destroyed: but the THOUGHT itself  lives still, and must live on forever.

A Human Thought, then, is an actual EXISTENCE, and a 
FORCE and POWER, capable of acting upon and controlling  matter as well as mind. Is not the existence of a God, who is  the immaterial soul of the Universe, and whose THOUGHT,  embodied or not embodied in His WORD, is an Infinite 
Power, of Creation and production,  p. 574  destruction and preservation, quite as comprehensible as the  existence of a Soul, of a Thought separated from the Soul, of  the Power of that Thought to mould the fate and influence the 
Destinies of Humanity?

And yet we know not when that Thought comes, nor what it  is. It is not WE. We do not mould it, shape it, fashion it. It is  neither our mechanism nor our invention. It appears  spontaneously, flashing, as it were, into the soul, making that  soul the involuntary instrument of its utterance to the world. It  comes to us, and seems a stranger to us, seeking a home.

As little can we explain the mighty power of the human 
WILL. Volition, like Thought, seems spontaneous, an effect  without a cause. Circumstances provoke it, and serve as its  occasion, but do not produce it. It springs up in the soul, like 
Thought, as the waters gush upward in a spring. Is it the  manifestation of the soul, merely making apparent what  passes within the soul, or an emanation from it, going abroad  and acting outwardly, itself a real Existence, as it is an  admitted Power? We can but own our ignorance. It is certain  that it acts on other souls, controls, directs them, shapes their  action, legislates for men and nations: and yet it is not  material nor visible; and the laws it writes merely inform one  soul of what has passed within another.

God, therefore, is a mystery, only as everything that surrounds  us, and as we ourselves, are mysteries. We know that there is  and must be a FIRST CAUSE. His attributes, severed from

Himself, are unrealities. As color and extension, weight and  hardness, do not exist apart from matter as separate existences  and substantives, spiritual or immaterial; so the Goodness, 
Wisdom, Justice, Mercy, and Benevolence of God are not  independent existences, personify them as men may, but  attributes of the Deity, the adjectives of One Great 
Substantive. But we know that He must be Good, True, Wise, 
Just, Benevolent, Merciful: and in all these, and all His other  attributes, Perfect and Infinite; because we are conscious that  these are laws imposed on us by the very nature of things,  necessary, and without which the Universe would be con¬  fusion and the existence of a God incredible. They are of His  essence, and necessary, as His existence is.

He is the Living, Thinking, Intelligent Sour, of the Universe,  the PERMANENT, the STATIONARY [Eoxwc .. Estos], of 
Simon Magus, the ONE that always IS [To Ov .. TO ON] of 
Plato, as  p. 575  contradistinguished from the perpetual flux and reflux, or 
Genesis, of things.

And, as the Thought of the Soul, emanating from the Soul,  becomes audible and visible in Words, so did THE 
THOUGHT or GOD, springing up within Himself, immortal  as Himself, when once conceived,-immortal before, because  in Himself, utter Itself in THE WORD, its manifestation and  mode of communication, and thus create the Material, Mental,

Spiritual Universe, which, like Him, never began to exist.

This is the real idea of the Ancient Nations: GOD, the 
Almighty Father, and Source of All; His THOUGHT,  conceiving the whole Universe, and willing its creation: His 
WORD, uttering that THOUGHT, and thus becoming the 
Creator or Demiourgos, in whom was Life and Light, and that 
Light the Life of the Universe.

Nor did that Word cease at the single act of Creation; and  having set going the great machine, and enacted the laws of  its motion and progression, of birth and life, and change and  death, cease to exist, or remain thereafter in inert idleness.

FOR THE THOUGHT OF GOD LIVES AND IS 
IMMORTAL. Embodied in the WORD, is not only created,  but it preserves. It conducts and controls the Universe, all  spheres, all worlds, all actions of mankind, and of every  animate and inanimate creature. It speaks in the soul of every  man who lives. The Stars, the Earth, the Trees, the Winds, the  universal voice of Nature, tempest, and avalanche, the Sea's  roar and the grave voice of the waterfall, the hoarse thunder  and the low whisper of the brook, the song of birds, the voice  of love, the speech of men, all are the alphabet in which it  communicates itself to men, and informs them of the will and  law of God, the Soul of the Universe. And thus most truly did 
"THE WORD BECOME MESH AND DWELL AMONG 
MEN."

God, the unknown FATHER [naxiip Ayvoioioc .. Pater 
Agnostos], known to us only by His Attributes; the 
ABSOLUTE I AM: . . The THOUGHT of God f'Evvoia . 
Ennoia], and the WORD [Aoyoc;.... Logos], Manifestation  and expression of the Thought; .... Behold THE TRUE 
MASONIC TRINITY; the UNIVERSAL SOUL, the 
THOUGHT in the Soul, the WORD, or Thought expressed;  the THREE IN ONE, of a Trinitarian Ecossais.

Here Masonry pauses, and leaves its Initiates to carry out and  develop these great Truths in such manner as to each may  seem  p. 576  most accordant with reason, philosophy, truth, and his  religious faith. It declines to act as Arbiter between them. It  looks calmly on, while each multiplies the intermediates  between the Deity and Matter, and the personifications of 
God's manifestations and attributes, to whatever extent his  reason, his conviction, or his fancy dictates.

While the Indian tells us that PARABRAHMA, BRAHM, and 
PARATMA were the first Triune God, revealing Himself as 
BRAHMA, VISHNU, and SIVA, Creator, Preserver, and 
Destroyer ,....

The Egyptian, of AMUN-RE, NEITH, and PHTHA, Creator, 
Matter, Thought or Light, the Persian of his Trinity of Three 
Powers in ORMUZD, Sources of Light, Fire, and Water, the

Buddhists of the God SAKYA, a Trinity composed of 
BUDDHA, DHARMA, and S A N G A .—Intelligence, Law, and 
Union or Harmony, the Chinese Sabeans of their Trinity of 
Chang-ti, the Supreme Sovereign; Tien, the Heavens; and 
Tao, the Universal Supreme Reason and Principle of all  things; who produced the Unit; that, two; two, three; and  three, all that is;....

While the Sclavono-Vend typifies his Trinity by the three  heads of the God Triglav, the Ancient Prussian points to his 
Triune God, Perkoun, Pikollos, and Potrimpos, Deities of 
Light and Thunder, of Hell and of the Earth; the Ancient 
Scandinavian to Odin, Frea, and Thor, and the old Etruscans  to TINA, TALNA, and MINERVA, Strength, Abundance, and 
Wisdonv ,....

While Plato tells us of the Supreme Good, the Reason or 
Intellect, and the Soul or Spirit', and Philo of the Archetype of 
Light, Wisdom [Soqna], and the Word [Aoyoi;]; the Kabalists,  of the Triads of the Sephiroth; ....

While the disciples of Simon Magus, and the many sects of  the Gnostics, confuse us with their Eons, Emanations,

Powers, Wisdom Superior and Inferior, Ialdabaoth, Adam- 
Kadmon, even to the three hundred and sixty-five thousand  emanations of the Maldai'tes; ....

And while the pious Christian believes that the WORD dwelt  in the Mortal Body of Jesus of Nazareth, and suffered upon  the Cross; and that the HOLY GHOST was poured out upon  the Apostles, and now inspires every truly Christian Soul: . . .

While all these faiths assert their claims to the exclusive  possession of the Truth, Masonry inculcates its old doctrine,  and no more: .... That God is ONE; that His THOUGHT  uttered in His  p. 577

[paragraph continues] WORD, created the Universe, and preserves it  by those Eternal Laws which are the expression of that 
Thought: that the Soul of Man, breathed into him by God, is  immortal as His Thoughts are; that he is free to do evil or to  choose good, responsible for his acts and punishable for his  sins: that all evil and wrong and suffering are but temporary,  the discords of one great Harmony, and that in His good time  they will lead by infinite modulations to the great, harmonic  final chord and cadence of Truth, Love, Peace, and 
Happiness, that will ring forever and ever under the Arches of 
Heaven, among all the Stars and Worlds, and in all souls of  men and Angels.

Footnotes

568:1 The Substance, or Very Self, of which the Alohayim are  the manifestations.

XXVII.

KNIGHT COMMANDER OF THE TEMPLE.

THIS is the first of the really Chivalric Degrees of the 
Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. It occupies this place in  the Calendar of the Degrees between the 26th and the last of  the Philosophical Degrees, in order, by breaking the  continuity of these, to relieve what might otherwise become  wearisome; and also to remind you that, while engaged with  the speculations and abstractions of philosophy and creeds,  the Mason is also to continue engaged in the active duties of  this great warfare of life. He is not only a Moralist and 
Philosopher, but a Soldier, the Successor of those Knights of  the Middle Age, who, while they wore the Cross, also wielded  the Sword, and were the Soldiers of Honor, Loyalty, and 
Duty.

Times change, and circumstances; but Virtue and Duty  remain the same. The Evils to be warred against but take  another shape, and are developed in a different form.

There is the same need now of truth and loyalty as in the days  of Frederic Barbarossa.

The characters, religious and military, attention to the sick  and wounded in the Hospital, and war against the Infidel in  the field, are no longer blended; but the same duties, to be  performed in another shape, continue to exist and to environ  us all.

The innocent virgin is no longer at the mercy of the brutal 
Baron or licentious man-at-arms; but purity and innocence  still need protectors.

War is no longer the apparently natural State of Society; and  for most men it is an empty obligation to assume, that they  will not recede before the enemy; but the same high duty and  obligation still rest upon all men.

Truth, in act, profession, and opinion, is rarer now than in the  days of chivalry. Falsehood has become a current coin, and  circulates with a certain degree of respectability; because it  has an actual value. It is indeed the great Vice of the Age—it,  and its twin-sister, Dishonesty. Men, for political preferment,  profess  p. 579  whatever principles are expedient and profitable. At the bar,  in the pulpit, and in the halls of legislation, men argue against  their own convictions, and, with what they term logic, prove  to the satisfaction of others that which they do not themselves  believe, Insincerity and duplicity are valuable to their  possessors, like estates in stocks, that yield a certain revenue:  and it is no longer the truth of an opinion or a principle, but  the net profit that may be realized from it, which is the  measure of its value.

The Press is the great sower of falsehood. To slander a  political antagonist, to misrepresent all that he says, and, if  that be impossible, to invent for him what he does not say; to  put in circulation whatever baseless calumnies against him are  necessary to defeat him,—these are habits so common as to  have ceased to excite notice or comment, much less surprise  or disgust.

There was a time when a Knight would die rather than utter a  lie, or break his Knightly word. The Knight Commander of  the Temple revives the old Knightly spirit; and devotes  himself to the old Knightly worship of Truth. No profession  of an opinion not his own, for expediency's sake or profit, Or  through fear of the world's disfavor; no slander of even an  enemy; no coloring or perversion of the sayings or acts of  other men; no insincere speech and argument for any purpose,  or under any pretext, must soil his fair escutcheon. Out of the 
Chapter, as well as in it, he must speak the Truth, and all the 
Truth, no more and no less; or else speak not at all.

To purity and innocence everywhere, the Knight Commander  owes protection, as of old; against bold violence, or those,  more guilty than murderers, who by art and treachery seek to  slay the soul; and against that want and destitution that drive  too many to sell their honor and innocence for food.

In no age of, the world has man had better opportunity than  now to display those lofty virtues and that noble heroism that  so distinguished the three great military and religious Orders,  in their youth, before they became corrupt and vitiated by  prosperity and power.

When a fearful epidemic ravages a city, and death is inhaled  with the air men breathe; when the living scarcely suffice to  bury the dead,—most men flee in abject terror, to return and  live, respectable and influential, when the danger has passed  away. But the old Knightly spirit of devotion and  disinterestedness and contempt  p. 580  of death still lives, and is not extinct in the human heart. 
Everywhere a few are found to stand firmly and unflinchingly  at their posts, to front and defy the danger, not for money, or  to be honored for it, or to protect their own household; but  from mere humanity, and to obey the unerring dictates of  duty. They nurse the sick, breathing the pestilential  atmosphere of the hospital. They explore the abodes of want  and misery. With the gentleness of woman, they soften the  pains of the dying, and feed the lamp of life in the  convalescent. They perform the last sad offices to the dead;  and they seek no other reward than the approval of their own  consciences.

These are the true Knights of the present age: these, and the  captain who remains at his post on board his shattered ship  until the last boat, loaded to the water's edge with passengers  and crew, has parted from her side; and then goes calmly  down with her into the mysterious depths of the ocean:—the  pilot who stands at the wheel while the swift flames eddy  round him and scorch away his life:—the fireman who ascends  the blazing walls, and plunges amid the flames to save the  property or lives of those who have upon him no claim by tie  of blood, or friendship, or even of ordinary acquaintance:—  these, and others like these:—all men, who, set at the post of  duty, stand there manfully; to die, if need be, but not to desert  their post: for these, too, are sworn not to recede before the  enemy.

To the performance of duties and of acts of heroism like  these, you have devoted yourself, my Brother, by becoming a 
Knight Commander of the Temple. Soldier of the Truth and  of Loyalty! Protector of Purity and Innocence! Defier of 
Plague and Pestilence! Nurser of the Sick and Burier of the 
Dead! Knight, preferring Death to abandonment of the Post of 
Duty! Welcome to the bosom of this Order!

XXVIII.

KNIGHT OF THE SUN, OR PRINCE ADEPT.

GOD is the author of everything that existeth; the Eternal, the Supreme, the 
Living, and Awful Being; from Whom nothing in the Universe is hidden. 
Make of Him no idols and visible images; but rather worship Him in the  deep solitudes of sequestered forests; for He is invisible, and fills the 
Universe as its soul, and liveth not in any Temple!

Light and Darkness are the World's Eternal ways. God is the principle of  everything that exists, and the Father of all Beings. He is eternal,  immovable, and Self-Existent. There are no bounds to His power. At one  glance He sees the Past, the Present, and the Future; and the procession of  the builders of the Pyramids, with us and our remotest Descendants, is now  passing before Him. He reads our thoughts before they are known to  ourselves. He rules the movements of the Universe, and all events and  revolutions are the creatures of His will. For He is the Infinite Mind and 
Supreme Intelligence.

In the beginning Man had the WORD, and that WORD was from God: and

out of the living power which, in and by that WORD, was communicated to  man, came the LIGHT of his existence. Let no man speak the WORD, for  by it THE FATHER made light and darkness, the world and living  creatures!  p. 582

The Chaldean upon his plains worshipped me, and the sea-loving 
Phoenician. They builded me temples and towers, and burned sacrifices to  me upon a thousand altars. Light was divine to them, and they thought me a 
God. But I am nothing —nothing', and LIGHT is the creature of the unseen 
GOD that taught the true religion to the Ancient Patriarchs: AWFUL, 
MYSTERIOUS, THE ABSOLUTE.

Man was created pure; and God gave him TRUTH, as He gave him LIGHT. 
He has lost the truth and found error. He has wandered far into darkness;  and round him Sin and Shame hover evennore. The Soul that is impure, and  sinful, and defiled with earthly stains, cannot again unite with God, until, by  long trials and many purifications, it is finally delivered from the old  calamity; and Light overcomes Darkness and dethrones it, in the Soul.

God is the First; indestructible, eternal, UNCREATED, INDIVISIBLE. 
Wisdom, Justice, Truth, and Mercy, with Harmony and Love, are of His  essence, and Eternity and Infinitude of Extension. He is silent, and consents  with MIND, and is known to Souls through MIND alone. In Him were all  things originally contained, and from Him all things were evolved. For out  of His Divine SILENCE and REST, after an infinitude of time, was  unfolded the WORD, or the Divine POWER; and then in turn the Mighty,  ever-acting, measureless INTELLECT; and from the WORD were evolved  the myriads of suns and systems that make the Universe; and fire, and light,  and the electric HARMONY, which is the harmony of spheres and numbers:  and from the INTELLECT all Souls and intellects of men.

In the Beginning, the Universe was but ONE SOUL. HE was THE ALL,  alone with TIME and SPACE, and Infinite as they.

HE HAD THIS THOUGHT: "I Create Worlds and lo! the Universe,  and the laws of harmony and motion that rule it. the expression of a thought  of God; and bird and beast, and every living thing but Man: and light and  air, and the mysterious cur-rents, and the dominion of mysterious numbers!

.HE HAD THIS THOUGHT: "I Create Man, whose Soul shall be my  image, and he shall rule.'' And lo! Man, with senses, instinct, and a  reasoning mind!

.And yet not MAN! but an animal that breathed, and saw, and thought:  until an immaterial spark from God's own  p. 583

[paragraph continues] Infinite Being penetrated the brain, and became the Soul: and  lo, MAN THE IMMORTAL! Thus, threefold, fruit of God's thought, is 
Man; that sees and hears and feels; that thinks and reasons; that loves and is  in harmony with the Universe.

Before the world grew old, the primitive Truth faded out from men's Souls. 
Then man asked himself, " What am I? and how and whence am I? and  whither do I go?" And the Soul, looking inward upon itself, strove to learn  whether that "I" were mere matter; its thought and reason and its passions  and affections mere results of material combination; or a material Being  enveloping an immaterial Spirit: . . and further it strove, by self-  examination, to learn whether that Spirit were an individual essence, with a  separate immortal existence, or an infinitesimal portion of a Great First 
Principle, inter-penetrating the Universe and the infinitude of space, and  undulating like light and heat: . . and so they wandered further amid the  mazes of error; and imagined vain philosophies; wallowing in the sloughs of  materialism and sensualism, of beating their wings vainly in the vacuum of  abstractions and idealities.

While yet the first oaks still put forth their leaves, man lost the perfect  knowledge of the One True God, the Ancient Absolute Existence, the 
Infinite Mind and Supreme Intelligence; and floated helplessly out upon the  shoreless ocean of conjecture. Then the soul vexed itself with seeking to  learn whether the material Universe was a mere chance combination of 
atoms, or the work of Infinite, Uncreated Wisdom: . . whether the Deity was  a concentrated, and the Universe an extended immateriality; or whether He  was a personal existence, an Omnipotent, Eternal, Supreme Essence,  regulating matter at will; or subjecting it to unchangeable laws throughout  eternity; and to Whom, Himself Infinite and Eternal, Space and Time are  unknown. With their finite limited vision they sought to leam the source and  explain the existence of Evil, and Pain, and Sorrow; and so they wandered  ever deeper into the darkness, and were lost; and there was for them no  longer any God; but only a great, dumb, soulless Universe, full of mere  emblems and symbols.

You have heretofore, in some of the Degrees through which you have  passed, heard much of the ancient worship of the Sun, the Moon, and the  other bright luminaries of Heaven, and of the Elements and Powers of 
Universal Nature. You have been made, to  p. 584  some extent, familiar with their personifications as Heroes suffering or  triumphant, or as personal Gods or Goddesses, with human characteristics  and passions, and with the multitude of legends and fables that do but  allegorically represent their risings and settings, their courses, their  conjunctions and oppositions, their domiciles and places of exaltation.

Perhaps you have supposed that we, like many who have written on these  subjects, have intended to represent this worship to you as the most ancient  and original worship of the first men that lived. To undeceive you, if such  was your conclusion, we have caused the Personifications of the Great 
Luminary of Heaven, under the names by which he was known to the most  ancient nations, to proclaim the old primitive truths that were known to the 
Fathers of our race, before men came to worship the visible manifestations  of the Supreme Power and Magnificence and the Supposed Attributes of the 
Universal Deity in the Elements and in the glittering armies that Night  regularly marshals and arrays upon the blue field of the firmament.

We ask now your attention to a still further development of these truths,  after we shall have added something to what we have already said in regard  to the Chief Luminary of Heaven, in explanation of the names and  characteristics of the several imaginary Deities that represented him among  the ancient races of men.

ATHOM or ATHOM-RE, was the Chief and Oldest Supreme God of Upper 
Egypt, worshipped at Thebes; the same as the OM or AUM of the Hindus,  whose name was unpronounceable, and who, like the BREHM of the latter 
People, was "The Being that was, and is, and is to come; the Great God, the 
Great Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent One, the Greatest in the 
Universe, the Lord;" whose emblem was a perfect sphere, showing that He  was first, last, midst, and without end; superior to all Nature-Gods, and all  personifications of Powers, Elements, and Luminaries; symbolized by Light,  the Principle of Life.

AMUN was the Nature-God, or Spirit of Nature, called by that name or 
AMUN-RE, and worshipped at Memphis in Lower Egypt, and in Libya, as  well as in Upper Egypt. He was the Libyan Jupiter, and represented the  intelligent and organizing force that develops itself in Nature, when the  intellectual types or forms of bodies are revealed to the senses in the world's  order, by their  p. 585  union with matter, whereby the generation of bodies is effected. He was the  same with Kneph, from whose mouth issued the Orphic egg out of which  came the Universe.

DIONUSOS was the Nature-God of the Greeks, as AMUN was of the 
Egyptians. In the popular legend, Dionusos, as well as Hercules, was a 
Theban Hero, born of a mortal mother. Both were sons of Zeus, both  persecuted by Here. But in Hercules the God is subordinate to the Hero;  while Dionusos, even in poetry, retains his divine character, and is identical  with Iacchus, the presiding genius of the Mysteries. Personification of the 
Sun in Taurus, as his ox-hoofs showed, the delivered earth from the harsh  dominion of Winter, conducted the mighty chorus of the Stars, and the  celestial revolution of the year, changed with the seasons, and underwent  their periodical decay. He was the Sun as invoked by the Eleans, nupiY£vt]<;,  ushered into the world amidst lightning and thunder, the Mighty Hunter of  the Zodiac, Zagreus the Golden or ruddy-faced. The Mysteries taught the  doctrine of Divine Unity; and that Power Whose Oneness is a seeming  mystery, but really a truism, was Dionusos, the God of Nature, or of that  moisture, which is the life of Nature, who prepares in darkness, in Hades or 
Iasion, the return of life and vegetation, or is himself the light and change  evolving their varieties. In the Egean Islands he was Butes, Dardanus, 
Himeros or Imbros; in Crete he appears as Iasius or even Zeus, whose  orgiastic worship, remaining unveiled by the usual forms of mystery,  betrayed to profane curiosity the symbols which, if irreverently  contemplated, were sure to be misunderstood.

He was the same with the dismembered Zagreus, the son of Persephone, an 
Ancient Subterranean Dionusos, the homed progeny of Zeus in the 
Constellation of the Serpent, entrusted by his father with the thunderbolt,  and encircled with the protecting dance of Curetes. Through the envious  artifices of Here, the Titans eluded the vigilance of his guardians and tore  him to pieces; but Pallas restored the still palpitating heart to his father, who  commanded Apollo to bury the dismembered remains upon Parnassus.

Dionusos, as well as Apollo, was leader of the Muses; the tomb of one  accompanied the worship of the other; they were the same, yet different,  contrasted, yet only as filling separate parts in the same drama; and the  mystic and heroic personifications, the God of Nature and of Art, seem, at  some remote period, to have proceeded from a common source. Their  separation was one of fonn  p. 586  rather than of substance: and from the time when Hercules obtained  initiation from Triptolemus, or Pythagoras received Orphic tenets, the two  conceptions were tending to re-combine. It was said that Dionusos or 
Poseidon had preceded Apollo in the Oracular office; and Dionusos  continued to be esteemed in Greek Theology as Healer and Saviour, Author  of Life and Immortality. The dispersed Pythagoreans, "Sons of Apollo,"  immediately betook themselves to the Orphic Service of Dionusos, and  there are indications that there was always something Dionysiac in the  worship of Apollo.

Dionusos is the Sun, that liberator of the elements; and his spiritual  meditation was suggested by the same imagery which made the Zodiac the  supposed path of the Spirits in their descent and their return. His second  birth, as offspring of the highest, is a type of the spiritual regeneration of  man. He, as well as Apollo, was preceptor of the Muses and source of  inspiration. His rule prescribed no unnatural mortification: its yoke was  easy, and its mirthful choruses, combining the gay with the severe, did but  commemorate that golden age when earth enjoyed eternal spring, and when  fountains of honey, milk, and wine burst forth out of its bosom at the touch  of the thyrsus. He is the "Liberator." Like Osiris, he frees the soul, and  guides it in its migrations beyond the grave, preserving it from the risk of  again falling under the slavery of matter or of some inferior animal form.

All soul is part of the Universal Soul, whose totality is Dionusos; and he  leads back the vagrant spirit to its home, and accompanies it through the  purifying processes, both real and symbolical, of its earthly transit. He died  and descended to the Shades; and his suffering was the great secret of the 
Mysteries, as death is the grand mystery of existence. He is the immortal  suitor of Psyche (the Soul), the Divine influence which physically called the  world into being, and which, awakening the soul from its Stygian trance,  restores it from earth to Heaven.

Of HERMES, the Mercury of the Greeks, the Thoth of the Egyptians, and  the Taaut of the Phoenicians, we have heretofore spoken sufficiently at  length. He was the inventor of letters and of Oratory, the winged messenger  of the Gods, bearing the Caduceus wreathed with serpents; and in our 
Council he is represented by the ORATOR.

The Hindus called the Sun SURYA; the Persians , MITHRAS;  p. 587  the Egyptians, OSIRIS; the Assyrians and Chaldceans, BEL; the Scythians  and Etruscans and the ancient Pelasgi, ARKALEUS or HERCULES; the 
Phoenicians, ADONAI or ADON; and the Scandinavians, ODIN.

From the name SURYA, given by the Hindus to the Sun, the Sect who paid  him particular adoration were called Souras. Their painters describe his car  as drawn by seven green horses. In the Temple of Visweswara, at Benares,  there is an ancient piece of sculpture, well executed in stone, representing  him sitting in a car drawn by a horse with twelve heads. His charioteer, by  whom he is preceded, is ARUN [from TIN, AUR the Crepusculuml], or the 
Dawn; and among his many titles are twelve that denote his distinct powers  in each of the twelve months. Those powers are called Adityas, each of  whom has a particular name. Surya is supposed frequently to have  descended upon earth, in a human shape, and to have left a race on earth,  equally renowned in Indian story with the Heliades of Greece. He is often  styled King of the Stars and Planets, and thus reminds us of the Adon- 
Tsbauth (Lord of the Starry Hosts) of the Hebrew writings.

MITHRAS was the Sun-God of the Persians; and was fabled to have been  born in a grotto or cave, at the Winter Solstice. His feasts were celebrated at  that period, at the moment when the sun commenced to return Northward,  and to increase the length of the days. This was the great Feast of the 
Magian religion. The Roman Calendar, published in the time of 
Constantine, at which period his worship began to gain ground in the 
Occident, fixed his feast-day on the 25th of December. His statues and  images were inscribed, Deo-Soli invicto Mithrce —to the invincible Sun-God 
Mithras. Nomen invictum Sol Mithra. . . . Soli Omnipotenti Mithrce. To him,  gold, incense, and myrrh were consecrated. "Thee," says Martianus Capella,  in his hymn to the Sun, "the dwellers on the Nile adore as Serapis, and 
Memphis worships as Osiris; in the sacred rites of Persia thou art Mithras, in 
Phrygia, Atys, and Libya bows down to thee as Ammon, and Phoenician 
Byblos as Adonis; and thus the whole world adores thee under different  names."

OSIRIS was the son of Helios (Phra), the "divine offspring con-generate  with the dawn," and at the same time an incarnation of Kneph or 
Agathodaemon, the Good Spirit, including all his possible manifestations,  either physical or moral. He represented in a familiar form the beneficent  aspect of all higher emanations and  p. 588  in him was developed the conception of a Being purely good, so that it  became necessary to set up another power as his adversary, called Seth, 
Babys or Typhon, to account for the injurious influences of Nature.

With the phenomena of agriculture, supposed to be the invention of Osiris,  the Egyptians connected the highest truths of their religion. The soul of man  was as the seed hidden in the ground, and the mortal framework, similarly  consigned to its dark resting-place, awaited its restoration to life's unfailing  source. Osiris was not only benefactor of the living; he was also Hades, 
Serapis, and Rhadamanthus, the monarch of the dead. Death, therefore, in 
Egyptian opinion, was only another name for renovation, since its God is the  same power who incessantly renews vitality in Nature. Every corpse duly  embalmed was called "Osiris," and in the grave was supposed to be united,  or at least brought into approximation, to the Divinity. For when God  became incarnate for man's benefit, it was implied that, in analogy with His  assumed character, He should submit to all the conditions of visible  existence. In death, as in life, Isis and Osiris were patterns and precursors of  mankind; their sepulchres stood within the temples of the Superior Gods;  yet though their remains might be entombed at Memphis or Abydus, their  divinity was unimpeached, and they either shone as luminaries in the  heavens, or in the unseen world presided over the futurity of the  disembodied spirits whom death had brought nearer to them.

The notion of a dying God, so frequent in Oriental legend, and of which we  have already said much in former Degrees, was the natural inference from a  literal interpretation of nature-worship; since nature, which in the  vicissitudes of the seasons seems to undergo a dissolution, was to the  earliest religionists the express image of the Deity, and at a remote period  one and the same with the "varied God," whose attributes were seen not  only in its vitality, but in its changes. The unseen Mover of the Universe  was rashly identified with its obvious fluctuations. The speculative Deity  suggested by the drama of nature, was worshipped with imitative and  sympathetic rites. A period of mourning about the Autumnal Equinox, and  of joy at the return of Spring, was almost universal. Phrygians and 
Paphlagonians, Boeotians, and even Athenians, were all more or less  attached to such observances; the Syrian damsels sat weeping for Thammuz  or Adoni, mortally  p. 589  wounded by the tooth of Winter, symbolized by the boar, its very general  emblem: and these rites, and those of Atys and Osiris, were evidently  suggested by the arrest of vegetation, when the Sun, descending from his  altitude, seems deprived of his generating power.

Osiris is a being analogous to the Syrian ADONI; and the fable of his  history, which we need not here repeat, is a narrative form of the popular  religion of Egypt, of which the Sun is the Hero, and the agricultural calendar  the moral. The moist valley of the Nile, owing its fertility to the annual  inundation, appeared, in contrast with the surrounding desert, like life in the  midst of death. The inundation was in evident dependence on the Sun, and 
Egypt, environed with arid deserts, like a heart within a burning censer, was  the female power, dependent on the influences personified in its God. 
Typhon his brother, the type of darkness, drought, and sterility, threw his  body into the Nile; and thus Osiris, the "good," the "Saviour," perished, in  the 28th year of his life or reign, and on the 17th day of the month Athor, or  the 13th of November. He is also made to die during the heats of the early 
Summer, when, from March to July, the earth was parched with intolerable  heat, vegetation was scorched, and the languid Nile exhausted. From that  death he rises when the Solstitial Sun brings the inundation, and Egypt is  filled with mirth and acclamation anticipatory of the second harvest. From  his Wintry death he rises with the early flowers of Spring, and then the  joyful festival of Osiris found was celebrated.

So the pride of Jemsheed, one of the Persian Sun-heroes, or the solar year  personified, was abruptly cut off by Zohak, the tyrant of the West. He was  sawn asunder by a fish-bone, and immediately the brightness of Iran  changed to gloom. Ganymede and Adonis, like Osiris, were hurried off in  all their strength and beauty; the premature death of Linus, the burthen of  the ancient lament of Greece, was like that of the Persian Siamek, the 
Bithynian Hylas, and the Egyptian Maneros, Son of Menes or the Eternal. 
The elegy called Maneros was sung at Egyptian banquets, and an effigy  enclosed within a diminutive Sarcophagus was handed round to remind the  guests of their brief tenure of existence. The beautiful Memnon, also,  perished in his prime; and Enoch, whose early death was lamented at 
Iconium, lived 365 years, the number of  p. 590  days of the solar year; a brief space when compared with the longevity of  his patriarchal kindred.

The story of Osiris is reflected in those of Orpheus and Dionusos Zagreus,  and perhaps in the legends of Absyrtus and Pelias, of /Eson, Thyestes, 
Melicertes, Itys, and Pelops. Io is the disconsolate Isis or Niobe: and Rhea  mourns her dismembered Lord, Hyperion, and the death of her son Helios,  drowned in the Eridanus; and if Apollo and Dionusos are immortal, they had  died under other names, as Orpheus, Linus, or Hyacinthus. The sepulchre of 
Zeus was shown in Crete. Hippolytus was associated in divine honors with 
Apollo, and after he had been torn to pieces like Osiris, was restored to life  by the Pasonian herbs of Diana, and kept darkling in the secret grove of 
Egeria. Zeus deserted Olympus to visit the Ethiopians; Apollo underwent  servitude to Admetus; Theseus, Peirithous, Hercules, and other heroes,  descended for a time to Hades; a dying Nature-God was exhibited in the 
Mysteries, the Attic women fasted, sitting on the ground, during the 
Thesmophoria, and the Boeotians lamented the descent of Cora-Proserpine  to the Shades.

But the death of the Deity, as understood by the Orientals, was not  inconsistent with His immortality. The temporary decline of the Sons of 
Light is but an episode in their endless continuity; and as the day and year  are more convenient subdivisions of the Infinite, so the fiery deaths of 
Phaethon or Hercules are but breaks in the same Phoenix process of  perpetual regeneration, by which the spirit of Osiris lives forever in the  succession of the Memphian Apis. Every year witnesses the revival of 
Adonis; and the amber tears shed by the Heliades for the premature death of  their brother, are the golden shower full of prolific hope, in which Zeus  descends from the brazen vault of Heaven into the bosom of the parched  ground.

BAL, representative or personification of the sun, was one of the Great 
Gods of Syria, Assyria, and Chaldea, and his name is found upon the  monuments of Nimroud, and frequently occurs in the Hebrew writings. He  was the Great Nature-God of Babylonia, the Power of heat, life, and  generation. His symbol was the Sun, and he was figured seated on a bull. 
All the accessories of his great temple at Babylon, described by Herodotus,  are repeated with singular fidelity, but on a smaller scale, in the Hebrew  tabernacle and temple. The golden statue alone is wanted to complete  p. 591  the resemblance. The word Bal or Baal, like the word Adon, signifies Lord  and Master. He was also the Supreme Deity of the Moabites, Anionites, and 
Carthaginians, and of the Sabeans in general; the Gauls worshipped the Sun  under the name of Belin or Belinus: and Bela is found among the Celtic 
Deities upon the ancient monuments.

The Northern ancestors of the Greeks maintained with hardier habits a more  manly style of religious symbolism than the effeminate enthusiasts of the 
South, and had embodied in their Perseus, HERCULES and MITHRAS, the  consummation of the qualities they esteemed and exercised.

Almost every nation will be found to have had a mythical being, whose  strength or weakness, virtues or defects, more or less nearly describe the 
Sun's career through the seasons. There was a Celtic, a Teutonic, a Scythian,  an Etruscan, a Lydian Hercules, all whose legends became tributary to those  of the Greek hero. The name of Hercules was found by Herodotus to have  been long familiar in Egypt and the East, and to have originally belonged to  a much higher personage than the comparatively modern hero known in 
Greece as the Son of Alcmena. The temple of the Hercules of Tyre was  reported to have been built 2300 years before the time of Herodotus; and 
Hercules, whose Greek name has been sometimes supposed to be of 
Phoenician origin, in the sense of Circuitor, i.e. "rover" and "perambulator"  of earth, as well as "Hyperion" of the sky, was the patron and model of those  famous navigators who spread his altars from coast to coast through the 
Mediterranean, to the extremities of the West, where "ARKALEUS" built  the City of Gades, and where a perpetual fire burned in his service. He was  the lineal descendant of Perseus, the luminous child of darkness, conceived  within a subterranean vault of brass; and he a representation of the Persian 
Mithras, rearing his emblematic lions above the gates of Mycenae, and  bringing the sword of Jemsheed to battle against the Gorgons of the West. 
Mithras is similarly described in the Zend-Avesta as the "mighty hero, the  rapid runner, whose piercing eye embraces all, whose arm bears the club for  the destruction of the Darood."

Hercules Ingeniculus, who, bending on one knee, uplifts his club and  tramples on the Serpent's head, was, like Prometheus and Tantalus, one of  the varying aspects of the struggling and declining Sun. The victories of 
Hercules are but exhibitions of  p. 592

[paragraph continues] Solar power which have ever to be repeated. It was in the far 
North, among the Hyperboreans, that, divested of his Lion's skin, he lay  down to sleep, and for a time lost the horses of his chariot. Henceforth that 
Northern region of gloom, called the "place of the death and revival of 
Adonis," that Caucasus whose summit was so lofty, that, like the Indian 
Meru, it seemed to be both the goal and commencement of the Sun's career,  became to Greek imaginations the final bourne of all things, the abode of 
Winter and desolation, the pinnacle of the arch connecting the upper and  lower world, and consequently the appropriate place for the banishment .of 
Prometheus. The daughters of Israel, weeping for Thammuz, mentioned by 
Ezekiel, sat looking to the North, and waiting for his return from that region. 
It was while Cybele with the Sun-God was absent among the Hyperboreans,  that Phrygia, abandoned by her, suffered the horrors of famine. Delos and 
Delphi awaited the return of Apollo from the Hyperboreans, and Hercules  brought thence to Olympia the olive. To all Masons, the North has  immemorially been the place of darkness; and of the great lights of the 
Lodge, none is in the North.

Mithras, the rock-born hero (nerpoyEvtn;), heralded the Sun's return in 
Spring, as Prometheus, chained in his cavern, betokened the continuance of 
Winter. The Persian beacon on the mountain-top represented the Rock-born 
Divinity enshrined in his worthiest temple; and the funeral conflagration of

Hercules was the sun dying in glory behind the Western hills. But though  the transitory manifestation suffers or dies, the abiding and eternal power  liberates and saves. It was an essential attribute of a Titan, that he should  arise again after his fall; for the revival of Nature is as certain as its decline,  and its alternations are subject to the appointment of a power which controls  them both.

"God," says Maximus Tyrius, "did not spare His own Son [Hercules], or  exempt Him from the calamities incidental to humanity. The Theban  progeny of Jove had his share of pain and trial. By vanquishing earthly  difficulties he proved his affinity with Heaven. His life was a continuous  struggle. He fainted before Typhon in the desert; and in the commencement  of the Autumnal season (cum longae redit hora noctis), descended under the  guidance of Minerva to Hades. He died; but first applied for initiation to 
Eumolpus, in order to foreshadow that state of religious preparation which  should precede the momentous change. Even in Hades he  p. 593  rescued Theseus and removed the stone of Ascalaphus, reanimated the  bloodless spirits, and dragged into the light of day the monster Cerberus,  justly reputed invincible because an emblem of Time itself; he burst the  chains of the grave (for Busiris is the grave personified), and triumphant at  the close as in the dawn of his career, was received after his labors into the  repose of the heavenly mansions, living forever with Zeus in the arms of 
Eternal Youth.

ODIN is said to have borne twelve names among the old Germans, and to  have had 114 names besides. He was the Apollo of the Scandinavians, and  is represented in the Voluspa as destined to slay the monstrous snake. Then  the Sun will be extinguished, the earth be dissolved in the ocean, the stars  lose their brightness, and all Nature be destroyed in order that it may be  renewed again. From the bosom of the waters a new world will emerge clad  in verdure; harvests will be seen to ripen where no seed was sown, and evil  will disappear.

The free fancy of the ancients, which wove the web of their myths and  legends, was consecrated by faith. It had not, like the modem mind, set apart  a petty sanctuary of borrowed beliefs, beyond which all the rest was  common and unclean. Imagination, reason, and religion circled round the  same symbol; and in all their symbols there was serious meaning, if we  could but find it out. They did not devise fictions in the same vapid spirit in  which we, cramped by conventionalities, read them. In endeavoring to  interpret creations of fancy, fancy as well as reason must guide: and much of  modern controversy arises out of heavy misapprehensions off ancient  symbolism.

To those ancient peoples, this earth was the centre of the Universe. To them  there were no other worlds, peopled with living beings, to divide the care  and attention of the Deity. To them the world was a great plain, of unknown,  perhaps inconceivable limits, and the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars  journeyed above it, to give them light. The worship of the Sun became the  basis of all the religions of antiquity. To them light and heat were mysteries;  as indeed they still are to us. As the Sun caused the day, and his absence the  night; as, when he journeyed Northward, Spring and Summer followed him;  and when he again turned to the South, Autumn and inclement Winter, and  cold and long dark nights ruled the earth; ... as his influence produced the  leaves and flowers, and ripened the harvests, and brought regular  inundation,  p. 594  he necessarily became to them the most interesting object of the material 
Universe. To them he was the innate fire of bodies, the fire of nature. Author  of Life, heat, and ignition, he was to them the efficient cause of all  generation, for without him there was no movement, no existence, no form. 
He was to them immense, indivisible, imperishable, and everywhere present. 
It was their need of light, and of his creative energy, that was felt by all  men; and nothing was more fearful to them than his absence. His beneficent  influences caused his identification with the Principle of Good; and the 
BRAHMA of the Hindus, the MITHRAS of the Persians, and ATHOM, 
AMUN, PHTHA, and OSIRIS, of the Egyptians, the BEL of the Chaldteans,  the ADONAI of the Phoenicians, the ADONIS and APOLLO of the Greeks  became but personifications of the Sun, the regenerating Principle, image of  that fecundity which perpetuates and rejuvenates the world's existence.

So too the struggle between the Good and Evil Principles was personified,  as was that between life and death, destruction and re-creation; in allegories  and fables which poetically represented the apparent course of the Sun; who,  descending toward the Southern Hemisphere, was figuratively said to be  conquered and put to death by darkness, or the genius of Evil; but, returning  again toward the Northern Hemisphere, he seemed to be victorious, and to  arise from the tomb. This death and resurrection were also figurative of the  succession of day and night, of death, which is a necessity of life, and of life  which is bom of death; and everywhere the ancients still saw the combat  between the two Principles that ruled the world. Everywhere this contest  was embodied in allegories and fictitious histories: into which were  ingeniously woven all the astronomical phenomena that accompanied,  preceded, or followed the different movements of the Sun, and the changes  of Seasons, the approach or withdrawal of inundation. And thus grew into  stature and strange proportions the histories of the contests between Typhon  and Osiris, Hercules and Juno, the Titans and Jupiter, Ormuzd and Ahriman,  the rebellious Angels and the Deity, the Evil Genii and the Good; and the  other like fables, found not only in Asia, but in the North of Europe, and  even among the Mexicans and Peruvians of the New World; carried thither,  in all probability, by those Phoenician voyagers who bore thither civilization  and the arts. The Scythians lamented the death of Acmon, the Persians that  of Zohak conquered  p. 595  by Pheridoun, the Hindus that of Soura-Parama slain by Soupra-Muni, as  the Scandinavians did that of Balder, torn to pieces by the blind Hother.

The primitive idea of infinite space existed in the first men, as it exists in us. 
It and the idea of infinite time are the first two innate ideas. Man cannot  conceive how thing can be added to thing, or event follow event, forever. 
The idea will ever return, that no matter how long bulk is added to bulk,  there must be, still beyond, an empty void without limit; in which is nothing. 
In the same way the idea of time without beginning or end forces itself on  him. Time, without events, is also a void, and nothing.

In that empty void space the primitive men knew there was no light nor  warmth. They felt, what we know scientifically, that there must be a thick  darkness there, and an intensity of cold of which we have no conception.

Into that void they thought the Sun, the Planets, and the Stars went down  when they set under the Western Horizon. Darkness was to them an enemy,  a harm, a vague dread and terror. It was the very embodiment of the evil  principle; and out of it they said that he was formed. As the Sun bent 
Southward toward that void, they shuddered with dread: and when, at the 
Winter Solstice, he again commenced his Northward march, they rejoiced  and feasted; as they did at the Summer Solstice, when most he appeared to  smile upon them in his pride of place. These days have been celebrated by  all civilized nations ever since. The Christian has made them feast-days of  the church, and appropriated them to the two Saints John; and Masonry has  done the same.

We, to whom the vast Universe has become but a great machine, not instinct  with a great SOUL, but a clockwork of proportions unimaginable, but still  infinitely less than infinite; and part at least of which we with our orreries  can imitate; we, who have measured the distances and dimensions, and  learned the specific gravity and determined the orbits of the moon and the  planets; we, who know the distance to the sun, and his size; have measured  the orbits of the flashing comets, and the distances of the fixed stars; and  know the latter to be suns like our sun, each with his retinue of worlds, and  all governed by the same unerring, mechanical laws and outwardly imposed  forces, centripetal and centrifugal; we, who with our telescopes have  separated the galaxy and the nebula into other stars and groups of stars;  discovered  p. 596  new planets, by first discovering their disturbing forces upon those already  known; and learned that they all, Jupiter, Venus, and the fiery Mars, and 
Saturn and the others, as well as the bright, mild, and ever-changing Moon,  are mere dark, dull, opaque clods like our earth, and not living orbs of  brilliant fire and heavenly light; we, who have counted the mountains and  chasms in the moon, with glasses that could distinctly reveal to us the  temple of Solomon, if it stood there in its old original glory; we, who no  longer imagine that the stars control our destinies, and who can calculate the  eclipses of the sun and moon, backward and forward, for ten thousand years;  we, with our vastly increased conceptions of the powers of the Grand 
Architect of the Universe, but our wholly material and mechanical view of  that Universe itself; we cannot, even in the remotest degree, feel, though we  may partially and imperfectly imagine, how those great, primitive, simple-  hearted children of Nature felt in regard to the Starry Hosts, there upon the  slopes of the Himalayas, on the Chaldsean plains, in the Persian and Median  deserts, and upon the banks of that great, strange River, the Nile. To them  the Universe was alive —instinct with forces and powers, mysterious and  beyond their comprehension. To them it was no machine, no great system of  clockwork; but a great live creature, an army of creatures, in sympathy with  or inimical to man. To them, all was a mystery and a miracle, and the stars  flashing overhead spoke to their hearts almost in an audible language. 
Jupiter, with his kingly splendors, was the Emperor of the starry legions. 
Venus looked lovingly on the earth and blessed it; Mars, with his crimson  fires, threatened war and misfortune; and Saturn, cold and grave, chilled and  repelled them. The ever-changing Moon, faithful companion of the Sun, was  a constant miracle and wander; the Sun himself the visible emblem of the  creative and generative power. To them the earth was a great plain, over  which the sun, the moon, and the planets revolved, its servants, framed to  give it light. Of the stars, some were beneficent existences that brought with  them Spring-time and fruits and flowers,—some, faithful sentinels, advising  them of coming inundation, of the season of storm and of deadly winds;  some heralds of evil, which, steadily foretelling, they seemed to cause. To  them the eclipses were portents of evil, and their causes hidden in mystery,  and supernatural. The regular returns of the stars, the comings of Arcturus, 
Orion,  p. 597

[paragraph continues] Sirius, the Pleiades, and Aldebaran, and the journeyings of the 
Sun, were voluntary and not mechanical to them. What wonder that  astronomy became to them the most important of sciences; that those who  learned it became rulers; and that vast edifices, the Pyramids, the tower or  temple of Bel, and other like erections everywhere in the East, were builded  for astronomical purposes?—and what wonder that, in their great child-like  simplicity, they worshipped Light, the Sun, the Planets, and the Stars, and  personified them, and eagerly believed in the histories invented for them; in  that age when the capacity for belief was infinite; as indeed, if we but  reflect, it still is and ever will be?

If we adhered to the literally historic sense, antiquity would be a mere  inexplicable, hideous chaos, and all the Sages deranged: and so it would be  with Masonry and those who instituted it. But when these allegories are  explained, they cease to be absurd fables, or facts purely local; and become  lessons of wisdom for entire humanity. No one can doubt, who studies them,  that they all came from a common source.

And he greatly errs who imagines that, because the mythological legends  and fables of antiquity are referable to and have their foundation in the  phenomena of the Heavens, and all the Heathen Gods are but mere names  given to the Sun, the Stars, the Planets, the Zodiacal Signs, the Elements, the 
Powers of Nature, and Universal Nature herself, therefore the first men  worshipped the Stars, and whatever things, animate and inanimate, seemed  to them to possess and exercise a power or influence, evident or imagined,  over human, fortunes and human destiny.

For ever, in all the nations, ascending to the remotest antiquity to which the  light of History or the glimmerings of tradition reach, we find, seated above  all the gods which represent the luminaries and the elements, and those  which personify the innate Powers of universal nature, a still higher Deity,  silent, undefined, incomprehensible, the Supreme, one God, from Whom all  the rest flow or emanate, or by Him are created. Above the Time-God 
Horns, the Moon-Goddess or Earth-Goddess Isis, and the Sun-God Osiris,  of the Egyptians, was Annin, the Nature-God; and above him, again, the 
Infinite, Incomprehensible Deity, ATHOM. BREHM, the silent, self-  contemplative, one original God, was the Source, to the Hindus, of Brahma, 
Vishnu, and Siva. Above Zeus, or before him, were Kronos and Ouranos. 
Over the Alohayim was the great  p. 598

[paragraph continues] Nature-God AL, and still beyond him. Abstract Existence,

IHUH--He that IS, WAS, and SHALL BE. Above all the Persian Deities  was the Unlimited Time, ZERUANE-AKHERENE; and over Odin and Thor  was the Great Scandinavian Deity ALFADIR.

The worship of Universal Nature as a God was too near akin to the worship  of a Universal Soul, to have been the instinctive creed of any savage people  or rude race of men. To imagine all nature, with all its apparently  independent parts, as forming one consistent whole, and as itself a unit,  required an amount of experience and a faculty of generalization not  possessed by the rude uncivilized mind, and is but a step below the idea of a  universal Soul.

In the beginning man had the WORD; and that WORD was from God; and  out of the living POWER communicated to man in and by that WORD,  came THE LIGHT of His Existence.

God made man in His own likeness. When, by a long succession of  geological changes, He had prepared the earth to be his habitation. He  created him, and placed him in that part of Asia which all the old nations  agreed in calling the cradle of the human race, and whence afterward the  stream of human life flowed forth to India, China, Egypt, Persia, Arabia, and 
Phoenicia. HE communicated to him a knowledge of the nature of his 
Creator, and of the pure, primitive, undefiled religion. The peculiar and  distinctive excellence and real essence of the primitive man, and his true  nature and destiny, consisted in his likeness to God. HE stamped His own  image upon man's soul. That image has been, in the breast of every  individual man and of mankind in general, greatly altered, impaired, and  defaced; but its old, half-obliterated characters are still to be found on all the  pages of primitive history; and the impress, not entirely effaced, every  reflecting mind may discover in its own interior.

Of the original revelation to mankind, of the primitive WORD of Divine 
TRUTH, we find clear indications and scattered traces in the sacred  traditions of all the primitive Nations; traces which, when separately  examined, appear like the broken remnants, the mysterious and hieroglyphic  characters, of a mighty edifice that has been destroyed; and its fragments,  like those of the old Temples and Palaces of Nimroud, wrought  incongruously into edifices many centuries younger. And, although amid the  ever-growing degeneracy of mankind, this primeval word of revelation was  p. 599  falsified by the admixture of various errors, and overlaid and obscured by  numberless and manifold fictions, inextricably confused, and disfigured  almost beyond the power of recognition, still a profound inquiry will  discover in heathenism many luminous vestiges of primitive Truth.

For the old Heathenism had everywhere a foundation in Truth; and if we  could separate that pure intuition into nature and into the simple symbols of  nature, that constituted the basis of all Heathenism, from the alloy of error  and the additions of fiction, those first hieroglyphic traits of the instinctive  science of the first men, would be found to agree with truth and a true  knowledge of nature, and to afford an image of a free, pure, comprehensive,  and finished philosophy of life.

The struggle, thenceforward to be eternal, between the Divine will and the  natural will in the souls of men, commenced immediately after the creation. 
Cain slew his brother Abel, and went forth to people parts of the earth with  an impious race, forgetters and defiers of the true God. The other 
Descendants of the Common Father of the race intermarried with the  daughters of Cain's Descendants: and all nations preserved the remembrance  of that division of the human family into the righteous and impious, in their  distorted legends of the wars between the Gods, and the Giants and Titans. 
When, afterward, another similar division occurred, the Descendants of Seth  alone preserved the true primitive religion and science, and transmitted them  to posterity in the ancient symbolical character, on monuments of stone: and  many nations preserved in their legendary traditions the memory of the  columns of Enoch and Seth.

Then the world declined from its original happy condition and fortunate  estate, into idolatry and barbarism: but all nations retained the memory of  that old estate; and the poets, in those early days the only historians,  commemorated the succession of the ages of gold, silver, brass, and iron.

In the lapse of those ages, the sacred tradition followed various courses  among each of the most ancient nations; and from its original source, as  from a common centre, its various streams flowed downward; some  diffusing through favored regions of the world fertility and life; but others  soon losing themselves, and being dried up in the sterile sands of human  error.

After the internal and Divine WORD originally communicated  p. 600  by God to man, had become obscured; after man's comiection with his 
Creator had been broken, even outward language necessarily fell into  disorder and confusion. The simple and Divine Truth was overlaid with  various and sensual fictions, buried under illusive symbols, and at last  perverted into horrible phantoms.

For in the progress of idolatry it needs came to pass, that what was  originally revered as the symbol of a higher principle, became gradually  confounded or identified with the object itself, and was worshipped; until  this error led to a more degraded form of idolatry. The early nations  received much from the primeval source of sacred tradition; but that haughty  pride which seems an inherent part of human nature led each to represent  these fragmentary relics of original truth as a possession peculiar to  themselves; thus exaggerating their value, and their own importance, as  peculiar favorites of the Deity, who had chosen them as the favored people  to whom to commit these truths. To make these fragments, as far as  possible, their private property, they reproduced them under peculiar forms,  wrapped them up in symbols, concealed them in allegories, and invented  fables to account for their own special possession of them. So that, instead  of preserving in their primitive simplicity and purity these blessings of  original revelation, they overlaid them with poetical ornament; and the  whole wears a fabulous aspect, until by close and severe examination we  discover the truth which the apparent fable contains.

These being the conflicting elements in the breast of man; the old  inheritance or original dowry of truth, imparted to him by God in the  primitive revelation; and error, or the foundation for error, in his degraded  sense and spirit now turned from God to nature, false faiths easily sprung up  and grew rank and luxuriant, when the Divine Truth was no longer guarded  with jealous care, nor preserved in its pristine purity. This soon happened  among most Eastern nations, and especially the Indians, the Chaldaeans, the 
Arabians, the Persians, and the Egyptians; with whom imagination, and a  very deep but still sensual feeling for nature, were very predominant. The 
Northern firmament, visible to their eyes, possesses by far the largest and  most brilliant constellations; and they were more alive to the impressions  made by such objects, than are the men of the present day.

With the Chinese, a patriarchal, simple, and secluded people,  p. 601  idolatry long made but little progress. They invented writing within three or  four generations after the flood; and they long preserved the memory of  much of the primitive revelation; less overlaid with fiction than those  fragments which other nations have remembered. They were among those  who stood nearest to the source of sacred tradition; and many passages in  their old writings contain remarkable vestiges of eternal truth, and of the 
WORD of primitive revelation, the heritage of old thought, which attest to  us their original eminence.

But among the other early nations, a wild enthusiasm and a sensual idolatry  of nature soon superseded the simple worship of the Almighty God, and set  aside or disfigured the pure belief in the Eternal Uncreated Spirit. The great  powers and elements of nature, and the vital principle of production and  procreation through all generations; then the celestial spirits or heavenly 
Host, the luminous armies of the Stars, and the great Sun, and mysterious,  ever-changing Moon (all of which the whole ancient world regarded not as  mere globes of light or bodies of fire, but as animated living substances,  potent over man's fate and destinies); next the genii and tutelar spirits, and  even the souls of the dead, received divine worship. The animals,  representing the starry constellations, first reverenced as symbols merely,  came to be worshipped as gods; the heavens, earth, and the operations of  nature were personified; and fictitious personages invented to account for  the introduction of science and arts, and the fragments of the old religious  truths; and the good and bad principles personified, became also objects of  worship; while, through all, still shone the silver threads .of the old  primitive revelation.

Increasing familiarity with early oriental records seems more and more to  confirm the probability that they all originally emanated from one source. 
The eastern and southern slopes of the Paropismus, or Hindukusch, appear  to have been inhabited by kindred Iranian races, similar in habits, language,  and religion. The earliest Indian and Persian Deities are for the most part  symbols of celestial light, their agency being regarded as an eternal warfare  with the powers of Winter, storm, and darkness. The religion of both was  originally a worship of outward nature, especially the manifestations of fire  and light; the coincidences being too marked to be merely accidental. Deva, 
God, is derived from the root div, to shine. Indra, like Orrnuzd or Ahura- 
Mazda,  p. 602  is the bright firmament; Sura or Surya, the Heavenly, a name of the Sun,  recurs in the Zend word Huare, the Sun, whence Khur and Khorshid or 
Corasch. Uschas and Mitra are Medic as well as Zend Deities and the 
Amschaspands or "immortal Holy Ones" of the Zend-Avesta may be  compared with the seven Rishis or Vedic Star-God, of the constellation of  the Bear. Zoroastrianism, like Buddhism, was an innovation in regard to an  older religion; and between the Parsee and Brahmin may be found traces of  disruption as well as of coincidence. The original Nature-worship, in which  were combined the conceptions both of a Universal Presence and perpetuity  of action, took different directions of development, according to the  difference between the Indian and Persian mind.

The early shepherds of the Punjaub, then called the country of the Seven 
Rivers, to whose intuitional or inspired wisdom (Veda) we owe what are  perhaps the most ancient religious effusions extant in any language,  apostrophized as living beings the physical objects of their worship. First in  this order of Deities stands Indra, the God of the "blue" or "glittering"  firmament, called Devaspiti, Father of the Devas or Elemental Powers, who  measured out the circle of the sky, and made fast the foundations of the 
Earth; the ideal domain of Varouna, "the All-encompasser,” is almost  equally extensive, including air, water, night, the expanse between Heaven  and Earth; Agni, who lives on the fire of the sacrifice, on the domestic  hearth, and in the lightnings of the sky, is the great Mediator between God  and Man; Uschas, or the Dawn, leads forth the Gods in the morning to make  their daily repast in the intoxicating Soma of Nature's offertory, of which the 
Priest could only compound from simples a symbolical imitation. Then  came the various Sun-Gods, Adityas or Solar Attributes, Surya the 
Heavenly, Savitri the Progenitor, Pashan the Nourisher, Bagha the 
Felicitous, and Mitra the Friend.

The coming forth of the Eternal Being to the work of creation was  represented as a marriage, his first emanation being a universal mother,  supposed to have potentially existed with him from Eternity, or, in  metaphorical language, to have been "his sister and his spouse." She became  eventually promoted to be the Mother of the Indian Trinity, of the Deity  under His three Attributes, of Creation, Preservation, and Change or 
Regeneration.

The most popular forms or manifestations of Vishnu the Pre-server, were his  successive avataras or historic impersonations,  p. 603  which represented the Deity coming forth out of the incomprehensible  mystery of His nature, and revealing Himself at those critical epochs which  either in the physical or moral world seemed to mark a new commencement  of prosperity and order. Combating the power of Evil in the various  departments of Nature, and in successive periods of time, the Divinity,  though varying in fonn, is ever in reality the same, whether seen in useful  agricultural or social inventions, in traditional victories over rival creeds, or  in physical changes faintly discovered through tradition, or suggested by  cosmogonical theory. As Rama, the Epic hero armed with sword, club, and  arrows, the prototype of Hercules and Mithras, he wrestles like the Hebrew 
Patriarch with the Powers of Darkness; as Chrishna-Govinda, the Divine 
Shepherd, he is the Messenger of Peace, ovennastering the world by music  and love. Under the human form he never ceases to be the Supreme Being. 
"The foolish” (he says, in Bhagavad Ghita), "unacquainted with my 
Supreme Nature, despise me in this human form, while men of great minds,  enlightened by the Divine principle within them, acknowledge me as  incorruptible and before all things, and serve me with undivided hearts." "I  am not recognized by all," he says again, "because concealed by the  supernatural power which is in me; yet to me are known all things past,  present, and to come; I existed before Vaivaswata and Menou. I am the 
Most High God, the Creator of the World, the Eternal Poorooscha (Man- 
World or Genius of the World). And although in my own nature I am  exempt from liability to birth or death, and am Lord of all created things, yet  as often as in the world virtue is enfeebled, and vice and injustice prevail, so  often do I become manifest and am revealed from age to age, to save the  just, to destroy the guilty, and to reassure the faltering steps of virtue. He  who acknowledged me as even so, doth not on quitting this mortal frame  enter into another, for he entered into me; and many who have trusted in me  have already entered into me, being purified by the power of wisdom. I help  those who walk in my path, even as they serve me."

Brahma, the creating agent, sacrificed himself, when, by descending into  material forms, he became incorporated with his work; and his mythological  history was interwoven with that of the Universe. Thus, although spiritually  allied to the Supreme, and Lord of all creatures (Prajapati), he shared the  imperfection and  p. 604  corruption of an inferior nature, and, steeped in manifold and perishable  forms, might be said, like the Greek Uranus, to be mutilated and fallen. He  thus combined two characters, formless form, immortal and mortal, being  and non-being, motion and rest. As Incarnate Intelligence, or THE WORD,  he communicated to man what had been revealed to himself by the Eternal,  since he is creation's Soul as well as Body, within which the Divine Word is  written in those living letters which it is the prerogative of the self-conscious  spirit to interpret.

The fundamental principles of the religion of the Hindi's consisted in the  belief in the existence of One Being only, of the immortality of the soul, and  of a future state of rewards and punishments. Their precepts of morality  inculcate the practice of virtue as necessary for procuring happiness even in  this transient life; and their religious doctrines make their felicity in a future  state to depend upon it.

Besides their doctrine of the transmigration of souls, their dogmas may be  epitomized under the following heads: 1st. The existence of one God, from 
Whom all things proceed, and to Whom all must return. To him they  constantly apply these expressions—The Universal and Eternal Essence; that  which has ever been and will ever continue; that which vivifies and  pervades all things; He who is everywhere present, and causes the celestial  bodies to revolve in the course He has prescribed to them. 2d. A tripartite  division of the Good Principle, for the purposes of Creation, Preservation,  and Renovation by change and death. 3d. The necessary existence of an Evil 
Principle, occupied in counteracting the benevolent purposes of the first, in  their execution by the Devata or Subordinate Genii, to whom is entrusted  the control over the various operations of nature.

And this was part of their doctrine: "One great and incomprehensible Being  has alone existed from all Eternity. Everything we behold and we ourselves  are portions of Him. The soul, mind or intellect, of gods and men, and of all  sentient creatures, are detached portions of the Universal Soul, to which at  stated periods they are destined to return. But the mind of finite beings is  impressed by one uninterrupted series of illusions, which they consider as  real, until again united to the great fountain of truth. Of these illusions, the  first and most essential is individuality. By its influence, when detached  from its source, the soul becomes  p. 605  ignorant of its own nature, origin, and destiny. It considers itself as a  separate existence, and no longer a spark of the Divinity, a link of one  immeasurable chain, an infinitely small but indispensable portion of one  great whole."

Their love of imagery caused them to personify what they conceived to be  some of the attributes Of God, perhaps in order to present things in a way  better adapted to the comprehensions of the vulgar, than the abstruse idea of  an indescribable, invisible God; and hence the invention of a Brahma, a 
Vishnu, and a Siva or Iswara. These were represented under various forms;  but no emblem or visible sign of Brihm or Brehm, the Omnipotent, is to be  found. They considered the great mystery of the existence of the Supreme 
Ruler of the Universe, as beyond human comprehension. Every creature  endowed with the faculty of thinking, they held, must be conscious of the  existence of a God, a first cause; but the attempt to explain the nature of that 
Being, or in any way to assimilate it with our own, they considered not only  a proof of folly, but of extreme impiety.

The following extracts from their books will serve to show what were the  real tenets of their creed:

'By one Supreme Ruler is this Universe pervaded; even every world in the  whole circle of nature. . There is one Supreme Spirit, which nothing can  shake, more swift than the thought of man. That Supreme Spirit moves at  pleasure, but in itself is immovable; it is distant from us, yet near us; it  pervades this whole system of worlds; yet it is infinitely beyond it. That man  who considers all beings as existing even in the Supreme Spirit, and the 
Supreme Spirit as pervading all beings, henceforth views no creature with  contempt.... All spiritual beings are the same in kind with the Supreme 
Spirit. . . . The pure enlightened soul assumes a luminous form, with no  gross body, with no perforation, with no veins or tendons, unblemished,  untainted by sin: itself being a ray from the Infinite Spirit, which knows the 
Past and the Future, which pervades all, which existed with no cause but  itself, which created all things as they are, in ages most remote. That all-  pervading Spirit which gives light to the visible Sun, even the same in kind  am I, though infinitely distant in degree. Let my soul return to the immortal 
Spirit of God, and then let my body, which ends in ashes, return to dust! O 
Spirit, who pervadest fire, lead us in a straight path to the riches of  beatitude.  p. 606

[paragraph continues] Thou, O God, possessest all the treasures of knowledge!

Remove each foul taint from our souls!

"From what root springs mortal man, when felled by the hand of death?

Who can make him spring again to birth? God, who is perfect wisdom,  perfect happiness. He is the final refuge of the man who has liberally  bestowed his wealth, who has been firm in virtue, who knows and adores  that Great One. . . . Let us adore the supremacy of that Divine Sun, the 
Godhead who illuminates all, who re-creates all, from whom all proceed, to  whom all must return, whom we invoke to direct our understandings aright,  in our progress toward his holy seat. . . . What the Sun and Light are to this  visible world, such is truth to the intellectual and visible Universe. . . . Our  souls acquire certain knowledge, by meditating on the light of Truth, which  emanates from the Being of Beings. . . . That Being, without eyes sees,  without ears hears all; he knows whatever can be known, but there is none  who knows him; him the wise call the Great, Supreme, Pervading Spirit. . . . 
Perfect Truth, Perfect Happiness, without equal, immortal; absolute unity,  whom neither speech can describe, nor mind comprehend: all-pervading, all-  transcending, delighted with his own boundless intelligence, nor limited by  space or time; without feet, running swiftly; without hands, grasping all  worlds; without eyes, all-surveying; without ears, all-hearing; without an  intelligent guide, understanding all; without cause, the first of all causes; all¬  ruling, all-powerful, the Creator, Preserver, Transformer of all things: such  is the Great One; this the Vedas declare.

"May that soul of mine, which mounts aloft in my waking hours as an  ethereal spark, and which, even in my slumber, has a like ascent, soaring to  a great distance, as an emanation from the Light of Lights, be united by  devout meditation with the Spirit supremely blest, and supremely  intelligent! . . . May that soul of mine, which was itself the primeval  oblation placed within all creatures. . . . which is a ray of perfect wisdom,  which is the inextinguishable light fixed within created bodies, without  which no good act is performed. ... in which as an immortal essence may  be comprised whatever has passed, is present, or will be hereafter. ... be  united by devout meditation with the Spirit supremely blest and supremely  intelligent

"The Being of Beings is the Only God, eternal and everywhere present, Who  comprises everything. There is no God but He ... . The  p. 607

[paragraph continues] Supreme Being is invisible, incomprehensible, immovable,  without figure or shape. No one has ever seen Him; time never comprised 
Him; His essence pervades everything; all was derived from Him.

"The duty of a good man, even in the moment of his destruction, consists  not only in forgiving, but even in a desire of benefiting his destroyer; as the  sandal-tree, in the instant of its overthrow, sheds perfume on the axe which  fells it."

The Vedanta and Nyaya philosophers acknowledge a Supreme Eternal 
Being, and the immortality of the soul: though, like the Greeks, they differ  in their ideas of those subjects. They speak of the Supreme Being as an  eternal essence that pervades space, and gives life or existence. Of that  universal and eternal pervading spirit, the Vedanti suppose four  modifications; but as these do not change its nature, and as it would be  erroneous to ascribe to each of them a distinct essence, so it is equally  erroneous, they say, to imagine that the various modifications by which the 
All-pervading Being exists, or displays His power, are individual existences. 
Creation is not considered as the instant production of things, but only as the  manifestation of that which exists eternally in the one Universal Being. The 
Nyaya philosophers believe that spirit and matter are eternal; but they do not  suppose that the world in its present form has existed from eternity, but only  the primary matter from which it sprang when operated on by the almighty 
Word of God, the Intelligent Cause and Supreme Being, Who produced the  combinations or aggregations which compose the material Universe.

Though they believe that soul is an emanation from the Supreme Being,  they distinguish it from that Being, in its individual existence. Truth and 
Intelligence are the eternal attributes of God, not, they say, of the individual  soul, which is susceptible Both of knowledge and ignorance, of pleasure and  pain; and therefore God and it are distinct. Even when it returns to the 
Eternal, and attains supreme bliss, it undoubtedly does not cease. Though  united to the Supreme Being, it is not absorbed in it, but still retains the  abstract nature of definite or visible existence.

"The dissolution of the world," they say, "consists in the destruction of the  visible forms and qualities of things; but their material essence remains, and  from it new worlds are formed by the creative energy of God; and thus the 
Universe is dissolved and renewed in endless succession."  p. 608

The Jainas, a sect at Mysore and elsewhere, say that the ancient religion of 
India and of the whole world consisted in the belief in one God, a pure 
Spirit, indivisible, omniscient and all-powerful; that God, having given to all  things their appointed order and course of action, and to man a sufficient  portion of reason, or understanding, to guide him in his conduct, leaves him  to the operation of free will, without the entire exercise of which he could  not be held answerable for his conduct.

Menou, the Hindu lawgiver, adored, not the visible, material Sun, but "that  divine and incomparably greater light," to use the words of the most  venerable text in the Indian Scripture, "which illumines all, delights all,  from which all proceed, to which all must return, and which alone can  irradiate our intellects." He thus commences his Institutes:

"Be it heard!

"This Universe existed only in the first divine idea yet unexpanded, as if  involved in darkness, imperceptible, undeftnable, undiscoverable by reason,  and undiscovered by revelation, as if it were wholly immersed in sleep:

"Then the Sole Self-existing Power, Himself undiscovered, but making this  world discernible, with five elements, and other principles of nature,  appeared with undiminished glory, expanding His idea, or dispelling the  gloom.

"He Whom the mind alone can perceive, whose essence eludes the eternal  organs, who has no visible parts, who exists from Eternity, even He, the soul  of all beings, Whom no being can comprehend, shone forth.

"He, having willed to produce various beings from His own divine 
Substance, first with a thought created the waters.... From that which is 
[precisely the Hebrew mrr], the first cause, not the object of sense, existing  everywhere in substance, not existing to our perception, without beginning  or end" [the A.', and fl.‘., or the I.'. A.'.fl.’.], "was produced the divine  male famed in all worlds under the appellation of Brahma."

Then recapitulating the different things created by Brahma, he adds: "He,"  meaning Brahma [the Aoyoi;, the WORD], "whose powers are  incomprehensible, having thus created this Universe, was again absorbed in  the Supreme Spirit, changing the time of energy for the time of repose."

The Antareya A 'ran ’ya, one of the Vedas, gives this primitive  p. 609  idea of the creation: "In the beginning, the Universe was but a Soul: nothing  else, active or inactive, existed. Then HE had this thought, I will create  worlds', and thus HE created these different worlds; air, the light, mortal  beings, and the waters.

"HE had this thought: Behold the worlds; I will create guardians for the  worlds. So HE took of the water and fashioned a being clothed with the  human form. He looked upon him, and of that being so contemplated, the  mouth opened like an egg, and speech came forth, and from the speech fire. 
The nostrils opened, and through them went the breath of respiration, and by  it the air was propagated. The eyes opened; from them came a luminous ray,  and from it was produced the sun. The ears dilated; from them came  hearing, and from hearing space:" . . . and, after the body of man, with the  senses, was formed;—"HE, the Universal Soul, thus reflected: How can this  body exist without Mel He examined through what extremity He could  penetrate it. He said to Himself: If, without Me, the World is articulated,  breath exhales, and sight sees; if hearing hears, the skin feels, and the: mind  reflects, deglutition swallows, and the generative organ fulfils its functions,  what then am II And separating the suture of the cranium, He penetrated

Behold the great fundamental primitive truths! God, an infinite Eternal Soul  or Spirit. Matter, not eternal nor self-existent, but created-created by a  thought of God. After matter, and worlds, then man, by a like thought: and  finally, after endowing him with the senses and a thinking mind, a portion, a  spark, of God Himself penetrates the man, and becomes a living spirit  within him.

The Vedas thus detail the creation of the world:

"In the beginning there was a single God, existing of Himself; Who, after  having passed an eternity absorbed in the contemplation of His own being,  desired to manifest His perfections outwardly of Himself; and created the  matter of the world. The four elements being thus produced, but still  mingled in confusion, He breathed upon the waters, which swelled up into  an immense ball in the shape of an. egg, and, developing themselves,  became the vault and orb of Heaven which encircles the earth. Having made  the earth and the bodies of animal beings, this God, the essence of  movement, gave to them, to animate them, a portion of His own being.

Thus, the soul of everything that breathes  p. 610  being a fraction of the universal soul, none perishes; but each soul merely  changes its mould and form, by passing successively into different bodies. 
Of all forms, that which most pleases the Divine Being is Man, as nearest  approaching His own perfections. When a man, absolutely disengaging  himself from his senses, absorbs himself in self-contemplation, he comes to  discern the Divinity, and becomes part of Him."

The Ancient Persians in many respects resembled the Hindus,—in their  language, their poetry, and their poetic legends. Their conquests brought  them in contact with China; and they subdued Egypt and Judea. Their views  of God and religion more resembled those of the Hebrews than those of any  other nation; and indeed the latter people borrowed from them some  prominent doctrines, that we are in the habit of regarding as an essential part  of the original Hebrew creed.

Of the King of Heaven and Father of Eternal Light, of the pure World of 
LIGHT, of the Eternal WORD by which all things were created, of the 
Seven Mighty Spirits that stand next to the Throne of Light and 
Omnipotence, and of the glory of those Heavenly Hosts that encompass that 
Throne, of the Origin of Evil, and the Prince of Darkness, Monarch of the  rebellious spirits, enemies of all good, they entertained tenets very similar to  those of the Hebrews. Toward Egyptian idolatry they felt the strongest  abhorrence, and under Cambyses pursued a regular plan for its utter  extirpation. Xerxes, when he invaded Greece, destroyed the Temples and  erected fire-chapels along the whole course of his march. Their religion was  eminently spiritual, and the earthly fire and earthly sacrifice were but the  signs and emblems of another devotion and a higher power.

Thus the fundamental doctrine of the ancient religion of India and Persia  was at first nothing more than a simple veneration of nature, its pure  elements and its primary energies, the sacred fire, and above all, Light, the  air, not the lower atmospheric air, but the purer and brighter air of Heaven,  the breath that animates and pervades the breath of mortal life. This pure  and simple veneration of nature is perhaps the most ancient, and was by far  the most generally prevalent in the primitive and patriarchal world. It was  not originally a deification of nature, or a denial of the sovereignty of God. 
Those pure elements and primitive essences of created nature offered to the  first men, still in a close communication  p. 611  with the Deity, not a likeness of resemblance, nor a mere fanciful image or a  poetical figure, but a natural and true symbol of Divine power. Everywhere  in the Hebrew writings the pure light or sacred fire is employed as an image  of the all-pervading and all-consuming power and omnipresence of the 
Divinity. His breath was the first source of life; and the faint whisper of the  breeze announced to the prophet His immediate presence.

"All things are the progeny of one fire. The Father perfected all things, and  delivered them over to the Second Mind, whom all nations of men call the

First. Natural works co-exist with the intellectual light of the Father; for it is  the Soul which adorns the great Heaven, and which adorns it after the 
Father. The Soul, being a bright fire, by the power of the Father, remains  immortal, and is mistress of life, and fills up the recesses of the world. For  the fire which is first beyond, did not shut up his power in matter by works,  but by mind, for the framer of the fiery world is the mind of mind, who first  sprang from mind, clothing fire with fire. Father-begotten Light! for He  alone, having from the Father's power received the essence of intellect, is  enabled to understand the mind of the Father; and to instill into all sources  and principles the capacity of understanding, and of ever continuing in  ceaseless revolving motion." Such was the language of Zoroaster,  embodying the old Persian ideas.

And the same ancient sage thus spoke of the Sun and Stars: "The Father  made the whole Universe of fire and water and earth, and all-nourishing  ether. He fixed a great multitude of moveless stars, that stand still forever,  not by compulsion and unwillingly, but without desire to wander, fire acting  upon fire. He congregated the seven firmaments of the world, and so  surrounded the earth with the convexity of the Heavens; and therein set  seven living existences, arranging their apparent disorder in regular orbits,  six of them planets, and the Sun, placed in the centre, the seventh;—in that  centre from which all lines, diverging which way soever, are equal; and the  swift sun himself, revolving around a principal centre, and ever striving to  reach the central and all-pervading light, bearing with him the bright Moon."

And yet Zoroaster added: "Measure not the journeyings of the Sun, nor  attempt to reduce them to rule; for he is carried by the eternal will of the 
Father, not for your sake. Do not endeavor to understand the impetuous  course of the Moon; for she runs  p. 612  evermore under the impulse of necessity; and the progression of the Stars  was not generated to serve any purpose of yours."

Ormuzd says to Zoroaster, in the Boundehesch: "I am he who holds the Star- 
Spangled Heaven in ethereal space; who makes this sphere, which once was  buried in darkness, a flood of light. Through me the Earth became a world  firm and lasting-the earth on which walks the Lord of the world. I am he  who makes the light of Sun, Moon, and Stars pierce the clouds. I make the  corn seed, which perishing in the ground sprouts anew. ... I created plan,  whose eye is light, whose life is the breath of his nostrils. I placed within  him life's unextinguishable power."

Ormuzd or Ahura-Mazda himself represented the primal light, distinct from  the heavenly bodies, yet necessary to their existence, and the source of their  splendor. The Amschaspands (Ameschaspenta, "immortal Holy Ones"),  each presided over a special department of nature. Earth and Heaven, fire  and water, the Sun and Moon, the rivers, trees, and mountains, even the  artificial divisions of the day and year were addressed in prayer as tenanted  by Divine beings, each separately ruling within his several sphere. Fire, in  particular, that "most energetic of immortal powers," the visible  representative of the primal light, was invoked as "Son of Ormuzd." The 
Sun, the Archimagus, that noblest and most powerful agent of divine power,  who "steps forth as a Conqueror from the top of the terrible Alborj to rule  over the world which he enlightens from the throne of Ormuzd," was  worshipped among other symbols by the name of MITHRAS, a beneficent  and friendly genius, who, in the hymn addressed to him in the Zend-Avesta,  bears the names given him by the Greeks, as the "Invincible" and the 
"Mediator"; the fonner, because in his daily strife with darkness he is the  most active confederate of Ormuzd; the latter, as being the medium through  which Heaven's choicest blessings are communicated to men. He is called 
"the eye of Ormuzd, the effulgent Nero, pursuing his course triumphantly,  fertilizer of deserts, most exalted of the Izeds or Yezatas, the never-sleeping,  the protector of the land." "When the dragon foe devastates my provinces,"  says Ormuzd, "and afflicts them with famine, then is he struck down by the  strong arm of Mithras, together with the Devs of Mazanderan. With his  lance and his immortal club, the Sleepless Chief hurls down the Devs into  the dust, when as Mediator he interposes to guard the City from evil,"  p. 613

Ahriman was by some Parsee sects considered older than Ormuzd, as  darkness is older than light; he is imagined to have been unknown as a

Malevolent Being in the early ages of the world, and the fall of man is  attributed in the Boundehesch to an apostate worship of him, from which  men were converted by a succession of prophets terminating with Zoroaster.

Mithras is not only light, but intelligence; that luminary which, though born  in obscurity, will not only dispel darkness but conquer death. The warfare  through which this consummation is to be reached, is mainly carried on  through the instrumentality of the "Word," that "ever-living emanation of  the Deity, by virtue of which the world exists," and of which the revealed  formulas incessantly repeated in the liturgies of the Magi are but the  expression. "What shall I do," cried Zoroaster, "O Ormuzd, steeped in  brightness, in order to battle with Daroodj-Ahriman, father of the Evil Law;  how shall I make men pure and holy?" Ormuzd answered and said: "Invoke, 
O Zoroaster, the pure law of the Servants of Ormuzd; invoke the 
Amschaspands who shed abundance throughout the seven Keshwars; invoke  the Heaven, Zeruana-Akarana, the birds travailing on high, the swift wind,  the Earth; invoke my Spirit, me who am Ahura-Mazda, the purest, strongest,  wisest, best of beings; me who have the most majestic body, who through  purity am Supreme, whose Soul is the Excellent Word; and ye, all people,  invoke me as I have commanded Zoroaster."

Ahura-Mazda himself is the living WORD; he is called "First-born of all  things, express image of the Eternal, very light of very light, the Creator,  who by power of the Word which he never ceases to pronounce, made in 
365 days the Heaven and the Earth." The Word is said in the Yashna to have  existed before all, and to be itself a Yazata, a personified object of prayer. It  was revealed in Serosch, in Homa, and again, under Gushtasp, was  manifested in Zoroaster.

Between life and death, between sunshine and shade, Mithras is the present  exemplification of the Primal Unity from which all things arose, and into  which, through his mediation, all contrarieties will ultimately be absorbed. 
His annual sacrifice is the Passover of the Magi, a symbolical atonement or  pledge of moral and physical regeneration. He created the world in the  beginning; and as at the close of each successive year he sets free the current  of life to invigorate a fresh circle of being, so in the  p. 614  end of all things he will bring the weary sum of ages as a hecatomb before 
God, releasing by a final sacrifice the Soul of Nature from her perishable  frame, to commence a brighter and purer existence.

Iamblichus (De Mys. viii. 4) says: "The Egyptians are far from ascribing all  things to physical causes; life and intellect they distinguish from physical  being, both in man and in the Universe. They place intellect and reason first  as self-existent, and from these they derive the created world. As Parent of  generated things they constitute a Demiurge, and acknowledge a vital force  both in the Heavens and before the Heavens. They place Pure Intellect  above and beyond the Universe, and another (that is, Mind revealed in the 
Material World), consisting of one continuous mind pervading the Universe,  and apportioned to all its parts and spheres." The Egyptian idea, then, was  that of all transcendental philosophy-that of a Deity both immanent and  transcendent-spirit passing into its manifestations, but not exhausted by so  doing.

The wisdom recorded in the canonical rolls of Hermes quickly attained in  this transcendental lore, all that human curiosity can ever discover. Thebes  especially is said to have acknowledged a being without beginning or end,  called Amun or Amun-Kneph, the all-pervading Spirit or Breath of Nature,  or perhaps even some still more lofty object of reverential reflection, whom  it was forbidden even to name. Such a being would in theory stand at the  head of the three orders of Gods mentioned by Herodotus, these being  regarded as arbitrary classifications of similar or equal beings, arranged in  successive emanations, according to an estimate of their comparative  dignity. The Eight Great Gods, or primary class, were probably  manifestations of the emanated God in the several parts and powers of the 
Universe, each potentially comprising the whole Godhead.

In the ancient Hermetic books, as quoted by Iamblichus, occurred the  following passage in regard to the Supreme Being:

"Before all the things that actually exist, and before all beginnings, there is  one God, prior even to the first God and King, remaining unmoved in the  singleness of his own Unity: for neither is anything conceived by intellect  inwoven with him, nor anything else; but he is established as the exemplar  of the God who is good, who is his own father, self-begotten, and has only  one  p. 615

[paragraph continues] Parent. For he is something greater and prior to, and the  fountain of all things, and the foundation of things conceived by the  intellect, which are the first species. And from this ONE, the self-originated 
God caused himself to shine forth; for which reason he is his own father,  and self-originated. For he is both a beginning and God of Gods, a Monad  from the One, prior to substance and the beginning of substance; for from  him is substantiality and substance, whence also he is called the beginning  of things conceived by the intellect. These then are the most ancient  beginnings of all things, which Hermes places before the ethereal and  empyrean and celestial Gods."

"CHANG-TI, or the Supreme Lord or Being," said the old Chinese creed,

"is the principle of everything that exists, and Father of all living. He is  eternal, immovable, and independent: His power knows no bounds: His  sight equally comprehends the Past, the Present, and the Future, and  penetrates even to the inmost recesses of the heart. Heaven and earth are  under his government: all events, all revolutions, are the consequences of  his dispensation and will. He is pure, holy, and impartial; wickedness  offends his sight; but he beholds with an eye of complacency the virtuous  actions of men. Severe, yet just, he punishes vice in an exemplary manner,  even in Princes and Rulers; and often casts down the guilty, to crown with  honor the man who walks after his own heart, and whom he raises from  obscurity. Good, merciful, and full of pity, he forgives the wicked upon their  repentance: and public calamities and the irregularity of the seasons are but  salutary warnings, which his fatherly goodness gives to men, to induce them  to reform and amend."

Controlled by reason infinitely more than by the imagination, that people,  occupying the extreme East of Asia, did not fall into idolatry until after the  time of Confucius, and within two centuries of the birth of Christ; when the  religion of BUDDHA or Fo was carried thither from India. Their system  was long regulated by the pure worship of God, and the foundation of their  moral and political existence laid in a sound, upright reason, conformable to  true ideas of the Deity. They had no false gods or images, and their third 
Emperor Hoam-ti erected a Temple, the first probably ever erected, to the 
Great Architect of the Universe. And though they offered sacrifices to divers  tutelary angels, yet they honored  p. 616  them infinitely less than XAM-TI or CHANG-TI, the Sovereign Lord of the 
World.

Confucius forbade making images or representations of the Deity. He  attached no idea of personality to Him; but considered Him as a Power or 
Principle, pervading all Nature. And the Chinese designated the Divinity by  the name of THE, DIVINE REASON.

The Japanese believe in a Supreme Invisible Being, not to be represented by  images or worshipped in Temples. They styled him AMIDA or OMITH;  and say that he is without beginning or end; that he came on earth, where he  remained a thousand years, and became the Redeemer of our fallen race:  that he is to judge all men; and the good are to live forever, while the bad  are to be condemned to Hell.

"The Chang-ti is represented," said Confucius, "under the general emblem  of the visible firmament, as well as under the particular symbols of the Sun,  the Moon, and the Earth, because by their means we enjoy the gifts of the 
Chang-ti. The Sun is the source of life and light: the Moon illuminates the  world by night. By observing the course of these luminaries, mankind are  enabled to distinguish times and seasons. The Ancients, with the view of  connecting the act with its object, when they established the practice of  sacrificing to the Chang-ti, fixed the day of the Winter Solstice, because the 
Sun, after having passed through the twelve places assigned apparently by  the Chang-ti as its annual residence, began its career anew, to distribute  blessings throughout the Earth."

He said: "The TEEN is the universal principle and prolific source of all  things. . . . The Chang-ti is the universal principle of existence."

The Arabians never possessed a poetical, high-wrought, and scientifically  arranged system of Polytheism. Their historical traditions had much analogy  with those of the Hebrews, and coincided with them in a variety of points. 
The tradition of a purer faith and the simple Patriarchal worship of the 
Deity; appear never to have been totally extinguished among them; nor did  idolatry gain much foothold until near the time of Mahomet; who, adopting  the old primeval faith, taught again the doctrine of one God, adding to it that  he was His Prophet.

To the mass of Hebrews, as well as to other nations, seem to  p. 617  have come fragments only of the primitive revelation: nor do they seem,  until after their captivity among the Persians, to have concerned themselves  about metaphysical speculations in regard to the Divine Nature and essence;  although it is evident, from the Psalms of David, that a select body among  them preserved a knowledge, in regard to the Deity, which was wholly  unknown to the mass of the people; and those chosen few were made the  medium of transition for certain truths, to later ages.

Among the Greeks, the scholars of the Egyptians, all the higher ideas and  severer doctrines on the Divinity, his Sovereign Nature and Infinite Might,  the Eternal Wisdom and Providence that conducts and directs all things to  their proper end, the Infinite Mind and Supreme Intelligence that created all  things, and is raised far above external nature,—all these loftier ideas and  nobler doctrines were expounded more or less perfectly by Pythagoras, 
Anaxagoras, and Socrates, and developed in the most beautiful and  luminous manner by Plato, and the philosophers that succeeded him. And  even in the popular religion of the Greeks are many things capable of a  deeper import and more spiritual signification; though they seem only rare  vestiges of ancient truth, vague presentiments, fugitive tones, and  momentary flashes, revealing a belief in a Supreme Being, Almighty 
Creator of the Universe, and Common Father of Mankind.

Much of the primitive Truth was taught to Pythagoras by Zoroaster, who  himself received it from the Indians. His disciples rejected the use of 
Temples, of Altars, and of Statues; and smiled at the folly of those nations  who imagined that the Deity sprang from or had any affinity with human  nature. The tops of the highest mountains were the places chosen for  sacrifices. Hymns and prayers were their principal worship. The Supreme 
God, who fills the wide circle of Heaven, was the object to Whom they were  addressed. Such is the testimony of Herodotus. Light they considered not so  much as an object of worship, as rather the most pure and lively emblem of,  and first emanation from, the Eternal God; and thought that man required  something visible or tangible to exalt his mind to that degree of adoration  which is due to the Divine Being.

There was a surprising similarity between the Temples, Priests, doctrines,  and worship of the Persian Magi and the British Druids. The latter did not  worship idols in the human shape,  p. 618  because they held that the Divinity, being invisible, ought to be adored  without being seen. They asserted the Unity of the God-head. Their  invocations were made to the One All-preserving Power; and they argued  that, as this power was not matter, it must necessarily be the Deity; and the  secret symbol used to express his name was O. I. W. They believed that the  earth had sustained one general destruction by water; and would again be  destroyed by fire. They admitted the doctrines of the immortality of the soul,  a future state, and a day of judgment, which would be conducted on the  principle of man's responsibility. They even retained some idea of the  redemption of mankind through the death of a Mediator. They retained a  tradition of the Deluge, perverted and localized. But, around these fragments  of primitive truth they wove a web of idolatry, worshipped two Subordinate 
Deities under the names of Hu and CERIDWEN, male and female 
(doubtless the same as Osiris and Isis), and held the doctrine of  transmigration.

The early inhabitants of Scandinavia believed in a God who was "the Author  of everything that existeth; the Eternal, the Ancient, the Living and Awful

Being, the Searcher into concealed things, the Being that never changeth." 
Idols and visible representations of the Deity were originally forbidden, and 
He was directed to be worshipped in the lonely solitude of sequestered  forests, where He was said to dwell, invisible, and in perfect silence.

The Druids, like their Eastern ancestors, paid the most sacred regard to the  odd numbers, which, traced backward, ended in Unity or Deity, while the  even numbers ended in nothing. 3 was particularly reverenced. 19 (7+3+3 2 ): 
30 (7 X 3+3 X 3): and 21 (7 X 3) were numbers observed in the erection of their  temples, constantly appearing in their dimensions, and the number and  distances of the huge stones.

They were the sole interpreters of religion. They superintended all  sacrifices; for no private person could offer one without their permission. 
They exercised the power of excommunication; and without their  concurrence war could not be declared nor peace made: and they even had  the power of inflicting the punishment of death. They professed to possess a  knowledge of magic, and practised augury for the public service.

They cultivated many of the liberal sciences, and particularly  p. 619  astronomy, the favorite science of the Orient; in which they attained  considerable proficiency. They considered day as the off-spring of night,  and therefore made their computations by nights instead of days; and we,  from them, still use the words fortnight and sen’night. They knew the  division of the heavens into constellations; and finally, they practised the  strictest morality, having particularly the most sacred regard for that  peculiarly Masonic virtue. Truth.

In the Icelandic Prose Edda is the following dialogue:

"Who is the first or eldest of the Gods?

"In our language he is called ALFADIR (All-Father, or the Father of All);  but in the old Asgard he had twelve names.

"Where is this God? What is his power? and what hath he done to display  his glory?

"He liveth from all ages, he governeth all realms, and swayeth all things  both great and small.

"He hath formed Heaven and earth, and the air, and all things thereunto  belonging.

"He hath made man and given hint a soul which shall live and never perish,  though the body shall have mouldered away or have been burnt to ashes. 
And all that are righteous shall dwell with him in the place called Gimli or 
Vingolf, but the wicked shall go to Hel and thence to Niflhel which is below,  in the ninth world."

Almost every heathen nation, so far as we have any knowledge of their  mythology, believed in one Supreme Overruling God, whose name it was  not lawful to utter.

"When we ascend," says Muller, to the most distant heights of Greek  history, the idea of God as the Supreme Being stands before us as a simple  fact. Next to this adoration of One God, the Father of Heaven, the Father of  men, we find in Greece a Worship of Nature." The original Zeui; was the 
God or Gods, called by the Greeks the Son of Time, meaning that there was  no God before Him, but He was Eternal. "Zeus," says the Orphic line, "is the 
Beginning, Zeus the Middle; out of Zeus all things have been made.” And  the Peleides of Dodona said, "Zeus was, Zeus is. Zeus will be; O great 
Zeus!" Zsui; vp, Zeuq egt'iv, Zeu; eoaErar tit pEA.dX.ri Zsu: and he was Zeu<;,  kuSicstoi;, psyiaxoi;, Zeus, Best and Greatest.  p. 620

The Parsees, retaining the old religion taught by Zaradisht, say in their  catechism: "We believe in only one God, and do not believe in any beside

Him; Who created the Heavens, the Earth, the Angels. . . . Our God has  neither face nor form, color nor shape, nor fixed place. There is no other like 
Him, nor can our mind comprehend Him."

The Tetragrammaton, or some other word covered by it, was forbidden to be  pronounced. But that its pronunciation might not be lost among the Levites,  the High-Priest uttered it in the Temple once a year, on the 10th day of the 
Month Tisri, the day of the great feast of expiation. During this ceremony,  the people were directed to make a great noise, that the Sacred Word might  not be heard by any who had not a right to it; for every other, said the Jews,  would be incontinently stricken dead.

The Great Egyptian Initiates, before the time of the Jews, did the same thing  in regard to the word Isis; which they regarded as sacred and  incommunicable.

Origen says: "There are names which have a natural potency. Such as those  which the Sages used among the Egyptians, the Magi in Persia, the 
Brahmins in India. What is called Magic is not a vain and chimerical act, as  the Stoics and Epicureans pretend. The names SABAOTH and ADONAI  were not made for created beings; but they belong to a mysterious theology,  which goes back to the Creator. From Him comes the virtue of these names,  when they are arranged and pronounced according to the rules."

The Hindu word AUM represented the three Powers combined in their 
Deity: Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva; or the Creating, Pre-serving, and 
Destroying Powers: A, the first; U or O-O, the second; and M, the third.

This word could not be pronounced, except by the letters: for its  pronunciation as one word was said to make Earth tremble, and even the 
Angels of Heaven to quake for fear.

The word AUM, says the Ramayan, represents "The Being of Beings, One 
Substance in three forms; without mode, without quality, without passion: 
Immense, Incomprehensible, Infinite, Indivisible, Immutable, Incorporeal, 
Irresistible."

An old passage in the Purana says: "All the rites ordained in the Vedas, the  sacrifices to the fire, and all other solemn purifications, shall pass away; but  that which shall never pass away is  p. 621  the word A 0-0 M for it is the symbol of the Lord of all things."

Herodotus says that the Ancient Pelasgi built no temples and worshipped no  idols, and had a sacred name of Deity, which it was not permissible to  pronounce.

The Clarian Oracle, which was of unknown antiquity, being asked which of  the Deities was named IAQ, answered in these remarkable words: "The 
Initiated are bound to conceal the mysterious secrets. Learn, then, that IAOis  the Great God Supreme, that ruleth over all."

The Jews consider the True Name of God to be irrecoverably lost by disuse,  and regard its pronunciation as one of the Mysteries that will be revealed at  the coming of their Messiah. And they attribute its loss to the illegality of  applying the Masoretic points to so sacred a Name, by which a knowledge  of the proper vowels is forgotten. It is even said, in the Gemara of Abodah 
Zara, that God permitted a celebrated Hebrew Scholar to be burned by a 
Roman Emperor, because he had been heard to pronounce the Sacred Name  with points.

The Jews feared that the Heathen would get possession of the Name: and  therefore, in their copies of the Scriptures, they wrote it in the Samaritan  character, instead of the Hebrew or Chaldaic, that the adversary might not  make an improper use of it: for they believed it capable of working miracles;  and held that the wonders in Egypt were performed by Moses, in virtue of  this name being engraved on his rod: and that any person who knew the true  pronunciation would be able to do as much as he did.

Josephus says it was unknown until God communicated it to Moses in the  wilderness: and that it was lost through the wickedness of man.

The followers of Mahomet have a tradition that there is a secret name of the 
Deity which possesses wonderful properties; and that the only method of  becoming acquainted with it, is by being initiated into the Mysteries of the 
Ism Abla.

H O M was the first framer of the new religion among the Persians,  and His Name was Ineffable.

AMUN, among the Egyptians, was a name pronounceable by none save the 
Priests.

The old Gennans adored God with profound reverence, without daring to  name Him, or to worship Him in Temples.  p. 622

The Druids expressed the name of Deity by the letters O I W

Among all the nations of primitive antiquity, the doctrine of the immortality  of the soul was not a mere probable hypothesis, needing laborious  researches and diffuse argumentation to produce conviction of its truth. Nor  can we hardly give it the name of Faith ; for it was a lively certainty , like the  feeling of one's own existence and identity, and of what is actually present;  exerting its influence on all sublunary affairs, and the motive of mightier  deeds and enterprises than any mere earthly interest could inspire.

Even the doctrine of transmigration of souls, universal among the Ancient 
Hindus and Egyptians, rested on a basis of the old primitive religion, and  was connected with a sentiment purely religious. It involved this noble  element of truth: That since man had gone astray, and wandered far from 
God, he must needs make many efforts, and undergo a long and painful  pilgrimage, before he could rejoin the Source of all Perfection: and the firm  conviction and positive certainty, that nothing defective, impure, or defiled  with earthy stains, could enter the pure region of perfect spirits, or be  eternally united to God; wherefore the soul had to pass through long trials  and many purifications before it could attain that blissful end. And the end  and aim of all these systems of philosophy was the final deliverance of the  soul from the old calamity, the dreaded fate and frightful lot of being  compelled to wander through the dark regions of nature and the various  forms of the brute creation, ever changing its terrestrial shape, and its union  with God, which they held to be the lofty destiny of the wise and virtuous  soul.

Pythagoras gave to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls that meaning  which the wise Egyptians gave to it in their Mysteries. He never taught the  doctrine in that literal sense in which it was understood by the people. Of  that literal doctrine not the least vestige is to be found in such of his symbols  as remain, nor in his precepts collected by his disciple Lysias. He held that  men always remain, in their essence, such as they were created; and can  degrade themselves only by vice, and ennoble themselves only by virtue.

Hierocles, one of his most zealous and celebrated disciples, expressly says  that he who believes that the soul of man, after his death, will enter the body  of a beast, for his vices, or become a  p. 623  plant for his stupidity, is deceived; and is absolutely ignorant of the eternal  form of the soul, which can never change; for, always remaining man, it is  said to become God or beast, through virtue or vice, though it can become  neither one nor the other by nature, but solely by resemblance of its  inclinations to theirs.

And Timsus of Locria, another disciple, says that to alarm men and prevent  them from committing crimes, they menaced them with strange humiliations  and punishments; even declaring that their souls would pass into new  bodies,-that of a coward into the body of a deer; that of a ravisher into the  body of a wolf; that of a murderer into the body of some still more ferocious  animal; and that of an impure sensualist into the body of a hog.

So, too, the doctrine is explained in the Phtedo. And Lysias days, that after  the soul, purified of its crimes, has left the body and returned to Heaven, it is  no longer subject to change or death, but enjoys an eternal felicity.

According to the Indians, it returned to, and became a part of, the universal  soul which animates everything.

The Hindus held that Buddha descended on earth to raise all human beings  up to the perfect state. He will ultimately succeed, and all, himself included,  be merged in Unity.

Vishnu is to judge the world at the last day. It is to be consumed by fire: The 
Sun and Moon are to lose their light; the Stars to fall; and a New Heaven  and Earth to be created.

The legend of the fall of the Spirits, obscured and distorted, is preserved in  the Hindu Mythology. And their traditions acknowledged, and they revered,  the succession of the first ancestors of mankind, or the Holy Patriarchs of  the primitive world, under the name of the Seven Great RISHIS, or Sages of  hoary antiquity; though they invested their history with a cloud of fictions.

The Egyptians held that the soul was immortal; and that Osiris was to judge  the world.

And thus reads the Persian legend:

"After Ahriman shall have ruled the world until the end of time,

SOSIOSCH, the promised Redeemer, will come and annihilate the power of  the DEVS (or Evil Spirits), awaken the dead, and sit in final judgment upon  spirits and men. After that the comet Gurzsher will be thrown down, and a  general conflagration take place, which will consume the whole world. The  remains of the  p. 624  earth will then sink down into Duzakh, and become for three periods a place  of punishment for the wicked. Then, by degrees, all will be pardoned, even 
Ahriman and the Devs, and admitted to the regions of bliss, and thus there  will be a new Heaven and a new earth."

In the doctrines of Lamaism also, we find, obscured, and partly concealed in  fiction, fragments of the primitive truth. For, according to that faith, "There  is to be a final judgment before ESLIK KHAN: The good are to be admitted  to Paradise, the bad to be banished to hell, where there are eight regions  burning hot and eight freezing cold."

In the Mysteries, wherever they were practised, was taught that truth of the  primitive revelation, the existence of One Great Being, Infinite and  pervading the Universe, Who was there worshipped without superstition;  and His marvellous nature, essence, and attributes taught to the Initiates;  while the vulgar attributed His works to Secondary Gods, personified, and  isolated from Him in fabulous independence.

These truths were covered from the common people as with a veil; and the 
Mysteries were carried into every country, that, without disturbing the  popular beliefs, truth, the arts, and the sciences might be known to those  who were capable of understanding them, and maintaining the true doctrine  incorrupt; which the people, prone to superstition and idolatry, have in no  age been able to do; nor, as many strange aberrations and superstitions of  the present day prove, any more now than heretofore. For we need but point  to the doctrines of so many sects that degrade the Creator to the rank, and  assign to Him the passions of humanity, to prove that now, as always, the  old truths must be committed to a few, or they will be overlaid with fiction  and error, and irretrievably lost.

Though Masonry is identical with the Ancient Mysteries, it is so in this  qualified sense; that it presents but an imperfect image of their brilliancy;  the ruins only of their grandeur, and a system that has experienced  progressive alterations, the fruits of social events and political  circumstances. Upon leaving Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by the  habits of the different nations among whom they were introduced. Though  originally more moral and political than religious, they soon became the  heritage, as it were, of the priests, and essentially religious, though in reality  p. 625  limiting the sacerdotal power, by teaching the intelligent laity the folly and  absurdity of the creeds of the populace. They were therefore necessarily  changed by the religious systems of the countries into which they were  transplanted. In Greece, they were the Mysteries of Ceres; in Rome, of Bona 
Dea , the Good Goddess; in Gaul, the School of Mars; in Sicily, the 
Academy of the Sciences; among the Hebrews, they partook of the rites and  ceremonies of a religion which placed all the powers of government, and all  the knowledge, in the hands of the Priests and Levites. The pagodas of 
India, the retreats of the Magi of Persia and Chaldea, and the pyramids of 
Egypt, were no longer the sources at which men drank in knowledge. Each  people, at all informed, had its Mysteries. After a time the Temples of 
Greece and the School of Pythagoras lost their reputation, and Freemasonry  took their place.

Masonry, when properly expounded, is at once the interpretation of the great  book of nature, the recital of physical and astronomical phenomena, the  purest philosophy, and the place of deposit, where, as in a Treasury, are kept  in safety all the great truths of the primitive revelation, that form the basis of  all religions. In the modem Degrees three things are to be recognized: The  image of primeval times, the tableau of the efficient causes of the Universe,  and the book in which are written the morality of all peoples, and the code  by which they must govern themselves if they would be prosperous.

The Kabalistic doctrine was long the religion of the Sage and the Savant;  because, like Freemasonry, it incessantly tends toward spiritual perfection,  and the fusion of the creeds and Nationalities of Mankind. In the eyes of the 
Kabalist, all men are his brothers; and their relative ignorance is, to him, but  a reason for instructing them. There were illustrious Kabalists among the 
Egyptians and Greeks, whose doctrines the Orthodox Church has accepted;  and among the Arabs were many, whose wisdom was not slighted by the 
Mediteval Church.

The Sages proudly wore the name of Kabalists. The Kabalah embodied a  noble philosophy, pure, not mysterious, but symbolic. It taught the doctrine  of the Unity of God, the art of knowing and explaining the essence and  operations of the Supreme Being, of spiritual powers and natural forces, and  of determining their action by symbolic figures; by the arrangement of the  alphabet,  p. 626  the combinations of numbers, the inversion of letters in writing and the  concealed meanings which they claimed to discover therein. The Kabalah is  the key of the occult sciences; and the Gnostics were born of the Kabalists.

The science of numbers represented not only arithmetical qualities, but also  all grandeur, all proportion. By it we necessarily arrive at the discovery of  the Principle or First Cause of things, called at the present day THE 
ABSOLUTE.

Or UNITY,—that loftiest term to which all philosophy directs itself; that  imperious necessity of the human mind, that pivot round which it is  compelled to group the aggregate of its ideas: Unity, this source, this centre  of all systematic order, this principle of existence, this central point,  unknown in its essence, but manifest in its effects; Unity, that sublime  centre to which the chain of causes necessarily ascends, was the august Idea  toward which all the ideas of Pythagoras converged. He refused the title of 
Sage, which means one who knows. He invented, and applied to himself that  of Philosopher, signifying one who is fond of or studies things secret and  occult. The astronomy which he mysteriously taught, was astrology, his  science of numbers was based on Kabalistical principles.

The Ancients, and Pythagoras himself, whose real principles have not been  always understood, never meant to ascribe to numbers, that is to say, to  abstract signs, any special virtue. But the Sages of Antiquity concurred in  recognizing a ONE FIRST CAUSE (material or spiritual) of the existence of  the Universe. Thence, UNITY became the symbol of the Supreme Deity. It  was made to express, to represent God; but without attributing to the mere,  number ONE any divine or supernatural virtue.

The Pythagorean ideas as to particular numbers are partially expressed in the  following

LECTURE OT THE KABALISTS.

Qu Why did you seek to be received a Rnight of the Kabalah?

Ans ■'■ To know, by means of numbers, the admirable harmony which there  is between nature and religion.

Qu ■'■ How were you announced?

Ans-'- By twelve raps.

Qu ■'■ What do they signify?  p. 627

Ans-'- The twelve bases of our temporal and spiritual happiness.

Qu ■'■ What is a Kabalist?

Ans ■'■ A man who has learned, by tradition, the Sacerdotal Art and the 
Royal Art.

Qu ■'■ What means the device, Omnia in numeris sita sunt ?

Ans-'- That everything lies veiled in numbers.

Qu-'- Explain me that.

Ans-'- I will do so, as far as the number 12. Your sagacity will discern the  rest.

Qu ■'■ What signifies the unit in the number 10?

Ans ■'■ Gob, creating and animating matter, expressed by O, which, alone, is  of no value.

Qu What does the unit mean ?

Ans-'- In the moral order, a Word incarnate in the bosom of a virgin—or  religion. ... In the physical, a spirit embodied in the virgin earth—or nature.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number two!

Ans-'- In the moral order, man and woman. ... In the physical, the active  and the passive.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 3?

Ans-'- In the moral order, the three theological virtues. ... In the physical,  the three principles of bodies.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 4?

Ans-'- The four cardinal virtues. . . . The four elementary qualities.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 5?

Ans-'- The quintessence of religion. . . . The quintessence of matter.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 6?

Ans-'- The theological cube . . . The physical cube.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 7?

Ans-'- The seven sacraments . . . The seven planets.

Qu What do you mean by the number 8?

Ans-'- The small number of Elus . . . The small number of wise men.

Qu What do you mean by the number 9?

Aiis-'- The exaltation of religion . . . The exaltation of matter.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 10?

Ans-'- The ten commandments . . . The ten precepts of nature.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 11?  p. 628

Ans-'- The multiplication of religion . . . The multiplication of nature.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the number 12?

Ans-'- The twelve Articles of Faith; the twelve Apostles, foundation of the 
Holy City, who preached throughout the whole world, for our happiness and  spiritual joy . . . The twelve operations of nature: The twelve signs of the 
Zodiac, foundation of the Primum Mobile, extending it throughout the 
Universe for our temporal felicity.

[The Rabbi (President of the Sanhedrin) adds: From all that you have said, it  results that the unit develops itself in 2, is completed in three internally, and  so produces 4 externally; whence, through 6, 7, 8, 9, it arrives at 5, half of  the spherical number 10, to ascend, passing through 11, to 12, and to raise  itself, by the number 4 times 10, to the number 6 times 12, the final term  and summit of our eternal happiness.]

Qu-'- What is the generative number?

Ans ■'■ In the Divinity, it is the unit; in created things, the number 2: Because  the Divinity, 1, engenders 2, and in created things 2 engenders 1.

Qu What is the most majestic number?

Ans 3, because it denotes the triple divine essence.

Qu What is the most mysterious number?

Ans ■' - 4, because it contains all the mysteries of nature.

Qu What is the most occult number?

Ans ■' ■ 5, because it is inclosed in the centre of the series.

Qu What is the most salutary number?

Ans-'- 6, because it contains the source of our spiritual and corporeal  happiness.

Qu-'- What is the most fortunate number?

Ans-'- 7, because it leads us to the decade, the perfect number.

Qu ■'■ Which is the number most to be desired?

Ans-'- 8, because he who possesses it, is of the number of the plus and 
Sages.

Qu ■'■ Which is the most sublime number?

Ans-'- 9, because by it religion and nature are exalted.

Qu ■'■ Which is the most perfect number?

Ans-'- 10, because it includes unity, which created everything, and zero,  symbol of matter and chaos, whence everything emerged.  p. 629

[paragraph continues] In its figures it comprehends the created and uncreated, the  commencement and the end, power and force, life and annihilation. By the  study of this number, we find the relations of all things; the power of the 
Creator, the faculties of the creature, the Alpha and Omega of divine  knowledge.

Qu Which is the most multiplying number?

Ans-'- 11, because with the possession of two units, we arrive at the  multiplication of things.

Qu ■'■ Which is the most solid number?

Ans-'- 12, because it is the foundation of our spiritual and temporal  happiness.

Qu-'- Which is the favorite number of religion and nature?

Ans-'- 4 times 10, because it enables us, rejecting everything impure,  eternally to enjoy the number 6 times 12, term and summit of our felicity.

Qu ■'■ What is the meaning of the square?

Ans ■'■ It is the symbol of the four elements contained in the triangle, or the  emblem of the three chemical principles: these things united form absolute  unity in the primal matter.

Qu-'- What is the meaning of the centre of the circumference?

Ans-'- It signifies the universal spirit, vivifying centre of nature.

Qu ■'■ What do you mean by the quadrature of the circle?

Ans-'- The investigation of the quadrature of the circle indicates the  knowledge of the four vulgar elements, which are themselves composed of  elementary spirits or chief principles; as the circle, though round, is  composed of lines, which escape the sight, and are seen only by the mind.

Qu What is the profoundest meaning of the figure 3?

Ans-'- The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. From the action of these  three results the triangle within the square; and from the seven angles, the  decade or perfect number.

Qu Which is the most confused figure?

Ans Zero,—the emblem of chaos, formless mixture of the elements.

Qu What do the four devices of the Degree signify?

Ans That we are to hear, see, be silent, and enjoy our happiness.

The unit is the symbol of identity, equality, existence, conservation, and  general harmony; the Central Fire, the Point within the Circle.  p. 630

Two, or the duad, is the symbol of diversity, inequality, division, separation,  and vicissitudes.

The figure 1 signifies the living man [a body standing upright]; man being  the only living being possessed of this faculty. Adding to it a head, we have  the letter P, the sign of Paternity, Creative

Power; and with a further addition, R, signifying man in motion, going,  lens. Hums.

The Duad is the origin of contrasts. It is the imperfect condition into which,  according to the Pythagoreans, a being falls, when he detaches himself from  the Monad, or God. Spiritual beings,  emanating from God, are enveloped in the duad, and therefore receive only  illusory impressions.

As formerly the number ONE designated harmony, order, or the Good 
Principle (the ONE and ONLY GOD, expressed in Latin by Solus, whence  the words Sol, Soleil, symbol of this God), the number Two expressed the  contrary idea. There commenced the fatal knowledge of good and evil. 
Everything double, false, opposed to the single and sole reality, was  expressed by the Binary number. It expressed also that state of contrariety in  which nature exists, where everything is double; night and day, light and  darkness, cold and heat, wet and dry, health and sickness, error and truth,  one and the other sex, etc. Hence the Romans dedicated the second month in  the year to Pluto, the God of Hell, and the second day of that month to the  manes of the dead.

The number One, with the Chinese, signified unity, hannony, order, the 
Good Principle, or God; Two, disorder, duplicity, false-hood. That people, in  the earliest ages, based their whole philosophical system on the two primary  figures or lines, one straight and unbroken, and the other broken or divided  into two; doubling which, by placing one under the other, and trebling by  placing three under each other, they made the four symbols and eight Koua\  which referred to the natural elements, and the primary principles of all  things, and served symbolically or scientifically to express them. Plato terms  unity and duality the original elements of nature, and first principles of all  existence: and the oldest sacred book of the Chinese says: "The Great First 
Principle has produced two equations and differences, or primary rules of  existence; but the two primary rules or two oppositions, namely YN and 
YANG, or repose and motion, have produced four signs or  p. 631  symbols, and the four symbols have produced the eight KOUA or further  combinations."

The interpretation of the Hennetic fables shows, among every ancient  people, in their principal gods, first, 1, the Creating Monad, then 3, then 3  times 3, 3 times 9, and 3 times 27. This triple progression has for its  foundation the three ages of Nature, the Past, the Present, and the Future; or  the three degrees of universal generation. . . Birth, Life, Death... Beginning,  middle, end.

The Monad was male, because its action produces no change in itself, but  only out of itself. It represented the creative principle.

The Duad, for a contrary reason, was female, ever changing by addition,  subtraction, or multiplication. It represents matter capable of form.

The union of the Monad and Duad produces the Triad, signifying the world  formed by the creative principle out of matter. Pythagoras represented the  world by the right-angled triangle, in which the squares of the two shortest  sides are equal, added together, to the square of the longest one; as the  world, as formed, is equal to the creative cause, and matter clothed with  form.

The ternary is the first of the unequal numbers. The Triad, mysterious  number, which plays so great a part in the traditions of Asia and the  philosophy of Plato, image of the Supreme Being, includes in itself the  properties of the first two numbers. It was, to the Philosophers, the most  excellent and favorite number: a mysterious type, revered by all antiquity,  and consecrated in the Mysteries; wherefore there are but three essential 
Degrees among Masons; who venerate, in the triangle, the most august  mystery, that of the Sacred Triad, object of their homage and study.

In geometry, a line cannot represent a body absolutely perfect. As little do  two lines constitute a figure demonstratively perfect. But three lines form,  by their junction, the TRIANGLE, or the first figure regularly perfect; and  this is why it has served and still serves to characterize The Eternal; Who,  infinitely perfect in His nature, is, as Universal Creator, the first Being, and  consequently the first Perfection.

The Quadrangle or Square, perfect as it appears, being but the second  perfection, can in no wise represent God; Who is the first. It is to be noted  that the name of God in Latin and French (Deus, Dieu), has for its initial the 
Delta or Greek Triangle. Such is the reason, among ancients and moderns,  for the consecration  p. 632  of the Triangle, whose three sides are emblems of the three Kingdoms, or 
Nature, or God. In the centre is the Hebrew JOD (initial of mn 1 ), the 
Animating Spirit of Fire, the generative principle, represented by the letter 
G., initial of the name of Deity in the languages of the North, and the  meaning whereof is Generation.

The first side of the Triangle, offered to the study of the Apprentice, is the  mineral kingdom, symbolized by Tub

The second side, the subject of the meditations of the Fellow Craft, is the  vegetable kingdom, symbolized by Schib (an ear of com). In this reign  begins the Generation of bodies; and this is why the letter G., in its radiance,  is presented to the eyes of the adept.

The third side, the study whereof is devoted to the animal kingdom, and  completes the instruction of the Master, is symbolized by Mach-'. (Son of  putrefaction).

The figure 3 symbolizes the Earth. It is a figure of the terrestrial bodies. The 
2, upper half of 3, symbolizes the vegetable world, the lower half being  hidden from our sight.

Three also referred to harmony, friendship, peace, concord, and temperance;  and was so highly esteemed among the Pythagoreans that they called it  perfect harmony.

Three, four, ten, and twelve were sacred numbers among the Etrurians, as  they were among the Jews, Egyptians, and Hindus.

The name of Deity, in many Nations, consisted of three letters: among the 
Greeks, I.'. A.'. ; among the Persians, H-'-O-'-M-'.; among the Hindus,

AUM; among the Scandinavians, I O W •'•. On the upright Tablet of the 
King, discovered at Nimroud, no less than five of the thirteen names of the 
Great Gods consist of three letters each,—ANU, SAN, YAV, BAR, and 
BEL.

The quaternary is the most perfect number, and the root of other numbers,  and of all things. The tetrad expresses the first mathematical power. Four  represents also the generative power, from which all combinations are  derived. The Initiates considered it the emblem of Movement and the 
Infinite, representing everything that is neither corporeal nor sensible. 
Pythagoras communicated it to his disciples as a symbol of the Eternal and 
Creative Principle, under the name of Quaternary, the Ineffable Name of 
God, which signifies Source of everything that has received existence; and  which, in Hebrew, is composed of four letters.  p. 633

In the Quaternary we find the first solid figure, the universal symbol of  immortality, the pyramid. The Gnostics claimed that the whole edifice of  their science rested on a square whose angles were . . . Siyfj, Silence : Bu0o^ 
Profundity. Nooi;, Intelligence', and AXpOeta, Truth. For if the Triangle,  figured by the number 3, forms the triangular base of the pyramid, it is unity  which forms its point or summit.

Lysias and Timteus of Locria said that not a single thing could be named,  which did not depend on the quaternary as its root.

There is, according to the Pythagoreans, a connection between the gods and  numbers, which constitutes the kind of Divination called Arithmomancy. 
The soul is a number: it is moved of itself: it contains in itself the quaternary  number.

Matter being represented by the number 9, or 3 times 3, and the Immortal 
Spirit having for its essential hieroglyphic the quaternary or the number 4,  the Sages said that Man, having gone astray and become entangled in an  inextricable labyrinth, in going from four to nine, the only way which he  could take to emerge from these deceitful paths, these disastrous detours,  and the abyss of evil into which he had plunged, was to retrace his steps,  and go from nine to four.

The ingenious and mystical idea which caused the Triangle to be venerated,  was applied to the figure 4 (4). It was said that it expressed a living being, I,  bearer of the Triangle A, the emblem of God; i.e., man bearing with himself  a Divine principle.

Four was a divine number; it referred to the Deity, and many Ancient 
Nations gave God a name of four letters; as the Hebrews mn\ the Egyptians 
AMUN, the Persians SURA, the Greeks ©EOS, and the Latins DEUS. This  was the Tetragrammaton of the Hebrews, and the Pythagoreans called it 
Tetractys, and swore their most solemn oath by it. So too ODIN among the 
Scandinavians, ZEYS among the Greeks, PHTA among the Egyptians, 
THOTH among the Phoenicians, and AS-UR and NEBO among the 
Assyrians. The list might be indefinitely extended.

The number 5 was considered as mysterious, because it was compounded of  the Binary, Symbol of the False and Double, and the Ternary, so interesting  in its results. It thus energetically expresses the state of imperfection, of  order and disorder, of happiness and misfortune, of life and death, which we  see upon the earth. To the Mysterious Societies it offered the fearful image  of  p. 634  the Bad Principle, bringing trouble into the inferior order,-in a word, the 
Binary acting in the Ternary.

Under another aspect it was the emblem of marriage; because it is composed  of 2, the first equal number, and of 3, the first unequal number. Wherefore 
Juno, the Goddess of Marriage, had for her hieroglyphic the number 5.

Moreover, it has one of the properties of the number 9, that of reproducing  itself, when multiplied by itself: there being always a 5 on the right hand of  the product; a result which led to its use as a symbol of material changes.

The ancients represented the world by the number 5. A reason for it, given  by Diodorus, is, that it represents earth, water, air, fire, and ether or spirit. 
Thence the origin of Jtsvis (5) and nav the Universe, as the whole.

The number 5 designated the universal quintessence, and symbolized, by its  form q, the vital essence, the animating spirit, which flows [serpentat]  through all nature. In fact, this ingenious figure is the union of the two 
Greek accents ‘ ’, placed over those vowels which ought to be or ought not  to be aspirated. The first sign 1 bears the name of potent spirit; and signifies  the Superior Spirit, the Spirit of God aspirated ( spiratus ), respired by man. 
The second sign ’ is styled mild spirit, and represents the secondary spirit,  the spirit purely human.

The triple triangle, a figure of five lines uniting in five points, was among  the Pythagoreans an emblem of Health.

It is the Pentalpha of Pythagoras, or Pentangle of Solomon; has five lines  and five angles; and is, among Masons, the outline or origin of the five-  pointed Star, and an emblem of Fellowship.

The number 6 was, in the Ancient Mysteries, a striking emblem of nature; as  presenting the six dimensions of all bodies; the six lines which make up  their form, viz., the four lines of direction, toward the North, South, East,  and West; with the two lines of height and depth, responding to the zenith  and nadir. The sages applied the senary to the physical man; while the  septenary was, for them, the symbol of his immortal spirit.

The hieroglyphical senary (the double equilateral triangle) is the symbol of 
Deity.

Six is also an emblem of health, and the symbol of justice; because it is the  first perfect number; that is, the first whose aliquot parts (1/2, 1/3, 1/6, or 3, 
2, and 1), added together, make itself.  p. 635

Ormuzd created six good spirits, and Ahriman six evil ones. These typify  the six Summer and the six Winter months.

No number has ever been so universally in repute as the septenary. Its  celebrity is due, no doubt, to the planets being seven in number. It belongs  also to sacred things. The Pythagoreans regarded it as formed of the  numbers 3 and 4; the first whereof was, in their eyes, the image of the three  material elements, and the second the principle of everything that is neither  corporeal nor sensible. It presented them, from that point of view, the  emblem of everything that is perfect.

Considered as composed of 6 and unity, it serves to designate the invisible  centre or soul of everything; because no body exists, of which six lines do  not constitute the form, nor without a seventh interior point, as the centre  and reality of the body, whereof the external dimensions give only the  appearance.

The numerous applications of the septenary confirmed the ancient sages in  the use of this symbol. Moreover, they exalted the properties of the number 
7, as having, in a subordinate manner, the perfection of the unit: for if the  unit is untreated, if no number produces it, the seven is also not engendered  by any number contained in the interval between 1 and 10. The number 4  occupies an arithmetical middle-ground between the unit and 7, inasmuch as  it is as much over 1, as it is under 7, the difference each way being 3.

The number 7, among the Egyptians, symbolized life; and this is why the  letter Z of the Greeks was the initial of the verb Zdto, I live; and Zsu<; 
(Jupiter), Father of Life.

The number 8, or the octary, is composed of the sacred numbers 3 and 5. Of  the heavens, of the seven planets, and of the sphere of the fixed stars, or of  the eternal unity and the mysterious number 7, is composed the ogdoade, the  number 8, the first cube of equal numbers, regarded as sacred in the  arithmetical philosophy.

The Gnostic ogdoade had eight stars, which represented the eight Cabiri of 
Samothrace, the eight Egyptian and Phoenician principles, the eight gods of 
Xenocrates, the eight angles of the cubic stone.

The number eight symbolizes perfection: and its figure, 8 or co indicates the  perpetual and regular course of the Universe.

It is the first cube (2 x 2 x 2), and signifies friendship, prudence,  p. 636  counsel, and justice. It was a symbol of the primeval law which regarded all  men as equal.

The novary, or triple ternary. If the number three was celebrated among the  ancient sages, that of three times three had no less celebrity; because,  according to them, each of the three elements which constitute our bodies is  ternary: the water containing earth and fire; the earth containing igneous and  aqueous particles; and the fire being tempered by globules of water and  terrestrial corpuscles which serve to feed it. No one of the three elements  being entirely separated from the others, all material beings composed of  these three elements, whereof each is triple, may be designated by the  figurative number of three times three, which has become the symbol of all  formations of bodies. Hence the name of ninth envelope, given to matter. 
Every material extension, every circular line, has for representative sign the  number nine, among the Pythagoreans; who had observed the property  which this number possesses, of reproducing itself incessantly and entire, in  every multiplication; thus offering to the mind a very striking emblem of  matter which is incessantly composed before our eyes, after having  undergone a thousand decompositions.

The number nine was consecrated to the Spheres and the Muses. It is the  sign of every circumference; because a circle of 360 degrees is equal to 9,  that is to say, 3 + 6 + 0 = 9. Nevertheless, the ancients regarded this number  with a sort of terror: they considered it a bad presage; as the symbol of  versatility, of change, and the emblem of the frailty of human affairs. 
Wherefore they avoided all numbers where nine appears, and chiefly 81, the  product of 9 multiplied by itself, and the addition whereof, 8 + 1, again  presents the number 9.

As the figure of the number 6 was the symbol of the terrestrial globe,  animated by a divine spirit, the figure of the number 9 symbolized the earth.  under the influence of the Evil Principle; and thence the terror it inspired. 
Nevertheless, according to the Kabalists, the figure 9 symbolizes the  generative egg, or the image of a little globular being, from whose lower  side seems to flow its spirit of life.

The Ennead, signifying an aggregate of 9 things or persons, is the first  square of unequal numbers.

Every one is aware of the singular properties of the number 9,  p. 637  which, multiplied by itself or any other number whatever, gives a result  whose final sum is always 9, or always divisible by 9.

Nine, multiplied by each of the ordinary numbers, produces an arithmetical  progression, each member whereof, composed of two figures, presents a  remarkable fact; for example:

123456789 10

9 18 27 36 45 54 63 72 81 90

The first line of figures gives the regular series, from 1 to 10. The second  reproduces this line doubly; first ascending, from the first figure of 18, and  then returning from the second figure of 81.

It follows, from the curious fact, that the half of the numbers which compose  this progression represents, in inverse order, the figures of the second half:

99 99 99 99 99 495 — IS—»

So9==si.. ,si==<;;r.i=is=9. . . 9 x 2 — is... i 8 == 324 =o. 
9x3=2/.. .27==729=IS=9. 9X4=36.. ,46-=12'>6=l8=0 
And so with civry multiple of 9—-,niv 43, 54, 63, 72, ete. 
Tims 9 V S = 72.. .72 ! = 5IK4= 1R=9

Ami furtlwr:

IS

27

IS

27

144

= 9

189=18=9

18

~ o

54 =!> =

324 =

9...1K = 9

729 = 18= 9

10 S

108

36 72

36 72

9 216 = 9 144= 9

108 = 9 MM = 9

9 1296=18= 9 5181 = 18=9

864=18

10S =9

11664= 18 = 9.

And so the cubes: 
275=729X729=18=9 18—324=9 
729 324

9=81 81-=..6561=18=9 
6561

6561 =18=9 
1458 =18=9 
5103 =0

1296=18=9 
648 =18=9 
972 =18=9

6561=18=9 
39366 =27=9 
32805 =18=9 
39366 =27=9

531441=18=9

104976=27=9

43,046,721=27=9.

The number 10, or the Denary, is the measure of everything; and reduces  multiplied numbers to unity. Containing all the numerical and harmonic  relations, and all the properties of the numbers which precede it, it  concludes the Abacus or Table of Pythagoras. To the Mysterious Societies,  this number typified the assemblage of all the wonders of the Universe.

They wrote it thus 0, that is to say, Unity in the middle of Zero, as the centre  of a circle, or symbol of Deity. They saw in this figure everything that  should lead to reflection: the centre, the ray, and the circumference,  represented to them God, Man, and the Universe.

This number was, among the Sages, a sign of concord, love, and peace. To 
Masons it is a sign of union and good faith; because it is expressed by  joining two hands, or the Master's grip, when the number of fingers gives 
10: and it was represented by the Tetractys of Pythagoras.

The number 12, like the number 7, is celebrated in the worship of nature. 
The two most famous divisions of the heavens, that by 7, which is that of  the planets, and that by 12, which is that of the Signs of the Zodiac, are  found upon the religious monuments of all the peoples of the Ancient 
World, even to the remote extremes of the East. Although Pythagoras does  not speak of the number 12, it is none the less a sacred number. It is the  image of the Zodiac; and consequently that of the Sun, which rules over it.

Such are the ancient ideas in regard to those numbers which so often appear  in Masonry; and rightly understood, as the old Sages understood them, they  contain many a pregnant lesson.

Before we enter upon the final lesson of Masonic Philosophy, we will delay  a few moments to repeat to you the Christian interpretations of the Blue 
Degrees.  p. 639

In the First Degree, they said, there are three symbols to be applied.

1st. Man, after the fall, was left naked and defenceless against the just anger  of the Deity. Prone to evil, the human race staggered blindly onward into the  thick darkness of unbelief, bound fast by the strong cable-tow of the natural  and sinful will. Moral corruption was followed by physical misery. Want  and destitution invaded the earth. War and Famine and Pestilence filled up  the measure of evil, and over the sharp flints of misfortune and  wretchedness man toiled with naked and bleeding feet. This condition of  blindness, destitution, misery, and bondage, from which to save the world  the Redeemer came, is symbolized by the condition of the candidate, when  he is brought up for the first time to the door of the Lodge.

2d. Notwithstanding the death of the Redeemer, man can be saved only by  faith, repentance, and reformation. To repent, he must feel the sharp sting of  conscience and remorse, like a sword piercing his bosom. His confidence in  his guide, whom he is told to follow and fear no danger; his trust in God,  which he is caused to profess; and the point of the sword that is pressed  against his naked left breast over the heart, are symbolical of the faith,  repentance and refonnation necessary to bring him to the light of a life in 
Christ the Crucified.

3d. Having repented and refonned, and bound himself to the service of God  by a firm promise and obligation, the light of Christian hope shines down  into the darkness of the heart of the humble penitent, and blazes upon his  pathway to Heaven. And this is symbolized by the candidate's being brought  to light, after he is obligated, by the Worshipful Master, who in that is a  symbol of the Redeemer, and so brings him to light, with the help of the  brethren, as He taught the Word with the aid of the Apostles.

In the Second Degree there are two symbols:

4th. The Christian assumes new duties toward God and his fellows. Toward 
God, of love, gratitude, and veneration, and an anxious desire to serve and  glorify Him; toward his fellows, of kindness, sympathy, and justice. And  this assumption of duty, this entering upon good works, is symbolized by  the Fellow-Craft's obligation; by which, bound as an apprentice to secrecy  merely, and set in the Northeast comer of the Lodge, he descends  p. 640  as a Fellow-Craft into the body of the brethren, and assumes the active  duties of a good Mason.

5th. The Christian, reconciled to God, sees the world in a new light. This  great Universe is no longer a mere machine, wound up and set going six  thousand or sixty millions years ago, and left to run on afterward forever, by  virtue of a law of mechanics created at the beginning, without further care or  consideration on the part of the Deity; but it has now become to him a great  emanation from God, the product of His thought, not a mere dead machine,  but a thing of life, over which God watches continually, and every  movement of which is immediately produced by His present action, the law  of harmony being the essence of the Deity, re-enacted every instant. And  this is symbolized by the imperfect instruction given in the Fellow-Craft's 
Degree, in the sciences, and particularly geometry, connected as the latter is  with God Himself in the mind of a Mason, because the same letter,  suspended in the East, represents both; and astronomy, or the knowledge of  the laws of motion and harmony that govern the spheres, is but a portion of  the wider science of geometry. It is so symbolized, because it is here, in the 
Second Degree, that the candidate first receives an other than moral  instruction.

There are also two symbols in the Third Degree, which, with the 3 in the  first, and 2 in the second, make the 7.

6th. The candidate, after passing through the first part of the ceremony,  imagines himself a Master; and is surprised to be informed that as yet he is  not, and that it is uncertain whether he ever will be. He is told of a difficult  and dangerous path yet to be travelled, and is advised that upon that journey  it depends whether he will become a Master. This is symbolical of that  which our Saviour said to Nicodemus, that, notwithstanding his morals  might be beyond reproach, he could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven  unless he were bom again; symbolically dying, and again entering the world  regenerate, like a spotless infant.

7th. The murder of Hiram, his burial, and his being raised again by the 
Master, are symbols, both of the death, burial, and resurrection of the

Redeemer; and of the death and burial in sins of the natural man, and his  being raised again to a new life, or born again, by the direct action of the 
Redeemer; after Morality (symbolized by the Entered Apprentice's grip),  and Philosophy (symbolized by the grip of the Fellow-Craft), had failed to  raise  p. 641  him. That of the Lion of the House of Judah is the strong grip, never to be  broken, with which Christ, of the royal line of that House, has clasped to 
Himself the whole human race, and embraces them in His wide arms as  closely and affectionately as brethren embrace each other on the five points  of fellowship.

As Entered Apprentices and Fellow-Crafts, Masons are taught to imitate the  laudable example of those Masons who labored at the building of King 
Solomon's Temple; and to plant firmly and deep in their hearts those  foundation-stones of principle, truth, justice, temperance, fortitude,  prudence, and charity, on which to erect that Christian character which all  the storms of misfortune and all the powers and temptations of Hell shall not  prevail against; those feelings and noble affections which are the most  proper homage that can be paid to the Grand Architect and Great Father of  the Universe, and which make the heart a living temple budded to Him:  when the unruly passions are made to submit to rule and measurement, and  their excesses are struck off with the gavel of self-restraint; and when every  action and every principle is accurately corrected and adjusted by the square  of wisdom, the level of humility, and the plumb of justice.

The two columns, Jachin and Boaz, are the symbols of that profound faith  and implicit trust in God and the Redeemer that are the Christian's strength ;  and of those good works by which alone that faith can be established and  made operative and effectual to salvation.

The three pillars that support the Lodge are symbols of a Christian's HOPE;  in a future state of happiness; FAITH in the promises and the divine  character and mission of the Redeemer; and CHARITABLE JUDGMENT  of other men.

The three murderers of Khir-Om symbolize Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas the 
High-Priest, and Judas Iscariot: and the three blows given him are the  betrayal by the last, the refusal of Roman protection by Pilate, and the  condemnation by the High-Priest. They also symbolize the blow on the ear,  the scourging, and the crown of thorns. The twelve fellow-crafts sent in  search of the body are the twelve disciples, in doubt whether to believe that  the Redeemer would rise from the dead.

The Master's word, supposed to be lost, symbolizes the Christian faith and  religion, supposed to have been crushed and destroyed when the Saviour  was crucified, after Iscariot had betrayed Him,  p. 642  and Peter deserted Him, and when the other disciples doubted whether He  would arise from the dead; but which rose from His tomb and flowed  rapidly over the civilized world; and so that which was supposed to be lost  was found. It symbolizes also the Saviour Himself; the WORD that was in  the beginning—that was with God, and that was God; the Word of life, that  was made flesh and dwelt among us, and was supposed to be lost, while He  lay in the tomb, for three days, and His disciples "as yet knew not the  scripture that He must rise again from the dead," and doubted when they  heard of it, and were amazed and frightened and still doubted when He  appeared among them.

The bush of acacia placed at the head of the grave of Khir-Om is an emblem  of resurrection and immortality.

Such are the explanations of our Christian brethren; entitled, like those of all  other Masons, to a respectful 'consideration.

CLOSING INSTRUCTION.

There is no pretence to infallibility in Masonry. It is not for us to dictate to  any man what he shall believe. We have hitherto, in the instruction of the  several Degrees, confined ourselves to laying before you the great thoughts  that have found expression in the different ages of the world, leaving you to  decide for yourself as to the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of each, and what  proportion of truth, if any, each contained. We shall pursue no other course  in this closing Philosophical instruction; in which we propose to deal with  the highest questions that have ever exercised the human mind, with the  existence and the nature of a God, with the existence and the nature of the  human soul, and with the relations of the divine and human spirit with the  merely material Universe. There can be no questions more important to an  intelligent being, none that have for him a more direct and personal interest;  and to this last word of Scottish Masonry we invite your serious and  attentive consideration. And, as what we shall now say will be but the  completion and rounding-off of what we have already said in several of the  preceding Degrees, in regard to the Old Thought and the Ancient 
Philosophies, we hope that you have noted and not forgotten our previous  lessons, without which this would seem imperfect and fragmentary.

In its idea of rewarding a faithful and intelligent workman by conferring  upon him a knowledge of the True Word, Masonry  p. 643  has perpetuated a very great truth, because it involves the proposition that  the idea which a man forms of God is always the most important element in  his speculative theory of the Universe, and in his particular practical plan of  action for the Church, the State, the Community, the Family, and his own  individual life. It will ever make a vast difference in the conduct of a people  in war or peace, whether they believe the Supreme God to be a cruel Deity,  delighting in sacrifice and blood, or a God of Love; and an individual's  speculative theory as to the mode and extent of God's government, and as to  the nature and reality of his own free-will and consequent responsibility,  will needs have great influence in shaping the course of his life and  conversation.

We see every day the vast influence of the popular idea of God. All the great  historical civilizations of the race have grown out of the national ideas  which were formed of God; or have been intimately connected with those  ideas. The popular Theology, which at first is only an abstract idea in the  heads of philosophers, by and by shows itself in the laws, and in the  punishments for crime, in the churches, the ceremonies and the sacraments,  the festivals and the fasts, the weddings, the baptisms and the funerals, in  the hospitals, the colleges, the schools, and all the social charities, in the  relations of husband and wife, parent and child, in the daily work and the  daily prayer of every man.

As the world grows in its development, it necessarily outgrows its ancient  ideas of God, which were only temporary and pro-visional. A man who has  a higher conception of God than those about him, and who denies that their  conception is God, is very likely to be called an Atheist by men who are  really far less believers in a God than he. Thus the Christians, who said the 
Heathen idols were no Gods, were accounted Atheists by the People, and  accordingly put to death; and Jesus of Nazareth was crucified as an  unbelieving blasphemer, by the Jews.

There is a mere formal Atheism, which is a denial of God in terms, but not  in reality. A man says. There is no God; that is, no God that is self-  originated, or that never originated, but always WAS and HAD BEEN, who  is the cause of existence, who is the Mind and the Providence of the 
Universe; and so the order, beauty, and harmony of the world of matter and  mind do not indicate any plan or purpose of Deity. But, he says, NATURE,- 
-meaning by that the whole sum-total of existence ,—that is powerful,  p. 644  active, wise, and good; Nature is self-originated, or always was and had  been, the cause of its own existence, the mind of the Universe and the 
Providence of itself. There is obviously a plan and purpose whereby order,  beauty, and harmony are brought about; but all that is the plan and purpose  of nature.

In such cases, the absolute denial of God is only formal and not real. The  qualities of God are admitted, and affirmed to be real; and it is a mere  change of name to call the possessor of those qualities, Nature, and not God. 
The real question is, whether such Qualities exist, as we call God; and not,  by what particular name we shall designate the Qualities. One man may call  the sum total of these Qualities, Nature; another, Heaven; a third, Universe,  a fourth, Matter; a fifth. Spirit; a sixth, God, Theos, Zeus, Alfadir, Allah, or  what he pleases. All admit the existence of the Being, Power, or ENS, thus  diversely named. The name is of the smallest consequence.

Real Atheism is the denial of the existence of any God, of the actuality of all  possible ideas of God. It denies that there is any Mind, Intelligence, or ENS,  that is the Cause and Providence of the Universe, and of any Thing or any 
Existence, Soul, Spirit, or Being, that intentionally or intelligently produces  the Order, Beauty, and Harmony thereof, and the constant and regular  modes of operation therein. It must necessarily deny that there is any law,  order, or harmony in existence, or any constant mode of operation in the  world; for it is utterly impossible for any human creature to conceive,  however much he may pretend to do so, of either of these, except as a  consequence of the action of Intelligence; which is, indeed, that otherwise  unknown thing, the existence of which these alone prove; otherwise than as  the cause of these, not a thing at all; a mere name for the wholly  uncognizable cause of these.

The real atheist must deny the existence of the Qualities of God, deny that  there is any mind of or in the Universe, any self-conscious Providence, any 
Providence at all. He must deny that there is any Being or Cause of Finite  things, that is self-consciously powerful, wise, just, loving, and faithful to  itself and its own nature. He must deny that there is any plan in the Universe  or any part of it. He must hold, either that matter is eternal, or that it  originated itself, which is absurd, or that it was originated by an 
Intelligence, or at least by a Cause; and then he admits a. God,  p. 645

[paragraph continues] No doubt it is beyond the reach of our faculties to imagine  how matter originated,—how it began to be, in space where before was  nothing, or God only. But it is equally beyond the reach of our faculties to  imagine it eternal and nnoriginated. To hold it to be eternal, without thought  or will; that the specific forms of it, the seed, the rock, the tree, the man, the  solar system, all came with no forethought planning or producing them, by 
"chance" or "the fortuitous concourse of atoms" of matter that has no  thought or will; and that they indicate no mind, no plan, no purpose, no  providence, is absurd. It is not to deny the existence of what we understand  by mind, plan, purpose, Providence; but to insist that these words shall have  some other meaning than that which the human race has ever attached to  them: shall mean some unknown thing, for which the human race has no  name, because it has of such a thing no possible idea. Either there never was  any such thing as a "plan," and the word is nonsense, or the Universe exists  in conformity to a plan. The word never meant, and never can mean, any  other thing than that which the Universe exhibits. So with the word 
" purpose ;" so with the word "Providence.” They mean nothing, or else only  what the Universe proves.

It was soon found that the denial of a Conscious Power, the cause of man  and of his life, of a Providence, or a Mind and Intelligence arranging man in  reference to the world, and the world in reference to man, would not satisfy  the instinctive desires of human nature, or account for the facts of material  nature. It did not long answer to say, if it ever was said, that the Universe  was drifting in the void inane, and neither it, nor any mind within or without  it, knew of its whence, its whither, or its whereabouts; that man was drifting  in the Universe, knowing little of his whereabouts, nothing of his whence or  whither; that there was no Mind, no Providence, no Power, that knew any  better; nothing hat guided and directed man in his drifting, or the Universe  in the weltering waste of Time. To say to man and woman, "your heroism,  your bravery, your self-denial all comes to nothing: your nobleness will do  you no good: you will die, and your nobleness will do mankind no service;  for there is no plan or order in all these things; everything comes and goes  by the fortuitous con-course of atoms;" did not, nor ever will, long satisfy  the human mind.  p. 646

True, the theory of Atheism has been uttered. It has been said, "Death is the  end: this is a world without a God: you are a body without a soul: there is a 
Here, but no Hereafter for you; an Earth, but no Heaven. Die, and return to  your dust. Man is bones, blood, bowels, and brain; mind is matter: there is  no soul in the brain, nothing but nerves. We can see all the way to a little  star in the nebula of Orion's belt; so distant that it will take light a thousand  millions of years to come from it to the earth, journeying at the rate of  twelve millions of miles a minute. There is no Heaven this side of that: you  see all the way through: there is not a speck of Heaven; and do you think  there is any beyond it; and if so, when would you reach it? There is no 
Providence. Nature is a fortuitous concourse of atoms; thought is a  fortuitous function of matter, a fortuitous result of a fortuitous result, a  chance-shot from the great wind-gun of the Universe, accidentally loaded,  pointed at random, and fired off by chance. Things happen ; they are not  arranged. There is luck, and there is ill-luck; but there is no Providence. Die  you into dust!" Does all this satisfy the human instinct of immortality, that  makes us ever long, with unutterable longing, to join ourselves again to our  dear ones who have gone away before us, and to mankind, for eternal life? 
Does it satisfy our mighty hungering and thirst for immortality, our anxious  longing to come nearer to, and to know more of, the Eternal Cause of all  things?

Men never could be content to believe that there was no mind that thought  for man, no conscience to enact eternal laws, no heart to love those whom  nothing of earth loves or cares for, no will of the Universe to marshal the  nations in the way of wisdom, justice, and love. History is not—thank God!  we know it is not,—the fortuitous concourse of events, or Nature that of  atoms. We cannot believe that there is no plan nor purpose in Nature, to  guide our going out and coming in: that there is a mighty going, but it goes  nowhere; that all beauty, wisdom, affection, justice, morality in the world, is  an accident, and may end to-morrow.

All over the world there is heroism unrequited, or paid with misery; vice on  thrones, corruption in high places, nobleness in poverty or even in chains,  the gentle devotion of woman rewarded by brutal neglect or more brutal  abuse and violence; everywhere want, misery, over-work, and under-wages. 
Add to these the Atheist's creed,—a body without a soul, an earth without a  p. 647

[paragraph continues] Heaven, a world without a God; and what a Pandemonium  would we make of this world!

The intellect of the Atheist would find matter everywhere; but no Causing  and Providing Mind: his moral sense would find no Equitable Will, no 
Beauty of Moral Excellence, no Conscience enacting justice into the  unchanging law of right, no spiritual Order or spiritual Providence, but only  material Fate and Chance. His affections would find only finite things to  love; and to them the dead who were loved and who died yesterday, are like  the rainbow that yesterday evening lived a moment and then passed away. 
His soul, flying through the vast Inane, and feeling the darkness with its  wings, seeking the Soul of all, which at once is Reason, Conscience, and the 
Heart of all that is, would find no God, but a Universe all disorder; no 
Infinite, no Reason, no Conscience, no Heart, no Soul of things; nothing to  reverence, to esteem, to love, to worship, to trust in; but only an Ugly Force,  alien and foreign to us, that strikes down those we love, and makes us mere  worms on the hot sand of the world. No voice would speak from the Earth to  comfort him. It is a cruel mother, that great Earth, that devours her young,—a 
Force and nothing more. Out of the sky would smile no kind Providence, in  all its thousand starry eyes; and in storms a malignant violence, with its  lightning-sword, would stab into the darkness, seeking for men to murder.

No man ever was or ever can be content with that. The evidence of .God has  been ploughed into Nature so deeply, and so deeply woven into the texture  of the human soul, that Atheism has never become a faith, though it has  sometimes assumed the shape of theory. Religion is natural to man. 
Instinctively he turns to God and reverences and relies on Him. In the 
Mathematics of the Heavens, written in gorgeous diagrams of fire, he sees  law, order, beauty, harmony without end: in the ethics of the little nations  that inhabit the ant-hills he sees the same; in all Nature, animate and  inanimate, he sees the evidences of a Design, a Will, an Intelligence, and a 
God,—of a God beneficent and loving as well as wise, and merciful and  indulgent as well as powerful.

To man, surrounded by the material Universe, and conscious of the  influence that his material environments exercised upon his fortunes and his  present destiny;—to man, ever confronted with the splendors of the starry  heavens, the regular march of the  p. 648  seasons, the phenomena of sunrise and moonrise, and all the evidences of  intelligence and design that everywhere pressed upon and overwhelmed  him, all imaginable questions as to the nature and cause of these phenomena  constantly recurred, demanding to be solved, and refusing to be sent away  unanswered. And still, after the lapse of ages, press upon the human mind  and demand solution, the same great questions—perhaps still demanding it in  vain.

Advancing to the period when man had ceased to look upon the separate  parts and individual forces of the Universe as gods.-when he had come to  look upon it as a whole, this question, among the earliest, occurred to him,  and insisted on being answered: "Is this material Universe self-existent, or  was it created? Is it eternal, or did it originate?"

And then in succession came crowding on the human mind these other  questions:

"Is this material Universe a mere aggregate of fortuitous combinations of  matter, or is it the result and work of intelligence, acting upon a plan?

"If there be such an Intelligence, what and where is it? Is the material 
Universe itself an Intelligent being? Is it like man, a body and a soul? Does 
Nature act upon itself, or is there a Cause beyond it that acts upon it?

"If there is a personal God, separate from the material Universe, that created  all things. Himself uncreated, is He corporeal or incorporeal, material or  spiritual, the soul of the Universe or wholly apart from it? and if He be 
Spirit, what then is spirit?

"Was that Supreme Deity active or quiescent before the creation; and if  quiescent during a previous eternity, what necessity of His nature moved 
Him at last to create a world; or was it a mere whim that had no motive?

"Was matter co-existent with Him, or absolutely created by him out of  nothing? Did He create it, or only mould and shape and fashion a chaos  already existing, co-existent with Himself?

"Did the Deity directly create matter, or was creation the work of inferior  deities, emanations from Himself?

"If He be good and just, whence comes it that, foreknowing everything, He  has allowed sorrow and evil to exist; and how to reconcile with His  benevolence and wisdom the prosperity of vice and the misfortunes of virtue  in this world?"  p. 649

And then, as to man himself, recurred these other questions, as they  continue to recur to all of us:

"What is it in us that thinks? Is Thought the mere result of material  organization; or is there in us a soul that thinks, separate from and resident  in the body? If the latter, is it eternal and uncreated; and if not, how created? 
Is it distinct from God, or an emanation from Him? Is it inherently  immortal, or only so by destination, because God has willed it? Is it to return  to and be merged in Him, or ever to exist, separately from Him, with its  present identity?

"If God has fore-seen and fore-arranged all that occurs, how has man any  real free-will, or the least control over circumstances? How can anything be  done against the will of Infinite Omnipotence; and if all is done according  to that will, how is there any wrong or evil, in what Infinite Wisdom and 
Infinite Power does not choose to prevent?

"What is the foundation of the moral law? Did God enact it of His own mere  pleasure; and if so, can He not, when He pleases, repeal it? Who shalt assure  us He will not repeal it, and make right wrong, and virtue vice? Or is the  moral law a necessity of His nature; and if so, who enacted it; and does not  that assert a power, like the old Necessity, superior to Deity?"

And, close-following after these, came the great question of HEREAFTER,  of another Life, of the soul's Destiny; and the thousand other collateral and  subordinate questions, as to matter, spirit, futurity, and God, that have  produced all the systems of philosophy, all metaphysics, and all theology,  since the world began.

What the old philosophic mind thought upon these great questions, we have  already, to some extent, developed. With the Emanation-doctrine of the 
Gnostics and the Orient, we have endeavored to make you familiar. We  have brought you face to face with the Kabalists, the Essenes, and Philo the 
Jew. We have shown that, and how, much of the old mythology was derived  from the daily and yearly recurring phenomena of the heavens. We have  exhibited to you the ancient notions by which they endeavored to explain to  themselves the existence and prevalence of evil; and we have in some  degree made known to you their metaphysical ideas as to the nature of the 
Deity. Much more remains to be done than it is within our power to do.  p. 650

[paragraph continues] We stand upon the sounding shore of the great ocean of Time. 
In front of us stretches out the heaving waste of the illimitable Past; and its  waves, as they roll up to our feet along the sparkling slope of the yellow  sands, bring to us, now and then, from the depths of that boundless ocean, a  shell, a few specimens of algte torn rudely from their stems, a rounded  pebble; and that is all; of all the vast treasures of ancient thought that lie  buried there, with the mighty anthem of the boundless ocean thundering  over them forever and forever.

Let us once more, and for the last time, along the shore of that great ocean,  gather a few more relics of the Past, and listen to its mighty voices, as they  come, in fragmentary music, in broken and interrupted rhythm, whispering  to us from the great bosom of the Past.

Rites, creeds, and legends express, directly or symbolically, some leading  idea, according to which the Mysteries of Being are supposed to be  explained in Deity. The intricacies of mythical genealogies are a practical  acknowledgment of the mysterious nature of the Omnipotent Deity;  displaying in their beautiful but ineffectual imagery the first efforts of the  mind to communicate with nature: the flowers which fancy strewed before  the youthful steps of Psyche, when she first set out in pursuit of the  immortal object of her love. Theories and notions, in all their varieties of  truth and falsehood, are a machinery more or less efficacious, directed to the  same end. Every religion was, in its origin, an embryo philosophy, or an  attempt to interpret the unknown by mind; and it was only when philosophy,  which is essentially progress, outgrew its first acquisitions, that religion  became a thing apart, cherishing as unalterable dogmas the notions which  philosophy had abandoned. Separated from philosophy, it became arrogant  and fantastical, professing to have already attained what its more authentic  representative was ever pursuing in vain; and discovering, through its  initiations and Mysteries, all that to its contracted view seemed wanting to  restore the well-being of mankind, the means of purification and expiation,  remedies for disease, expedients to cure the disorders of the soul, and to  propitiate the gods.

Why should we attempt to confine the idea of the Supreme Mind within an  arbitrary barrier, or exclude from the limits of veracity any conception of the 
Deity, which, if imperfect and  p. 651  inadequate, may be only a little more so than our own? "The name of God,"  says Hobbes, "is used not to make us conceive Him, for He is inconceivable,  but that we may honor Him.” "Believe in God, and adore Him," said the 
Greek Poet, "but investigate Him not; the inquiry is fruitless, seek not to  discover who God is; for, by the desire to know, you offend Him who  chooses to remain unknown." "When we attempt," says Philo, "to  investigate the essence of the Absolute Being, we fall into an abyss of  perplexity; and the only benefit to be derived from such researches is the  conviction of their absurdity."

Yet man, though ignorant of the constitution of the dust on which he treads,  has ventured, and still ventures, to speculate on the nature of God, and to  define dogmatically in creeds the subject least within the compass of his  faculties; and even to hate and persecute those who will not accept his views  as true.

But though a knowledge of the Divine Essence is impossible, the  conceptions formed respecting it are interesting, as indications of  intellectual development. The history of religion is the history of the human  mind; and the conception formed by it of Deity is always in exact relation to  its moral and intellectual attainments. The one is the index and the measure  of the other.

The negative notion of God, which consists in abstracting the inferior and  finite, is, according to Philo, the only way in which it is possible for man  worthily to apprehend the nature of God. After exhausting the varieties of  symbolism, we contrast the Divine Greatness with human littleness, and  employ expressions apparently affirmative, such as "Infinite," "Almighty," 
"All-wise," "Omnipotent," "Eternal," and the like; which in reality amount  only to denying, in regard to God, those limits which con-fine the faculties  of man; and thus we remain content with a name which is a mere  conventional sign and confession of our ignorance.

The Hebrew mri’ and the Greek To ON expressed abstract existence, without  outward manifestation or development. Of the same nature are the  definitions, "God is a sphere whose centre is everywhere, and whose  circumference nowhere;" "God is He who sees all, Himself unseen:" and  finally, that of Proclus and Hegel—"the To pr| ov—that which has no outward  and positive existence." Most of the so-called ideas or definitions of the 
"Absolute" are only a collection of negations; from which, as they affirm  nothing, nothing is learned.  p. 652

God was first recognized in the heavenly bodies and in the elements. When  man's consciousness of his own intellectuality was matured, and he became  convinced that the internal faculty of thought was something more subtle  than even the most subtle elements, he transferred that new conception to  the object of his worship, and deified a mental principle instead of a  physical one. He in every case makes God after his own image; for do what  we will, the highest efforts of human thought can conceive nothing higher  than the supremacy of intellect; and so he ever conies back to some familiar  type of exalted humanity. He at first deifies nature, and afterward himself.

The eternal aspiration of the religious sentiment in man is to become united  with God. In his earliest development, the wish and its fulfillment were  simultaneous, through unquestioning belief. In proportion as the conception  of Deity was exalted, the notion of His terrestrial presence or proximity was  abandoned; and the difficulty of comprehending the Divine Govermnent,  together with the glaring superstitious evils arising out of its  misinterpretation, endangered the belief in it altogether.

Even the lights of Heaven, which, as "bright potentates of the sky," were  formerly the vigilant directors of the economy of earth, now shine dim and  distant, and Uriel no more descends upon a sunbeam. But the real change  has been in the progressive ascent of man's own faculties, and not in the 
Divine Nature; as the Stars are no more distant now than when they were  supposed to rest on the shoulders of Atlas. And yet a little sense of  disappointment and humiliation attended the first awakening of the soul,  when reason, looking upward toward the Deity, was impressed with a dizzy  sense of having fallen.

But hope revives in despondency; and every nation that ever advanced  beyond the most elementary conceptions, felt the necessity of an attempt to  fill the chasm, real or imaginary, separating man from God. To do this was  the great task of poetry, philosophy, and religion. Hence the personifications  of God's attributes, developments, and manifestations, as "Powers," 
"Intelligences," "Angels," "Emanations;" through which and the oracular  faculty in himself, man could place himself in communion with God.

The various ranks and orders of mythical beings imagined by Persians, 
Indians, Egyptians, or Etrurians, to preside over the various departments of  nature, had each his share in a scheme to  p. 653  bring man into closer approximation to the Deity; they eventually gave way  only before an analogous though less picturesque symbolism; and the 
Deities and Daemons of Greece and Rome were perpetuated with only a  change of names, when their offices were transferred to Saints and Martyrs. 
The attempts by which reason had sometimes endeavored to span the  unknown by a bridge of metaphysics, such as the idealistic systems of 
Zoroaster, Pythagoras, or Plato, were only a more refined form of the  poetical illusions which satisfied the vulgar; and man still looked back with  longing to the lost golden age, when his ancestors communed face to face  with the Gods; and hoped that, by propitiating Heaven, he might accelerate  the renewal of it in the islands of the Far West, under the sceptre of Kronos,  or in a centralization of political power at Jerusalem. His eager hope  overcame even the terrors of the grave; for the Divine power was as infinite  as human expectation, and the Egyptian, duly ensepulchred in the Lybian 
Catacombs, was supposed to be already on his way to the Fortunate Abodes  under the guidance of Hermes, there to obtain a perfect association and  reunion with his God.

Remembering what we have already said elsewhere in regard to the old  ideas concerning the Deity, and repeating it as little as possible, let us once  more put ourselves in communion with the Ancient poetic and philosophic  mind, and endeavor to learn of it what it thought, and how it solved the great  problems that have ever tortured the human intellect.

The division of the First and Supreme Cause into two parts, one Active and  the other Passive, the Universe Agent and Patient, or the hermaphroditic 
God-World, is one of the most ancient and widespread dogmas of  philosophy or natural theology. Almost every ancient people gave it a place  in their worship, their mysteries, and their ceremonies.

Ocellus Lucanus, who seems to have lived shortly after Pythagoras opened  his School in Italy, five or six hundred years before our era, and in the time  of Solon, Thales, and the other Sages who had studied in the Schools of 
Egypt, not only recognizes the eternity of the Universe, and its divine  character as an unproduced and indestructible being, but also the distinction  of Active and Passive causes in what he terms the Grand Whole, or the  single hermaphroditic Being that comprehends all existences, as well causes  as effects; and which is a system regularly ordered, perfect  p. 654  and complete, of all Natures. He well apprehended the dividing-line that  separates existence eternally the same, from that which eternally changes;  the nature of celestial from that of terrestrial bodies, that of causes from that  of effects, that which is from that which only BECOMES,—a distinction that  naturally struck every thinking man.

We shall not quote his language at full length. The heavenly bodies, he  thought, are first and most noble; they move of themselves, and ever  revolve, without change of form or essence. Fire, water, earth, and air  change incessantly and continually, not place, but form. Then, as in the 
Universe there are generation and cause of generation,—as generation is  where there are change and displacement of parts, and cause where there is  stability of nature, evidently it belongs to what is the cause of generation, to  move and to act, and to the recipient, to be made and moved. In his view,  everything above the Moon was the habitation of the gods; all below, that of 
Nature and discord; this operates dissolution of things made; that,  production of those that are being made. As the world is unproduced and  indestructible, as it had no beginning, and will have no end, necessarily the  principle that operates generation in another than itself, and that which  operates it in itself, have co-existed.

The former is all above the moon, and especially the sun: the latter is the  sublunary world. Of these two parts, one active, the other passive—one  divine and always the same, the other mortal and ever changing, all that we  call the "world" or "universe" is composed.

These accorded with the principles of the Egyptian philosophy, which held  that man and the animals had always existed together with the world; that  they were its effects, eternal like itself. The chief divisions of nature into  active and passive causes, its system of generation and destruction, and the  concurrence of the two great principles, Heaven and earth, uniting to form  all things, will, according to Ocellus, always continue to exist. "Enough," he  concludes, "as to the Universe, the generations and destructions effected in  it, the mode in which it now exists, the mode in which it will ever exist, by  the eternal qualities of the two principles, one always moving, the other  always moved; one always governing, the other always governed."

Such is a brief summary of the doctrine of this philosopher,  p. 655  whose work is one of the most ancient that has survived to us. The subject  on which he treated occupied in his time all men's minds: the poets sang of  cosmogonies and theogonies, and the philosophers wrote treatises on the  birth of the world and the elements of its composition. The cosmogony of  the Hebrews; attributed to Moses; that of the Phoenicians, ascribed to 
Sanchoniathon; that of the Greeks, composed by Hesiod; that of the 
Egyptians, the Atlantes, and the Cretans, preserved by Diodorus Siculus; the  fragments of the theology of Orpheus, divided among different writers; the  books of the Persians, or their Boundehesh; those of the Hindus; the  traditions of the Chinese and the people of Macassar; the cosmogonic chants  which Virgil puts in the mouth of Iopas at Carthage; and those of the old 
Silenus, the first book of the Metamorphoses of Ovid; all testify to the  antiquity and universality of these fictions as to the origin of the world and  its causes.

At the head of the causes of nature, Heaven and earth were placed; and the  most apparent parts of each, the sun, the moon, the fixed stars and planets,  and, above all, the zodiac, among the active causes of generation; and  among the passive , the several elements. These causes were not only classed  in the progressive order of their energy, Heaven and earth heading the  respective lists, but distinct sexes were in some sort assigned to them, and  characteristics analogous to the mode in which they concur in universal  generation.

The doctrine of Ocellus was the general doctrine everywhere, it naturally  occurring to all to make the same distinction. The Egyptians did so, in  selecting those animals in which they recognized these emblematic qualities,  in order to symbolize the double sex of the Universe. Their God KNEPH,  out of whose mouth issued the Orphic egg, whence the author of the 
Clementine Recognitions makes a hermaphroditic figure to emerge, uniting  in itself the two principles whereof Heaven and the earth are forms, and  which enter into the organization of all beings which the heavens and the  earth engender by their concourse, furnishes another emblem of the double  power, active and passive, which the ancients saw in the Universe, and  which they symbolized by the egg. Orpheus, who studied in Egypt,  borrowed from the theologians of that country the mysterious forms under  which the science of nature was veiled, and carried into Greece the symbolic  p. 656  egg, with its division into two parts or causes figured by the hermaphroditic  being that issued from it, and whereof Heaven and earth are composed.

The Brahmins of India expressed the same cosmogonic idea by a statue,  representative of the Universe, uniting in itself both sexes. The male sex  offered an image of the sun, centre of the active principle, and the female  sex that of the moon, at the sphere whereof, proceeding downward, the  passive portion of nature begins. The Lingam, unto the present day revered  in the Indian temples, being but the conjunction of the organs of generation  of the two sexes, was an emblem of the same. The Hindus have ever had the  greatest veneration for this symbol of ever-reproductive nature. The Greeks  consecrated the same symbols of universal fruitfulness in their Mysteries;  and they were exhibited in the sanctuaries of Eleusis. They appear among  the sculptured ornaments of all the Indian temples. Tertullian accuses the 
Valentinians of having adopted the custom of venerating them; a custom, he  says, introduced by Melampus from Egypt into Greece. The Egyptians  consecrated the Phallus in the Mysteries of Osiris and Isis, as we leam from 
Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus; and the latter assures us that these emblems  were not consecrated by the Egyptians alone, but by every people. They  certainly were so among the Persians and Assyrians; and they were regarded  everywhere as symbolic of the generative and productive powers of all  animated beings. In those early ages, the works of Nature and all her agents  were sacred like herself.

For the union of Nature with herself is a chaste marriage, of which the union  of man and woman was a natural image, and their organs were an expressive  emblem of the double energy which manifests itself in Heaven and Earth  uniting together to produce all beings. "The Heavens," says Plutarch, 
"seemed to men to fulfill the functions of father, and the Earth of mother. 
The former impregnated the earth with its fertilizing rains, and the earth,  receiving them, became fruitful and brought forth." Heaven, which covers  and embraces the earth everywhere, is her potent spouse, uniting himself to  her to make her fruitful, without which she would languish in everlasting  sterility, buried in the shades of chaos and of night. Their union is their  marriage; their productions or parts are their children. The skies are our 
Father, and Nature the great Mother of us all.  p. 657

This idea was not the dogma of a single sect, but the general opinion of all  the Sages. "Nature was divided," says Cicero, '"into two parts, one active,  and the other that submitted itself to this action, which it received, and  which modified it. The former was deemed to be a Force, and the latter the  material on which that Force exerted itself.” Macrobius repeated almost  literally the doctrine of Ocellus. Aristotle termed the earth the fruitful  mother, environed on all sides by the air. Above it was Heaven, the  dwelling-place of the gods and the divine stars, its substance ether, or a fire  incessantly moving in circles, divine and incorruptible, and subject to no  change. Below it, nature, and the elements, imitable and acted on,  corruptible and mortal.

Synesius said that generations were effected in the portions of the Universe  which we inhabit; while the cause of generations resided in the portions  above us, whence descend to us the germs of the effects produced here  below. Proclus and Simplicius deemed Heaven the Active Cause and Father,  relatively to the earth. The former says that the World or the Whole is a  single Animal; what is done in it, is done by it; the same World acts , and  acts upon itself. He divides it into "Heaven" and "Generation." In the  former, he says, are placed and arranged the conservative causes of  generation, superintended by the Genii and Gods. The Earth, or Rhea,  associated ever with Saturn in production, is mother of the effects of which 
Heaven is Father; the womb or bosom that receives the fertilizing energy of  the God that engenders ages. The great work of generation is operated, he  says, primarily by the action of the Sun, and secondarily by that of the 
Moon, so that the Sun is the primitive source of this energy, as father and  chief of the male gods that form his court. He follows the action of the male  and female principles through all the portions and divisions of nature.  attributing to the former the origin of stability and identity, to the latter, that  of diversity and mobility. Heaven is to the earth, he says, as the male to the  female. It is the movement of the heavens that, by their revolutions,  furnished the seminal incitements and forces, whose emanations received by  the earth, make it fruitful, and cause it to produce animals and plants of  every kind.

Philo says that Moses recognized this doctrine of two causes, active and  passive; but made the former to reside in the Mind or Intelligence external to  matter.  p. 658

The ancient astrologers divided the twelve signs of the Zodiac into six male  and six female, and assigned them to six male and six female Great Gods. 
Heaven and Earth, or Ouranos and Ghe, were among most ancient nations,  the first and most ancient Divinities. We find them in the Phoenician history  of Sanchoniathon, and in the Grecian Genealogy of the Gods given by 
Hesiod. Everywhere they marry, and by their union produce the later Gods. 
"In the beginning," says Apollodorus, "Ouranos or the Heavens was Lord of  all the Universe: he took to wife Ghe or the earth, and had by her many  children." They were the first Gods of the Cretans, and under other names,  of the Armenians, as we learn from Berosus, and of Panchaia, an island 
South of Arabia, as we learn from Euhemerus. Otpheus made the Divinity,  or the "Great Whole," male and female, because, he said, it could produce  nothing, unless it united in itself the productive force of both sexes. He  called Heaven PANGENETOR, the Father of all things, most ancient of 
Beings, beginning and end of all, containing in Himself the incorruptible  and unwearying force of Necessity.

The same idea obtained in the rude North of Europe. The Scythians made  the earth to be the wife of Jupiter; and the Germans adored her under the  name of HERTA. The Celts worshipped the Heavens and the Earth, and said  that without the former the latter would be sterile, and that their marriage  produced all things. The Scandinavians acknowledged BOR or the Heavens,  and gave FURTUR, his son, the Earth as his wife. Olaus Rudbeck adds, that  their ancestors were persuaded that Heaven intermarried with the Earth, and  thus uniting his forces with hers, produced animals and plants. This  marriage of Heaven and Earth produced the AZES, Genii famous in the  theology of the North. In the theology of the Phrygians and Lydians, the 
ASH were born of the marriage of the Supreme God with the Earth, and 
Firmicus informs us that the Phrygians attributed to the Earth supremacy  over the other elements, and considered her the Great Mother of all things.

Virgil sings the impregnation of the joyous earth, by the Ether, its spouse,  that descends upon its bosom, fertilizing it with rains. Columella sings the  loves of Nature and her marriage with Heaven annually consummated at the  sweet Spring-time. He describes the Spirit of Life, the soul that animates the  world, fired with the passion of Love, uniting with Nature and itself, itself a  part of  p. 659

[paragraph continues] Nature, and filling its own bosom with new productions. This  union of the Universe with itself, this mutual action of two sexes, he terms 
"the great Secrets of Nature," the Mysteries of the Union of Heaven with 
Earth, imaged in the Sacred Mysteries of Atys and Bacchus."

Varro tells us that the great Divinities adored at Samothrace were the 
Heavens and the Earth, considered as First Causes or Primal Gods, and as  male and female agents, one bearing to the other the relations that the Soul  and Principle of Movement bear to the body or the matter that receives  them. These were the gods revered in the Mysteries of that Island, as they  were in the orgies of Phoenicia.

Everywhere the sacred body of Nature was covered with the veil of allegory,  which concealed it from the profane, and allowed it to be seen only by the  sage who thought it worthy to be the object of his study and investigation. 
She showed herself to those only who loved her in spirit and in truth, and  she abandoned the indifferent and careless to error and to ignorance. "The 
Sages of Greece," says Pausanias, "never wrote otherwise than in an  enigmatical manner, never naturally and directly." "Nature," says Sallust the 
Philosopher, "should be sung only in a language that imitates the secrecy of  her processes and operations. She is herself an enigma. We see only bodies  in movement; the forces and springs that move them are hidden from us." 
The poets inspired by the Divinity, the wisest philosophers, all the  theologians, the chiefs of the initiations and Mysteries, even the gods  uttering their oracles, have borrowed the figurative language of allegory. 
"The Egyptians," says Proclus, "preferred that mode of teaching, and spoke  of the great secrets of Nature, only in mythological enigmas." The 
Gymnosophists of India and the Druids of Gaul lent to science the same  enigmatic language, and in the same style wrote the Hierophants of 
Phoenicia.

The division of things into the active and the passive cause leads to that of  the two Principles of Light and Darkness, connected with and corresponding  with it. For Light comes from the ethereal substance that composes the  active cause, and darkness front earth or the gross matter which composes  the passive cause. In Hesiod, the Earth, by its union with Tartarus,  engenders Typhon. Chief of the Powers or Genii of Darkness. But it unites  p. 660  itself with the Ether or Ouranos, when it engenders the Gods of Olympus, or  the Stars, children of Starry Ouranos.

Light was the first Divinity worshipped by men. To it they owed the brilliant  spectacle of Nature. It seems an emanation from the Creator of all things,  making known to our senses the Universe which darkness hides from our  eyes, and, as it were, giving it existence. Darkness, as it were, reduces all  nature again to nothingness, and almost entirely annihilates man.

Naturally, therefore, two substances of opposite natures were imagined, to  each of which the world was in turn subjected, one contributing to its  felicity and the other to its misfortune. Light multiplied its enjoyments; 
Darkness despoiled it of them: the former was its friend, the latter its enemy. 
To one all good was attributed; to the other all evil; and thus the words 
"Light” and "Good” became synonymous, and the words "Darkness" and 
"Evil." It seeming that Good and Evil could not flow from one and the same  source, any more than could Light and Darkness, men naturally imagined  two Causes or Principles, of different natures and opposite in their effects,  one of which shed Light and Good, and the other Darkness and Evil, on the 
Universe.

This distinction of the two Principles was admitted in all the Theologies,  and formed one of the principal bases of all religions. It entered as a primary  element into the sacred fables, the cosmogonies and the Mysteries of  antiquity. "We are not to suppose," says Plutarch, "that the Principles of the 
Universe are inanimate bodies, as Democritus and Epicurus thought; nor  that a matter devoid of qualities is organized and arranged by a single 
Reason or Providence, Sovereign over all things, as the Stoics held; for it is  not possible that a single Being, good or evil, is the cause of all, inasmuch as 
God can in nowise be the cause of any evil. The harmony of the Universe is  a combination of contraries, like the strings of a lyre, or that of a bow, which  alternately is stretched and relaxed." "The good," says Euripides, "is never  separated from the Evil. The two must mingle, that all may go well." And  this opinion as to the two principles, continues Plutarch, "is that of all  antiquity. From the Theologians and Legislators it passed to the Poets and 
Philosophers. Its author is unknown; but the opinion itself is established by  the traditions of the whole human race, and consecrated in the mysteries and  sacrifices both of the Greeks and Barbarians, wherein was recognized the  dogma of  p. 661  opposing principles in nature, which, by their contrariety, produce the  mixture of good and evil. We must admit two contrary causes, two opposing  powers, which lead, one to the right and the other to the left, and thus  control our life, as they do the sublunary world, which is therefore subject to  so many changes and irregularities of every kind. For if there can be no  effect without a cause, and if the Good cannot be the cause of the Evil, it is  absolutely necessary that there should be a cause for the Evil, as there is one  for the Good." This doctrine, he adds, has been generally received among  most nations, and especially by those who have had the greatest reputation  for wisdom. All have admitted two gods, with different occupations, one  making the good and the other the evil found in nature. The former has been  styled "God," the latter "Demon." The Persians, or Zoroaster, named the  former Ormuzd and the latter Ahriman; of whom they said one was of the  nature of Light, the other of that of Darkness. The Egyptians called the  former Osiris, and the latter Typhon, his eternal enemy.

The Hebrews, at least after their return from the Persian captivity, had their  good Deity, and the Devil, a bad and malicious Spirit, ever opposing God,  and Chief of the Angels of Darkness, as God was of those of Light. The  word "Satan" means, in Hebrew, simply, "The Adversary."

The Chaldteans, Plutarch says, had their good and evil stars. The Greeks had  their Jupiter and Pluto, and their Giants and Titans, to whom were assigned  the attributes of the Serpent with which Pluto or Serapis was encircled, and  the shape whereof was assumed by Typhon, Ahriman, and the Satan of the 
Hebrews. Every people had something equivalent to this.

The People of Pegu believe in two Principles, one author of Good and the  other of Evil, and strive to propitiate the latter, while they think it needless  to worship the former, as he is incapable of doing evil. The people of Java,  of the Moluccas, of the Gold Coast, the Hottentots, the people of Teneriffe  and Madagascar, and the Savage Tribes of America, all worship and strive  to avert the anger and propitiate the good-will of the Evil Spirit.

But among the Greeks, Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Persians, and Assyrians, the  doctrine of the two Principles formed a complete and regularly arranged  theological system. It was the basis of the religion of the Magi and of Egypt. 
The author of an ancient  p. 662  work, attributed to Origen, says that Pythagoras learned from Zarastha, a 
Magus at Babylon (the same, perhaps, as Zerdusht or Zoroaster), that there  are two principles of all things, whereof one is the father and the other the  mother, the former, Light, and the latter. Darkness. Pythagoras thought that  the Dependencies on Light were warmth, dryness, lightness, swiftness; and  those on Darkness, cold, wet, weight, and slowness; and that the world  derived its existence from these two principles, as from the male and the  female. According to Porphyry, he conceived two opposing powers, one  good, which he termed Unity, the Light, Right, the Equal, the Stable, the

Straight; the other evil, which he termed Binary, Darkness, the Left, the 
Unequal, the Unstable, the Crooked. These ideas he received from the 
Orientals, for he dwelt twelve years at Babylon, studying with the Magi. 
Varro says he recognized two Principles of all things,-the Finite and the 
Infinite, Good and Evil, Life and Death, Day and Night. White he thought  was of the nature of the Good Principle, and Black of that of the Evil; that 
Light and Darkness, Heat and Cold, the Dry and the Wet, mingled in equal  proportions; that Summer was the triumph of heat, and Winter of cold; that  their equal combination produced Spring and Autumn, the former producing  verdure and favorable to health, and the latter, deteriorating everything,  giving birth to maladies. He applied the same idea to the rising and setting  of the sun; and, like the Magi, held that God or Ormuzd in the body  resembled light, and in the soul, truth.

Aristotle, like Plato, admitted a principle of Evil, resident in matter and in its  eternal imperfection.

The Persians said that Onnuzd, born of the pure Light, and Ahriman, born  of darkness, were ever at war. Ormuzd produced six Gods, Beneficence, 
Truth, Good Order, Wisdom, Riches, and Virtuous Joy. These were so many  emanations from the Good Principle, so many blessings bestowed by it on  men. Ahriman, in his turn, produced six Devs, opponents of the six  emanations from Ormuzd. Then Ormuzd made himself three times as great  as before, ascended as far above the sun as the sun is above the earth, and  adorned the heavens with stars, of which he made Sirius the sentinel or  advance-guard: that he then created twenty-four other Deities, and placed  them in an egg, where Ahriman also placed twenty-four others, created by  him, who broke the egg,  p. 663  and so intermingled Good and Evil. Theopompus adds that, according to the 
Magi, for two terms of three thousand years, each of the two Principles is to  be by turns victor and the other vanquished; then for three thousand more  for each they are to contend with each other, each destroying reciprocally  the works of the other; after which Ahriman is to perish, and men, wearing  transparent bodies, to enjoy unutterable happiness.

The twelve great Deities of the Persians, the six Amshaspands and six Devs,  marshalled, the former under the banner of Light, and the latter under that of 
Darkness, are the twelve Zodiacal Signs or Months; the six supreme signs,  or those of Light, or of Spring and Summer, commencing with Aries, and  the six inferior, of Darkness, or of Autumn and Winter, commencing with 
Libra. Limited Time, as contradistinguished from Time without limits, or 
Eternity, is Time created and measured by the celestial revolutions. It is  comprehended in a period divided into twelve parts, each subdivided into a  thousand parts, which the Persians termed years. Thus the circle annually  traversed by the Sun was divided into 12,000 parts, or each sign into 3,000:  and thus, each year, the Principle of Light and Good triumphed for 3,000  years, that of Evil and Darkness for 3,000, and they mutually destroyed each  other's labors for 6,000, or 3,000 for each: so that the Zodiac was equally  divided between them. And accordingly Ocellus Lucanus, the Disciple of 
Pythagoras, held that the principal cause of all sublunary effects resided in  the Zodiac, and that from it flowed the good or bad influences of the planets  that revolved therein.

The twenty-four good and twenty-four evil Deities, enclosed in the Egg, are  the forty-eight constellations of the ancient sphere, equally divided between  the realms of Light and Darkness, on the concavity of the celestial sphere  which was apportioned among them; and which, enclosing the world and  planets, was the mystic and sacred egg of the Magi, the Indians, and the 
Egyptians,-the egg that issued from the mouth of the God Kneph, that  figured as the Orphic Egg in the Mysteries of Greece, that issued from the 
God Chumong of the Coresians, and from the Egyptian Osiris and the God 
Phanes of the Modem Orphics, Principle of Light,—the egg crushed by the 
Sacred Bull of the Japanese, and from which the world emerged; that placed  by the Greeks at the feet of Bacchus the bull-horned God, and from which 
Aristophanes makes Love emerge, who with Night organizes Chaos.  p. 664

Thus the Balance, the Scorpion, the Serpent of Ophiucus, and the Dragon of  the Hesperides became malevolent Signs and Evil Genii; and entire nature  was divided between the two principles, and between the agents or partial  causes subordinate to them. Hence Michael and his Archangels, and Satan  and his fallen compeers. Hence the wars of Jupiter and the Giants, in which  the Gods of Olympus fought on the side of the Light-God, against the dark  progeny of earth and Chaos; a war which Proclus regarded as symbolizing  the resistance opposed by dark and chaotic matter to the active and  beneficent force which gives it organization; an idea which in part appears  in the old theory of two Principles, one innate in the active and luminous  substance of Heaven, and the other in the inert and dark substance of matter  that resists the order and the good that Heaven communicates to it.

Osiris conquers Typhon, and Ormuzd, Ahriman, when, at the Vernal 
Equinox, the creative action of Heaven and its demiourgic energy is most  strongly manifested. Then the principle of Light and Good overcomes that  of Darkness and Evil, and the world rejoices, redeemed from cold and  wintry darkness by the beneficent Sign into which the Sun then enters  triumphant and rejoicing, after his resurrection.

From the doctrine of the two Principles, Active and Passive, grew that of the 
Universe, animated by a Principle of Eternal Life, and by a Universal Soul,  from which every isolated and temporary being received at its birth an  emanation, which, at the death of such being, returned to its source. The life  of matter as much belonged to nature as did matter itself; and as life is  manifested by movement, the sources of life must needs seem to be placed  in those luminous and eternal bodies, and above all in the Heaven in which  they revolve, and which whirls them along with itself in that rapid course  that is swifter than all other movement. And fire and heat have so great an  analogy with life, that cold, like absence of movement, seemed the  distinctive characteristic of death. Accordingly, the vital fire that blazes in  the Sun and produces the heat that vivifies everything, was regarded as the  principle of organization and life of all sublunary beings.

According to this doctrine, the Universe is not to be regarded, in its creative  and eternal action, merely as an immense machine, moved by powerful  springs and forced into a continual movement, which, emanating from the  circumference, extends to the centre,  p. 665  acts and re-acts in every possible direction, and re-produces in succession all  the varied forms which matter receives. So to regard it would be to  recognize a cold and purely mechanical action, the energy of which could  never produce life.

On the contrary, it was thought, the Universe should be deemed an immense 
Being, always living, always moved and always moving in an eternal  activity inherent in itself, and which, subordinate to no foreign cause, is  communicated to all its parts, connects them together, and makes of the  world of things a complete and perfect whole. The order and harmony which  reign therein seem to belong to and be a part of it, and the design of the  various plans of construction of organized beings would seem to be graven  in its Supreme Intelligence, source of all the other Intelligences which it  communicates together with life to man. Nothing existing out of it, it must  be regarded as the principle and term of all things.

Chzeremon had no reason for saying that the Ancient Egyptians, inventors of  the sacred fables, and adorers of the Sun and the other luminaries, saw in the 
Universe only a machine, without life and without intelligence, either in its  whole or in its parts; and that their cosmogony was a pure Epicureanism,  which required only matter and movement to organize its world and govern  it. Such an opinion would necessarily exclude all religious worship. 
Wherever we suppose a worship, there we must suppose intelligent Deities  who receive it, and are sensible to the homage of their adorers; and no other  people were so religious as the Egyptians.

On the contrary, with them the immense, immutable, and Eternal Being,  termed "God" or "the Universe," had eminently, and in all their plenitude,  that life and intelligence which sublunary beings, each an infinitely small  and temporary portion of itself, possess in a far inferior degree and infinitely  less quantity. It was to them, in some sort, like the Ocean, whence the  springs, brooks, and rivers have risen by evaporation, and to the bosom  whereof they return by a longer or shorter course, and after a longer or  shorter separation from the immense mass of its waters. The machine of the 
Universe was, in their view, like that of man, moved by a Principle of Life  which kept it in eternal activity, and circulated in all its parts. The Universe  was a living and animated being, like man and the other animals; or rather  they were so only because the Universe was essentially so, and for a few  moments communicated to each an infinitely minute portion of  p. 666  its eternal life, breathed by it into the inert and gross matter of sublunary  bodies. That withdrawn, man or the animal died; and the Universe alone,  living and circulating around the wrecks of their bodies, by its eternal  movement, organized and animated new bodies, returning to them the  eternal fire and subtle substance which vivifies itself, and which,  incorporated in its immense mass, was its universal soul.

These were the ancient ideas as to this Great GOD, Father of all the gods, or  of the World; of this BEING, Principle of all things, and of which nothing  other than itself is Principle,-the Universal cause that was termed God. Soul  of the Universe, eternal like it, immense like it, supremely active and potent  in its varied operations, penetrating all parts of this vast body, impressing a  regular and symmetrical movement on the spheres, making the elements  instinct with activity and order, mingling with everything, organizing  everything, vivifying and preserving everything,—this was the UNIVERSE- 
GOD which the ancients adored as Supreme Cause and God of Gods.

Anchises, in the Aineid, taught Aineas this doctrine of Pythagoras, learned  by him from his Masters, the Egyptians, in regard to the Soul and 
Intelligence of the Universe, from which our souls and intelligences, as well  as our life and that of the animals, emanate, Heaven, Earth, the Sea, the 
Moon and the Stars, he said, are moved by a principle of internal life which  perpetuates their existence; a great intelligent soul, that penetrates every part  of the vast body of the Universe, and, mingling with everything, agitates it  by an eternal movement. It is the source of life in all living things. The force  which animates all, emanates from the eternal fire that bums in Heaven. In  the Georgies, Virgil repeats the same doctrine; and that, at the death of every  animal, the life that animated it, part of the universal life, returns to its 
Principle and to the source of life that circulates in the sphere of the Stars.

Servius makes God the active Cause that organizes the elements into bodies,  the vivifying breath or spirit, that, spreading through matter or the elements,  produces and engenders all things. The elements compose the substance of  our bodies: God composes the souls that vivify these bodies. From it come  the instincts of animals, from it their life, he says: and when they die, that  life returns to and re-enters into the Universal Soul, and their bodies into 
Universal Matter.  p. 667

Timaeus of Locria and Plato his Commentator wrote of the Soul of the 
World, developing the doctrine of Pythagoras, who thought, says Cicero,  that God is the Universal Soul, resident everywhere in nature, and of which  our Souls are but emanations. "God is one,” says Pythagoras, as cited by 
Justin Martyr: "He is not, as some think, without the world, but within it,  and entire in its entirety. He sees all that becomes , fonns all immortal  beings, is the author of their powers and performances, the origin of all  things, the Light of Heaven, the Father , the Intelligence, the Soul of all  beings, the Mover of all spheres."

God, in the view of Pythagoras, was ONE, a single substance, whose  continuous parts extended through all the Universe, without separation,  difference, or inequality, like the soul in the human body. He denied the  doctrine of the spiritualists, who had severed the Divinity from the 
Universe, making Him exist apart from the Universe, which thus became no  more than a material work, on which acted the Abstract Cause, a God,  isolated from it. The Ancient Theology did not so separate God from the 
Universe. This Eusebius attests, in saying that but a small number of wise  men, like Moses, had sought for God or the Cause of all, outside of that 
ALL; while the Philosophers of Egypt and Phoenicia, real authors of all the  old Cosmogonies, had placed the Supreme Cause in the Universe itself, and  in its parts, so that, in their view, the world and all its parts are in God.

The World or Universe was thus compared to man: the Principle of Life that  moves it, to that which moves man; the Soul of the World to that of man. 
Therefore Pythagoras called man a microcosm, or little world, as possessing  in miniature all the qualities found on a great scale in the Universe; by his  reason and intelligence partaking of the Divine Nature: and by his faculty of  changing aliments into other substances, of growing, and re-producing  himself, partaking of elementary Nature. Thus he made the Universe a great  intelligent Being, like man-an immense Deity, having in itself, what man  has in himself, movement, life, and intelligence, and besides, a perpetuity of  existence, which man has not; and, as having in itself perpetuity of  movement and life, therefore the Supreme Cause of all.

Everywhere extended, this Universal Soul does not, in the view of 
Pythagoras, act everywhere equally nor in the same manner. The highest  portion of the Universe, being as it were its head,  p. 668  seemed to him its principal seat, and there was the guiding power of the rest  of the world. In the seven concentric spheres is resident an eternal order,  fruit of the intelligence, the Universal Soul that moves, by a constant and  regular progression, the immortal bodies that form the harmonious system  of the heavens.

Manilius says: "I sing the invisible and potent Soul of Nature; that Divine 
Substance which, everywhere inherent in Heaven, Earth, and the Waters of  the Ocean, forms the bond that holds together and makes one all the parts of  the vast body of the Universe. It, balancing all Forces, and harmoniously  arranging the varied relations of the many members of the world, maintains  in it the life and regular movement that agitate it, as a result of the action of  the living breath or single spirit that dwells in all its parts, circulates in all  the channels of universal nature, flashes with rapidity to all its points, and  gives to animated bodies the configurations appropriate to the organization  of each .... This eternal Law, this Divine Force, that maintains the  harmony of the world, makes use of the Celestial Signs to organize and  guide the animated creatures that breathe upon the earth; and gives to each  of them the character and habits most appropriate. By the action of this 
Force Heaven rules the condition of the Earth and of its fields cultivated by  the husbandman: it gives us or takes from us vegetation and harvests: it  makes the great ocean overpass its limits at the flow, and retire within them  again at the ebbing, of the tide."

Thus it is no longer by means of a poetic fiction only that the heavens and  the earth become animated and personified, and are deemed living  existences, from which other existences proceed. For now they live, with  their own life, a life eternal like their bodies, each gifted with a life and  perhaps a soul, like those of man, a portion of the universal life and  universal soul; and the other bodies that they form, and which they contain  in their bosoms, live only through them and with their life, as the embryo  lives in the bosom of its mother, in consequence and by means of the life  communicated to it, and which the mother ever maintains by the active  power of her own life. Such is the universal life of the world, reproduced in  all the beings which its superior portion creates in its inferior portion, that is  as it were the matrix of the world, or of the beings that the heavens engender  in its bosom,

"The soul of the world," says Macrobius, "is nature itself' [as  p. 669  the soul of man is man himself], "always acting through the celestial spheres  which .it moves, and which but follow the irresistible impulse it impresses  on them. The heavens, the sun, great seat of generative power, the signs, the  stars, and the planets act only with the activity of the soul of the Universe. 
From that soul, through them, come all the variations and changes of  sublunary nature, of which the heavens and celestial bodies are but the  secondary causes. The zodiac, with its signs, is an existence, immortal and  divine, organized by the universal soul, and producing, or gathering in itself,  all the varied emanations of the different powers that make up the nature of  the Divinity."

This doctrine, that gave to the heavens and the spheres living souls, each a  portion of the universal soul, was of extreme antiquity. It was held by the  old Sabaeans. It was taught by Timaeus, Plato, Speusippus, Iamblichus, 
Macrobius, Marcus Aurelius, and Pythagoras. When once men had assigned  a soul to the Universe, containing in itself the plenitude of the animal life of  particular beings, and even of the stars, they soon supposed that soul to be  essentially intelligent, and the source of intelligence of all intelligent beings. 
Then the Universe became to them not only animated but intelligent, and of  that intelligence the different parts of nature partook. Each soul was the  vehicle, and, as it were, the envelope of the intelligence that attached itself  to it, and could repose nowhere else. Without a soul there could be no  intelligence; and as there was a universal soul, source of all souls, the  universal soul was gifted with a universal intelligence, source of all  particular intelligences. So the soul of the world contained in itself the  intelligence of the world. All the agents of nature into which the universal  soul entered, received also a portion of its intelligence, and the Universe, in  its totality and in its parts, was filled with intelligences, that might be  regarded as so many emanations from the sovereign and universal  intelligence. Wherever the divine soul acted as a cause, there also was  intelligence; and thus Heaven, the stars, the elements, and all parts of the 
Universe, became the seats of so many divine intelligences. Every minutest  portion of the great soul became a partial intelligence, and the more it was  disengaged from gross matter, the more active and intelligent it was. And all  the old adorers of nature, the theologians, astrologers, and poets, and the  most distinguished philosophers, supposed that the stars were so many  animated and intelligent beings, or  p. 670  eternal bodies, active causes of effects here below, whom a principle of life  animated, and whom an intelligence directed, which was but an emanation  from, and a portion of, the universal life and intelligence of the world.

The Universe itself was regarded as a supremely intelligent being. Such was  the doctrine of Timaeus of Locria. The soul of man was part of the intelligent  soul of the Universe, and therefore itself intelligent. His opinion was that of  many other philosophers. Cleanthes, a disciple of ZENO, regarded the 
Universe as God, Or as the unproduced and universal cause of all effects  produced. He ascribed a soul and intelligence to universal nature, and to this  intelligent soul, in his view, divinity belonged. From it the intelligence of  man was an emanation, and shared its divinity. Chrysippus, the most subtle  of the Stoics, placed in the universal reason that forms the soul and  intelligence of nature, that divine force or essence of the Divinity which he  assigned to the world moved by the universal soul that pervades its every  part.

An interlocutor in Cicero's work, De Natura Deorum, formally argues that  the Universe is necessarily intelligent and wise, because man, an infinitely  small portion of it, is so. Cicero makes the same argument in his oration for 
Milo. The physicists came to the same conclusion as the philosophers. They  supposed that movement essentially belonged to the soul, and the direction  of regular and ordered movements to the intelligence. And, as both  movement and order exist in the Universe, therefore, they held, there must  be in it a soul and an intelligence that role it, and are not to be distinguished  from itself; because the idea of the Universe is but the aggregate of all the  particular ideas of all things that exist.

The argument was, that the Heavens, and the Stars which make part of them,  are animated, because they possess a portion of the Universal Soul: they are  intelligent beings, because that Universal Soul, part whereof they possess, is  supremely intelligent; and they share Divinity with Universal Nature,  because Divinity resides in the Universal Soul and Intelligence which move  and rule the world, and of each of which they hold a share. By this process  of logic, the interlocutor in Cicero assigned Divinity to the Stars, as  animated beings gifted with sensibility and intelligence, and composed of  the noblest and purest portions of the ethereal substance, unmixed with  matter of an alien nature, and  p. 671  essentially containing light and heat. Hence he concluded them to be so  many gods, of an intelligence superior to that of other existences,  corresponding to the lofty height in which they moved with such perfect  regularity and admirable harmony, with a movement spontaneous and free. 
Hence he made them "Gods," active, eternal, and intelligent "Causes"; and  peopled the realm of Heaven with a host of Eternal Intelligences, celestial 
Genii or Angels, sharing the universal Divinity, and associated with it in the  administration of the Universe, and the dominion exercised over sublunary  nature and man.

We make the motive-force of the planets to be a mechanical law, which we  explain by the combination of two forces, the centripetal and centrifugal,  whose origin we cannot demonstrate, but whos e force we can calculate. The  ancients regarded them as moved by an intelligent force that had its origin in  the first and universal Intelligence. Is it so certain, after all, that we are any  nearer the truth than they were; or that we know what our "centripetal and  centrifugal forces" mean ; for what is a force! With us, the entire Deity acts  upon and moves each planet, as He does the sap that circulates in the little  blade of grass, and in the particles of blood in the tiny veins of the invisible  rotifer. With the Ancients, the Deity of each Star was but a portion of the 
Universal God, the Soul of Nature. Each Star and Planet, with them, was  moved of itself, and directed by its own special intelligence. And this  opinion of Achilles Tatius, Diodorus, Chrysippus, Aristotle, Plato,

Heraclides of Pontus, Theophrastus, Simplicius, Macrobius, and Proclus,  that in each Star there is an immortal Soul and Intelligence, part of the 
Universal Soul and Intelligence of the Whole,—this opinion of Orpheus, 
Plotinus, and the Stoics, was in reality, that of many Christian philosophers. 
For Origen held the same opinion; and Augustin held that every visible  thing in the world was superintended by an Angelic Power: and Cosma, the 
Monk, believed that every Star was under the guidance of an Angel; and the  author of the Octateuch, written in the time of the Emperor Justin, says that  they are moved by the impulse communicated to them by Angels stationed  above the firmament. Whether the stars were animated beings, was a  question that Christian antiquity did not decide. Many of the Christian  doctors believed they were. Saint Augustin hesitates, Saint Jerome doubts, if 
Solomon did not assign souls to the Stars. Saint  p. 672

[paragraph continues] Ambrose does not doubt they have souls; and Pamphilus says  that many of the Church believe they are reasonable beings, while many  think otherwise, but that neither one nor the other opinion is heretical.

Thus the Ancient Thought, earnest and sincere, wrought out the idea of a 
Soul inherent in the Universe and in its several parts. The next step was to  separate that Soul from the Universe, and give to it an external and  independent existence and personality; still omnipresent, in every inch of  space and in every particle of matter, and yet not a part of Nature, but its 
Cause and its Creator. This is the middle ground between the two doctrines,  of Pantheism (or that all is God, and God is in all and is all), on the one side,  and Atheism (or that all is nature, and there is no other God), on the other;  which doctrines, after all, when reduced to their simplest tenns, seem to be  the same.

We complacently congratulate ourselves on our recognition of a personal 
God, as being the conception most suited to human sympathies, and exempt  from the mystifications of Pantheism. But the Divinity remains still a  mystery, notwithstanding all the devices which symbolism, either from the  organic or inorganic creation, can supply; and personification is itself a  symbol, liable to misapprehension as much as, if not more so than, any  other, since it is apt to degenerate into a mere reflection of our own  infirmities; and hence any affirmative idea or conception that we can, in our  own minds, picture of the Deity, must needs be infinitely inadequate.

The spirit of the Vedas (or sacred Indian Books, of great antiquity), as  understood by their earliest as well as most recent expositors, is decidedly a  pantheistic monotheism—one God, and He all in all; the many divinities,  numerous as the prayers ad-dressed to them, being resolvable into the titles  and attributes of a few, and ultimately into THE ONE. The machinery of  personification was understood to have been unconsciously assumed as a  mere expedient to supply the deficiencies of language; and the Mimansa  justly considered itself as only interpreting the true meaning of the Mantras,  when it proclaimed that, in the beginning, "Nothing was but Mind, the 
Creative Thought of Him which existed alone from the beginning, and  breathed without afflation." The idea suggested in the Mantras is  dogmatically asserted and developed in the Upanischadas. The Vedanta  philosophy.  p. 673  assuming the mystery of the "ONE IN MANY" as the fundamental article of  faith, maintained not only the Divine Unity, but the identity of matter and  spirit. The unity which it advocates is that of mind. Mind is the Universal 
Element, the One God, the Great Soul, Mahaatma. He is the material as well  as efficient cause, and the world is a texture of which he is both the web and  the weaver. He is the Macrocosmos, the universal organism called 
Pooroosha, of which Fire, Air, and Sun are only the chief members. His  head is light, his eyes the sun and moon, his breath the wind, his voice the  opened Vedas. All proceeds from Brahm, like the web from the spider and  the grass from the earth.

Yet it is only the impossibility of expressing in language the origination of  matter from spirit, which gives to Hindu philosophy the appearance of  materialism. Formless Himself, the Deity is present in all forms. His glory is  displayed in the Universe as the image of the sun in water, which is, yet is  not, the luminary itself. All maternal agency and appearance, the subjective  world, are to a great extent phantasms, the notional representations of  ignorance. They occupy, however, a middle ground between reality and  non-reality; they are unreal, because nothing exists but Brahm; yet in some  degree real, inasmuch as they constitute an outward manifestation of him. 
They are a self-induced hypostasis of the Deity, under which He presents to 
Himself the whole of animate and inanimate Nature, the actuality of the  moment, the diversified appearances which successively invest the one 
Pantheistic Spirit.

The great aim of reason is to generalize; to discover unity in multiplicity,  order in apparent confusion; to separate from the accidental and the  transitory, the stable and universal. In the contemplation of Nature, and the  vague, but almost intuitive perception of a general uniformity of plan among  endless varieties of operation and form, arise those solemn and reverential  feelings, which, if accompanied by intellectual activity, may eventually  ripen into philosophy.

Consciousness of self and of personal identity is co-existent with our  existence. We cannot conceive of mental existence without it. It is not the  work of reflection nor of logic, nor the result of observation, experiment,  and experience. It is a gift from God, like instinct; and that consciousness of  a thinking soul which is  p. 674  really the person that we are, and other than our body, is the best and most  solid proof of the soul's existence. We have the same consciousness of a 
Power on which we are dependent; which we can define and form an idea or  picture of, as little as we can of the soul, and yet which we feel , and  therefore know, exists. True and correct ideas of that Power, of the Absolute 
Existence from which all proceeds, we cannot trace; if by true and correct  we mean adequate ideas; for of such we are not, with our limited faculties,  capable. And ideas of His nature, so far correct as we are capable of  entertaining, can only be attained either by direct inspiration or by the  investigations of philosophy.

The idea of the universal preceded the recognition of any system for its  explanation. It was felt rather than understood; and it was long before the  grand conception on which all philosophy rests received through deliberate  investigation that analytical development which might properly entitle it to  the name. The sentiment, when first observed by the self-conscious mind,  was, says Plato, "a Divine gift, communicated to mankind by some 
Prometheus, or by those ancients who lived nearer to the gods than our  degenerate selves." The mind deduced from its first experiences the notion  of a general Cause or Antecedent, to which it shortly gave a name and  personified it. This was the statement of a theorem, obscure in proportion to  its generality. It explained all things but itself. It was a true cause, but an  incomprehensible one. Ages had to pass before the nature of the theorem  could be rightly appreciated, and before men, acknowledging the First 
Cause to be an object of faith rather than science, were contented to confine  their researches to those nearer relations of existence and succession, which  are really within the reach of their faculties. At first, and for a long time, the  intellect deserted the real for a hastily-formed ideal world, and the  imagination usurped the place of reason, in attempting to put a construction  on the most general and inadequate of conceptions, by transmuting its  symbols into realities, and by substantializing it under a thousand arbitrary  forms.

In poetry, the idea of Divine unity became, as in Nature, obscured by a  multifarious symbolism; and the notionalities of transcendental philosophy  reposed on views of nature scarcely more profound than those of the earliest  symbolists. Yet the idea of unity was rather obscured than extinguished; and 
Xenophanes  p. 675  appeared as an enemy of Homer, only because he more emphatically  insisted on the monotheistic element, which, in poetry, has been  comparatively overlooked. The first philosophy reasserted the unity which  poetry had lost; but being unequal to investigate its nature, it again resigned  it to the world of approximate sensations, and became bewildered in  materialism, considering the conceptional whole or First Element as some  refinement of matter, unchangeable in its essence, though subject to  mutations of quality and form in an eternal succession of seeming decay and  regeneration; comparing it to water, air, or fire, as each endeavored to refine  on the doctrine of his predecessor, or was influenced by a different class of  theological traditions.

In the philosophical systems, the Divine Activity, divided by the poets and  by popular belief among a race of personifications, in whom the idea of  descent replaced that of cause, or of pantheistic evolution, was restored,  without subdivision or reservation, to nature as a whole; at first as a  mechanical force or life ; afterward as an all-pervading soul or inherent  thought ; and lastly as an external directing Intelligence.

The Ionian revival of pantheism was materialistic. The Moving Force was  inseparable from a material element, a subtle yet visible ingredient. Under  the form of air or fire, the principle of life was associated with the most  obvious material machinery of nature. Everything, it was said, is alive and  full of gods. The wonders of the volcano, the magnet, the ebb and flow of  the tide, were vital indications, the breathing or moving of the Great World- 
Animal. The imperceptible, ether of Anaximenes had no positive quality  beyond the atmospheric air with which it was easily confused: and even the 
"Infinite" of Anaximander, though free of the conditions of quality or  quantity, was only an ideal chaos, relieved of its coarseness by negations. It  was the illimitable storehouse or Pleroma, out of which is evolved the  endless circle of phenomenal change. A moving Force was recognized in,  but not clearly distinguished from, the material. Space, Time, Figure, and 
Number, and other common forms or properties, which exist only as  attributes, were treated as substances, or at least as making a substantial  connection between the objects to which they belong: and all the conditions  of material existence were supposed to have been evolved out of the

Pythagorean Monad.

The Eleatic philosophers treated conceptions not only as  p. 676  entities, but as the only entities, alone possessing the stability and certainty  and reality vainly sought among phenomena. The only reality was Thought. 
"All real existence," they said, "is mental existence; non-existence, being  inconceivable, is therefore impossible; existence fills up the whole range of  thought, and is inseparable from its exercise; thought and its object are one."

Xenophanes used ambiguous language, applicable to the material as well as  to the mental, and exclusively appropriate to neither. In other words, he  availed himself of material imagery to illustrate an indefinite meaning. In  announcing the universal being, he appealed to the heavens as the visible  manifestation, calling it spherical, a term borrowed from the material world. 
He said that God was neither moved nor unmoved, limited nor unlimited.

He did not even attempt to express clearly what cannot be conceived clearly;  admitting, says Simplicius, that such speculations were above physics. 
Pannenides employed similar expedients, comparing his metaphysical Deity  to a sphere, or to heat, an aggregate or a continuity, and so involuntarily  withdrawing its nominal attributes.

The Atomic school, dividing the All into Matter and Force, deemed matter  unchangeable in its ultimate constitution, though infinitely variable in its  resultant forms. They made all variety proceed from the varied combinations  of atoms; but they required no mover nor director of the atoms external to  themselves; no universal Reason; but a Mechanical Eternal Necessity, like  that of the Poets. Still it is doubtful whether there ever was a time when  reason could be said to be entirely asleep, a stranger to its own existence,  notwithstanding this apparent materialism. The earliest contemplation of the  external world, which brings it into an imagined association with ourselves,  assigns, either to its whole or its parts, the sensation and volition which  belong to our own souls.

Anaxagoras admitted the existence of ultimate elementary particles, as

Empedocles did, from the combinations whereof all material phenomena  resulted. But he asserted the Moving Force to be Mind; and yet, though he  clearly saw the impossibility of advancing by illustration or definition  beyond a reasonable faith, or a simple negation of materiality, yet he could  not wholly desist from the endeavor to illustrate the nature of this non¬  matter or mind, by symbols drawn from those physical considerations which  p. 677  decided him in placing it in a separate category. Whether as human reason,  or as the regulating Principle in nature, he held it different from all other  things in character and effect, and that therefore it must necessarily differ in  its essential constitution. It was neither Matter, nor a Force conjoined with  matter, or homogeneous with it, but independent and generically distinct,  especially in this, that, being the source of all motion, separation, and  cognition, it is something entirely unique, pure, and unmixed; and so, being  unhindered by any interfering influence limiting its independence of  individual action, it has Supreme Empire over all things, over the vortex of  worlds as well as over all that live in them. It is most penetrating and  powerful, mixing with other things, though no other thing mixes with it;  exercises universal control and cognition, and includes the Necessity of the 
Poets, as well as the independent power of thought which we exercise  within ourselves. In short, it is the self-conscious power of thought extended  to the Universe, and exalted into the Supreme External Mind which sees,  knows, and directs all things.

Thus Pantheism and Materialism were both avoided; and matter, though as  infinitely varied as the senses represent it, was held in a bond of unity  transferred to a ruling power apart from it. That Power could not be Prime 
Mover, if it were itself moved; nor All-Governing, if not apart from the  things it governs. If the arranging Principle were inherent in matter, it would  have been impossible to account for the existence of a chaos: if something  external, then the old Ionian doctrine of a "beginning" became more easily  conceivable, as being the epoch at which the Arranging Intelligence  commenced its operations.

But this grand idea of an all-governing independent mind involved  difficulties which proved insuperable; because it gave to matter, in the form  of chaos, an independent and eternal self-existence, and so introduced a  dualism of mind and matter. In the Mind or Intelligence, Anaxagoras  included not only life and motion, but the moral principles of the noble and  good; and probably used the term on account of the popular misapplication  of the word "God," and as being less liable to misconstruction, and more  specifically marking his idea. His "Intelligence" principle remained  practically liable to many of the same defects as the "Necessity" of the  poets. It was the presentiment of a great idea, which it was for the time  impossible to explain or follow out.  p. 678

[paragraph continues] It was not yet intelligible, nor was even the road opened  through which it might be approached.

Mind cannot advance in metaphysics beyond self-deification. In attempting  to go further, it only enacts the apotheosis of its own subtle conceptions, and  so sinks below the simpler ground already taken. The realities which Plato  could not recognize in phenomena, he discovered within his own mind, and  as unhesitatingly as the old Theosophists installed its creations among the  gods. He, like most philosophers after Anaxagoras, made the Supreme 
Being to be Intelligence; but in other respects left His nature undefined, or  rather indefinite through the variety of definitions, a conception vaguely  floating between Theism and Pan-theism. Though deprecating the  demoralizing tendencies of poetry, he was too wise to attempt to replace  them by other representations of a positive kind. He justly says, that spiritual  things can be made intelligible only through figures; and the forms of  allegorical expression which, in a rude age, had been adopted  unconsciously, were designedly chosen by the philosopher as the most  appropriate vehicles for theological ideas.

As the devices of symbolism were gradually stripped away, in order, if  possible, to reach the fundamental conception, the religious feeling  habitually connected with it seemed to evaporate under the process. And yet  the advocates of Monotheism, Xenophanes and Heraclitus, declaimed only  against the making of gods in human form. They did not attempt to strip  nature of its divinity, but rather to recall religious contemplation from an  exploded symbolism to a purer one. They continued the veneration which,  in the background of poetry, has been maintained for Sun and Stars, the Fire  or Ether. Socrates prostrated himself before the rising luminary; and the  eternal spheres, which seem to have shared the religious homage of 
Xenophanes, retained a secondary and qualified Divinity in the Schools of  the Peripatetics and Stoics.

The unseen being or beings revealed only to the Intellect became the theme  of philosophy; and their more ancient symbols, if not openly discredited,  were passed over with evasive generality, as beings respecting whose  problematical existence we must be "content with what has been reported by  those ancients, who, assuming to be their descendants, must therefore be  supposed to have been well acquainted with their own ancestors and family  p. 679  connections." And the Theism of Anaxagoras was still more decidedly  subversive, not only of Mythology, but of the whole religion of outward  nature; it being an appeal from the world without, to the consciousness of  spiritual dignity within man.

In the doctrines of Aristotle, the world moves on uninterruptedly, always  changing, yet ever the same, like Time, the Eternal Now, knowing neither  repose nor death. There is a principle which makes good the failure of  identity, by multiplying resemblances', the destruction of the individual by  an eternal renewal of the form in which matter is manifested. This regular  eternal movement implies an Eternal Mover; not an inert Eternity, such as  the Platonic Eidos, but one always acting, Elis essence being to act, for  otherwise he might never have acted, and the existence of the world would  be an accident; for what should have, in that case, decided Flim to act, after  long inactivity? Nor can Fie be partly in act and partly potential, that is,  quiescent and undetermined to act or not to act, for even in that case motion  would not be eternal, but contingent and precarious. Fie is therefore wholly  in act, a pure, untiring activity, and for the sane reasons wholly immaterial. 
Thus Aristotle avoided the idea that God was inactive and self-  contemplative for an eternity, and then for some unknown reason, or by  some unknown motive, commenced to act outwardly and produce; but he  incurred the opposite hazard, of making the result of His action, matter and  the Universe, be co-existent with Himself; or, in other words, of denying  that there was any time when His outward action commenced.

The First Cause, he said, unmoved, moves all. Act was first, and the 
Universe has existed forever; one persistent cause directing its continuity. 
The unity of the First Mover follows from His immateriality. If He were not 
Himself unmoved, the series of motions and causes of motion would be  infinite. Unmoved, therefore, and unchangeable Himself, all movement,  even that in space, is caused by Him: He is necessary: He camiot be  otherwise than as He is; and it is only through the necessity of His being that  we can account for those necessary eternal relations which make a science  of Being possible. Thus Aristotle leaned to a seemingly personal God; not a 
Being of parts and passions, like the God of the Hebrews, or that of the mass  even of educated men in our own day, but a Substantial Head of all the  categories of being, an Individuality of Intelligence, the dogma of 
Anaxagoras revived  p. 680  out of a more elaborate and profound analysis of Nature; something like that  living unambiguous Principle which the old poets, in advance of the  materialistic cosmogonists from Night and Chaos, had discovered in 
Ouranos or Zeus. Soon, however, the vision of personality is withdrawn,  and we reach that culminating point of thought where the real blends with  the ideal; where moral action and objective thought (that is, thought  exercised as to anything outside of itself), as well as the material body, are  excluded; and where the divine action in the world retains its veil of  impenetrable mystery, and to the utmost ingenuity of research presents but a  contradiction. At this extreme, the series of efficient causes resolves itself  into the Final Cause. That which moves, itself unmoved, can only be the  immobility of Thought or Form. God is both formal, efficient, and final  cause; the One Form comprising all forms, the one good including all good,  the goal of the longing of the University, moving the world as the object of  love or rational desire moves the individual. He is the internal or self-  realized Final Cause, having no end beyond Himself. He is no moral agent;  for if He were, He would be but an instrument for producing something still  higher and greater. One sort of act only, activity of mind or thought, can be  assigned to Him who is at once all act yet all repose. What we call our  highest pleasure, which distinguishes wakefulness and sensation, and which  gives a reflected charm to hope and memory, is with Him perpetual. His  existence is unbroken enjoyment of that which is most excellent but only  temporary with us. The divine quality of active and yet tranquil self¬  contemplation characterizing intelligence, is pre-eminently possessed by the  divine mind; His thought, which is His existence, being, unlike ours,  unconditional and wholly act. If He can receive any gratification or  enjoyment from that which exists beyond Himself, He can also be  displeased and pained with it, and then He would be an imperfect being. To  suppose pleasure experienced by Him from anything outward, supposes an  insufficient prior enjoyment and happiness, and a sort of dependency. Man's 
Good is beyond himself; not so God's. The eternal act which produces the  world's life is the eternal desire of good. The object of the Absolute Thought  is the Absolute Good. Nature is all movement, and Thought all repose. In  contemplating that absolute good, the Finality can contemplate only itself;  and thus, all material interference being excluded, the distinction of  p. 681  subject and object vanishes in complete identification, and the Divine 
Thought is "the thinking of thought." The energy of mind is life, and God is  that energy in its purity and perfection. He is therefore life itself, eternal and  perfect; and this sums up all that is meant by the term "God." And yet, after  all this transcendentalism, the very essence of thought consists in its  mobility and power of transference from object to object; and we can  conceive of no thought, without an object beyond itself, about which to  think, or of any activity in mere self-contemplation, without out-ward act,  movement, or manifestation.

Plato endeavors to show how the Divine Principle of Good becomes  realized in Nature: Aristotle's system is a vast analogical induction to prove  how all Nature tends toward a final good. Plato considered Soul as a  principle of movement, and made his Deity realize, that is, turn into  realities, his ideas as a free, intelligent Force. Aristotle, for whom Soul is the  motionless centre from which motion radiates, and to which it converges,  conceives a correspondingly unmoved God. The Deity of Plato creates,  superintends, and rejoices in the universal joy of, His creatures. That of 
Aristotle is the perfection of man's intellectual activity extended to the 
Universe. When he makes the Deity to be an eternal act of self¬  contemplation, the world is not excluded from His cognizance, for He  contemplates it within Himself. Apart from and beyond the world. He yet  mysteriously intermingles with it. He is universal as well as individual; His  agency is necessary and general, yet also makes the real and the good of the  particular.

When Plato had given to the unformed world the animal life of the Ionians,  and added to that the Anaxagorean Intelligence, overruling the wild  principle of Necessity; and when to Intelligence was added Beneficence;  and the dread Wardours, Force and Strength, were made subordinate to 
Mildness and Goodness, it seemed as if a further advance were impossible,  and that the Deny could not be more than The Wise and The Good.

But the contemplation of the Good implies that of its opposite, Evil. When 
God is held to be "The Good," it is not because Evil is unknown, but  because it is designedly excluded from His attributes. But if Evil be a  separate and independent existence, how would it fare with His prerogative  of Unity and Supremacy? To meet this dilemma, it remained only to fall  back on something more or less akin to the vagueness of antiquity; to make  a virtual  p. 682  confession of ignorance, to deny the ultimate reality of evil, like Plato and 
Aristotle, or, with Speusippus, the eternity of its antithetical existence, to  surmise that it is only one of those notions which are indeed provisionally  indispensable in a condition of finite knowledge, but of which so many have  been already discredited by the advance of philosophy; to revert, in short, to  the original conception of "The Absolute," or of a single Being, in whom all  mysteries are explained, and before whom the disturbing principle is  reduced to a mere turbid spot on the ocean of Eternity, which to the eye of  faith may be said no longer to exist.

But the absolute is nearly allied to the non-existent. Matter and evil  obtruded themselves too constantly and convincingly to he confuted or  cancelled by subtleties of Logic. It is in vain to attempt to merge the world  in God, while the world of experience exhibits contrariety, imperfection, and  mutability, instead of the immutability of its source. Philosophy was but  another name for uncertainty; and after the mind had successively deified 
Nature and its own conceptions, without any practical result but toilsome  occupation; when the reality it sought, without or within, seemed ever to  elude its grasp, the intellect, baffled in its higher flights, sought advantage  and repose in aiming at truth of a lower but more applicable kind.

The Deity of Plato is a Being proportioned to human sympathies; the Father  of the World, as well as its Creator; the author of good only, not of evil. 
"Envy," he says, "is far removed from celestial beings, and man, if willing,  and braced for the effort, is permitted to aspire to a communion with the  solemn troops and sweet societies of Heaven. God is the Idea or Essence of 
Goodness, the Good itself [to ctyaOov]; in goodness, He created the World,  and gave to it the greatest perfection of which it was susceptible; making it,  as far as possible, an image of Himself. The sublime type of all excellence is  an object not only of veneration but love." The Sages of old had already  intimated in enigmas that God is the Author of Good; that like the Sun in 
Heaven, or Aisculapius on earth. He is "Healer," "Saviour," and 
"Redeemer," the destroyer and averter of Evil, ever healing the mischiefs  inflicted by Here, the wanton or irrational power of nature.

Plato only asserts with more distinctness the dogma of antiquity when he  recognizes LOVE as the highest and most beneficent of gods, who gives to  nature the invigorating energy restored by the  p. 683  art of medicine to the body; since Love is emphatically the physician of the 
Universe, the Aisculapius to whom Socrates wished to sacrifice in the hour  of his death.

A figurative idea, adopted from familiar imagery, gave that endearing aspect  to the divine connection with the Universe which had commanded the  earliest assent of the sentiments, until, rising in refinement with the progress  of mental cultivation, it ultimately established itself as firmly in the  deliberate approbation of the understanding, as it had ever responded to the  sympathies. Even the rude Scythians, Bithynians, and Scandinavians, called 
God their "Father”; all nations traced their ancestry more or less directly to 
Heaven. The Hyperborean Olen, one of the oldest symbols of the religious  antiquity of Greece, made Love the First-born of Nature. Who will venture  to pronounce at what time God was first worthily and truly honored, or  when man first began to feel aright the mute eloquence of nature? In the  obscure physics of the mystical Theologers who preceded Greek  philosophy, Love was the Great First Cause and Parent of the Universe. 
"Zeus," says Proclus, "when entering upon the work of creation, changed 
Himself into the form of Love: and He brought forward Aphrodite, the  principle of Unity and Universal Harmony, to display her light to all. In the  depths of His mysterious being, He contains the principle of love within 
Himself; in Him creative wisdom and blessed love are united."

"From the first

Of Days on these his love divine be fixed,

His admiration; till in time complete 
What he admired and loved, his vital smile 
Unfolded into being."

The speculators of the venerable East, who had conceived the idea of an 
Eternal Being superior to all affection and change, in his own sufficiency  enjoying a plenitude of serene and independent bliss, were led to inquire  into the apparently inconsistent fact of the creation of the world. Why, they  asked, did He, who required nothing external to Himself to complete His  already-existing Perfection, come forth out of His unrevealed and perfect  existence, and become incorporated in the vicissitudes of nature? The  solution of the difficulty was Love. The Great Being beheld the beauty of 
His own conception, which dwelt with Him alone from the beginning, Maia,  or Nature's loveliness, at once the germ  p. 684  of passion and the source of worlds. Love became the universal parent,  when the Deity, before remote and inscrutable, became ideally separated  into the loving and the beloved.

And here again recurs the ancient difficulty; that, at whatever early period  this creation occurred, an eternity had previously elapsed, during which 
God, dwelling alone in His unimpeached unity, had no object for His love;  and that the very word implies to us an existing object toward which the  love is directed; so that we cannot conceive of love in the absence of any  object to be loved; and therefore we again return to this point, that if love is  of God's essence, and He is unchangeable, the same necessity of His nature,  supposed to have caused creation, must ever have made His existence  without an object to love impossible: and so that the Universe must have  been co-existent with Himself.

The questions how and why evil exists in the Universe: how its existence is  to be reconciled with the admitted wisdom and goodness and omnipotence  of God; and how far man is a free agent, or controlled by an inexorable  necessity or destiny, have two sides. On one, they are questions as to the  qualities and attributes of Got; for we must infer His moral nature from His  mode of governing the Universe, and they ever enter into any consideration  of His intellectual nature: and on the other, they directly concern the moral  responsibility, and therefore the destiny, of man. All-important, therefore, in  both points of view, they have been much discussed in all ages of the world,  and have no doubt urged men, more than all other questions have, to  endeavor to fathom the profound mysteries of the Nature and the mode of 
Existence and action of an incomprehensible God.

And, with these, still another question also presents itself: whether the Deity  governs the Universe by fixed and unalterable laws, or by special 
Providences and interferences, so that He may be induced to change His  course and the results of human or material action, by prayer and  supplication.

God alone is all-powerful; but the human soul has in all ages asserted its  claim to be considered as part of the Divine. "The purity of the spirit," says 
Van Helmont, "is shown through energy and efficaciousness of will. God,  by the agency of an infinite will, created the Universe, and the same sort of  power in an inferior degree, limited more or less by external hindrances,  exists in all spiritual beings." The higher we ascend in antiquity, the more  p. 685  does prayer take the form of incantation; and that form it still in a great  degree retains, since the rites of public worship are generally considered not  merely as an expression of trust or reverence, as real spiritual acts, the effect  of which is looked for only within the mind of the worshipper, but as acts  from which some direct outward result is anticipated, the attainment of some  desired object, of health or wealth, of supernatural gifts for body or soul, of  exemption from danger, or vengeance upon enemies. Prayer was able to  change the purposes of Heaven, and to make the Devs tremble under the  abyss. It exercised a compulsory influence over the gods. It promoted the  magnetic sympathy of spirit with spirit; and the Hindu and Persian liturgies,  addressed not only to the Deity Himself, but to His diversified  manifestations, were considered wholesome and necessary iterations of the  living or creative Word which at first effectuated the divine will, and which  from instant to instant supports the universal frame by its eternal repetition.

In the narrative of the Fall we have the Hebrew mode of explaining the great  moral mystery, the origin of evil and the apparent estrangement from 
Heaven; and a similar idea, variously modified, obtained in all the ancient  creeds. Everywhere, man had at the beginning been innocent and happy, and  had lapsed, by temptation and his own weakness, from his first estate. Thus  was accounted for the presumed connection of increase of knowledge with  increase of misery, and, in particular, the great penalty of death was  reconciled with Divine Justice. Subordinate to these greater points were the  questions, Why is the earth covered with thorns and weeds? whence the  origin of clothing, of sexual shame and passion? whence the infliction of  labor, and how to justify the degraded condition of woman in the East, or  account for the loathing so generally felt toward the Serpent Tribe?

The hypothesis of a fall, required under some of its modifications in all  systems, to account for the apparent imperfection in the work of a Perfect 
Being, was, in Eastern philosophy, the unavoidable accompaniment and  condition of limited or individual existence; since the Soul, considered as a  fragment of the Universal Mind, might be said to have lapsed from its pre¬  eminence when parted from its source, and ceasing to form part of integral  perfection. The theory of its reunion was correspondent to the assumed  cause of its degradation. To reach its prior condition,  p. 686  its individuality must cease; it must be emancipated by re-absorption into  the Infinite, the consummation of all things in God, to be promoted by  human effort in spiritual meditation or self-mortification, and completed in  the magical transformation of death.

And as man had fallen, so it was held that the Angels of Evil had, from their  first estate, to which, like men, they were, in God's good time, to be  restored, and the reign of evil was then to cease forever. To this great result  all the Ancient Theologies point; and thus they all endeavored to reconcile  the existence of Sin and Evil with the perfect and undeniable wisdom and  beneficence of God.

With man's exercise of thought are inseparably connected freedom and  responsibility. Man assumes his proper rank as a moral agent, when with a  sense of the limitations of his nature arise the consciousness of freedom, and  of the obligations accompanying its exercise, the sense of duty and of the  capacity to perfonn it. To suppose that man ever imagined himself not to be  a free agent until he had argued himself into that belief, would be to suppose  that he was in that below the brutes; for he, like them, is conscious of his  freedom to act. Experience alone teaches him that this freedom of action is  limited and controlled; and when what is outward to him restrains and limits  this freedom of action, he instinctively rebels against it as a wrong. The rule  of duty and the materials of experience are derived from an acquaintance  with the conditions of the external world, in which the faculties are exerted;  and thus the problem of man involves those of Nature and God. Our  freedom, we learn by experience, is determined by an agency external to us;  our happiness is intimately dependent on the relations of the outward World,  and on the moral character of its Ruler.

Then at once arises this problem: The God of Nature must be One, and His  character cannot be suspected to be other than good. Whence, then, came the  evil, the consciousness of which must invariably have preceded or  accompanied man's moral development? On this subject human opinion has  ebbed and flowed between two contradictory extremes, one of which seems  inconsistent with God's Omnipotence, and the other with His beneficence. If 
God, it was said, is perfectly wise and good, evil must arise from some  independent and hostile principle: if, on the other hand, all agencies are  subordinate to One, it is difficult, if evil does indeed exist,  p. 687  if there is any such thing as Evil, to avoid the impiety of making God the 
Author of it.

The recognition of a moral and physical dualism in nature was adverse to  the doctrine of Divine Unity. Many of the Ancients thought it absurd to  imagine one Supreme Being, like Homer's Jove, distributing good and evil  out of two urns. They therefore substituted, as we have seen, the doctrine of  two distinct and eternal principles; some making the cause of evil to be the  inherent imperfection of matter and the flesh, without explaining how God  was not the cause of that; while others personified the required agency, and  fancifully invented an Evil Principle, the question of whose origin indeed  involved all the difficulty of the original problem, but whose existence, if  once taken for granted, was sufficient as a popular solution of the mystery;  the difficulty being supposed no longer to exist when pushed a step further  off, as the difficulty of conceiving the world upheld by an elephant was  supposed to be got rid of when it was said that the elephant was supported  by a tortoise.

The simpler, and probably the older, notion, treated the one only God as the 
Author of all things. "I form the light," says Jehovah, "and create darkness; I  cause prosperity and create evil; I, the Lord, do all these things." "All  mankind," says Maximus Tyrius, "are agreed that there exists one only 
Universal King and Father, and that the many gods are His Children." There  is nothing improbable in the supposition that the primitive idea was that  there was but one God. A vague sense of Nature's Unity, blended with a dim  perception of an all-pervading Spiritual Essence, lias been remarked among  the earliest manifestations of the Human Mind. Everywhere it was the dim  remembrance, uncertain and indefinite, of the original truth taught by God to  the first men.

The Deity of the Old Testament is everywhere represented as the direct  author of Evil, commissioning evil and lying spirits to men, hardening the  heart of Pharaoh, and visiting the iniquity of the individual simier on the  whole people. The rude conception of sternness predominating over mercy  in the Deity, can alone account for the human sacrifices, purposed, if not  executed, by Abraham and Jephthah. It has not been uncommon, in any age  or country of the world, for men to recognize the existence of one God,  without forming any becoming estimate of His dignity. The  p. 688  causes of both good and ill are referred to a mysterious centre, to which each  assigns such attributes as correspond with his own intellect and advance in  civilization. Hence the assignment to the Deity of the feelings of envy and  jealousy. Hence the provocation given by the healing skill of Alsculapius  and the humane theft of fire by Prometheus. The very spirit of Nature,  personified in Orpheus, Tantalus, or Phineus was supposed to have been  killed, confined, or blinded, for having too freely divulged the Divine 
Mysteries to mankind. This Divine Envy still exists in a modified form, and  varies according to circumstances. In Hesiod it appears in the lowest type of  human malignity. In the God of Moses, it is jealousy of the infringement of  the autocratic power, the check to political treason; and even the penalties  denounced for worshipping other gods often seem dictated rather by a  jealous regard for His own greatness in Deity, than by the immorality and  degraded nature of the worship itself. In Herodotus and other writers it  assumes a more philosophical shape, as a strict adherence to a moral  equilibrium in the government of the world, in the punishment of pride,  arrogance, and insolent pretension.

God acts providentially in Nature by regular and universal laws, by constant  modes of operation; and so takes care of material things without violating  their constitution, acting always according to the nature of the things which

He has made. It is a fact of observation that, in the material and unconscious  world. He works by its materiality and unconsciousness, not against them; in  the animal world, by its animality and partial consciousness, not against  them. So in the providential government of the world, He acts by regular  and universal laws, and constant modes of operation; and so takes care of  human things without violating their constitution, acting always according  to the human nature of man, not against if, working in the human world by  means of man's consciousness and partial freedom, not against them.

God acts by general laws for general purposes. The attraction of gravitation  is a good thing, for it keeps the world together; and if the tower of Siloam,  thereby falling to the ground, slays eighteen men of Jerusalem, that number  is too small to think of, considering the myriad millions who are upheld by  the same law. It could not well be repealed for their sake, and to hold up that  tower; nor could it remain in force, and the tower stand.

It is difficult to conceive of a Perfect Will without confounding  p. 689  it with something like mechanism; since language has no name for that  combination of the Inexorable with the Moral, which the old poets  personified separately in Ananke or Eimarmene and Zeus. How combine  understandingly the Perfect Freedom of the Supreme and All-Sovereign 
Will of God with the inflexible necessity, as part of His Essence, that He  should and must continue to be, in all His great attributes, of justice and  mercy for example, what He is now and always has been, and with the  impossibility of His changing His nature and becoming unjust, merciless,  cruel, fickle, or of His repealing the great moral laws which make crime  wrong and the practice of virtue right?

For all that we familiarly know of Free-Will is that capricious exercise of it  which we experience in ourselves and other men; and therefore the notion of 
Supreme Will, still guided by Infallible Law, even if that law be self-  imposed, is always in danger of being either stripped of the essential quality  of Freedom, or degraded under the ill-name of Necessity to something of  even less moral and intellectual dignity than the fluctuating course of human  operations.

It is not until we elevate the idea of law above that of partiality or tyranny,  that we discover that the self-imposed limitations of the Supreme Cause,  constituting an array of certain alternatives, regulating moral choice, are the  very sources and safeguards of human freedom; and the doubt recurs,  whether we do not set a law above God Himself; or whether laws self-  imposed may not be self-repealed: and if not, what power prevents it.

The Zeus of Homer, like that of Hesiod, is an array of antitheses, combining  strength with weakness, wisdom with folly, universal parentage with narrow  family limitation, omnipotent control over events with submission to a  superior destiny;-DESTINY, a name by means of which the theological  problem was cast back into the original obscurity out of which the powers of  the human mind have proved themselves as incapable of rescuing it, as the  efforts of a fly caught in a spider's web to do more than increase its  entanglement.

The oldest notion of Deity was rather indefinite than repulsive. The positive  degradation was of later growth. The God of nature reflects the changeful  character of the seasons, varying from dark to bright. Alternately angry and  serene, and lavishing abundance which she again withdraws, nature seems  inexplicably capricious,  p. 690  and though capable of responding to the highest requirements of the moral  sentiment through a general comprehension of her mysteries, more liable by  a partial or hasty view to become darkened into a Siva, a Saturn, or a 
Mexitli, a patron of fierce orgies or blood-stained altars. All the older  poetical personifications exhibit traces of this ambiguity. They are neither  wholly immoral nor purely beneficent.

No people have ever deliberately made their Deity a malevolent or guilty 
Being. The simple piety which ascribed the origin of all things to God, took  all in good part, trusting and hoping all things. The Supreme Ruler was at  first looked up to with unquestioning reverence. No startling discords or  contradictions had yet raised a doubt as to His beneficence, or made men  dissatisfied with His government. Fear might cause anxiety, but could not  banish hope, still less inspire aversion. It was only later, when abstract  notions began to assume the semblance of realities, and when new or more  distinct ideas suggested new words for their expression, that it became  necessary to fix a definite barrier between Evil and Good.

To account for moral evil, it became necessary to devise some new  expedient suited both to the piety and self-complacency of the inventor,  such as the perversity of woman, or an agent distinct from God, a Typhon or 
Ahriman, obtained either by dividing the Gods into two classes, or by  dethroning the Ancient Divinity, and changing him into a Dev or Dtemon. 
Through a similar want, the Orientals devised the inherent corruption of the  fleshy and material; the Hebrew transferred to Satan everything illegal and  immoral; and the Greek reflection, occasionally adopting the older and truer  view, retorted upon man the obloquy cast on these creatures of his  imagination, and showed how he has to thank himself alone for his  calamities, while his good things are the voluntary gifts, not the plunder of 
Heaven. Homer had already made Zeus exclaim, in the Assembly of 
Olympus, "Grievous it is to hear these mortals accuse the Gods; they  pretend that evils come from us; but they themselves occasion them  gratuitously by their own wanton folly." "It is the fault of man," said Solon;  in reference to the social evils of his day, "not of God, that destruction  comes;" and Euripides, after a formal discussion of the origin of evil, comes  to the conclusion that men act wrongly, not from want of natural good sense  and feeling, but because knowing  p. 691  what is good, they yet for various reasons neglect to practise it.

And at last reaching the highest truth, Pindar, Hesiod, Aischylus, y£sop, and 
Horace said, "All virtue is a struggle; life is not a scene of repose, but of  energetic action. Suffering is but another name for the teaching of  experience, appointed by Zeus himself, the giver of all understanding, to be  the parent of instruction, the schoolmaster of life. He indeed put an end to  the golden age; he gave venom to serpents and predacity to wolves; he  shook the honey from the leaf, and stopped the flow of wine in the rivulets;  he concealed the element of fire, and made the means of life scanty and  precarious. But in all this his object was beneficent; it was not to destroy  life, but to improve it. It was a blessing to man, not a curse, to be sentenced  to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; for nothing great or excellent is  attainable without exertion; safe and easy virtues are prized neither by gods  nor men; and the parsimoniousness of nature is justified by its powerful  effect in rousing the dormant faculties, and forcing on mankind the  invention of useful arts by means of meditation and thought."

Ancient religious reformers pronounced the worship of "idols" to be the root  of all evil; and there have been many iconoclasts in different ages of the  world. The maxim still holds good; for the worship of idols, that is, of  fanciful conceits, if not the source of all evil, is still the cause of much; and  it prevails as extensively now as it ever did. Men are ever engaged in  worshipping the picturesque fancies of their own imaginations.

Human wisdom must always be limited and incorrect; and even right  opinion is only a something intermediate between ignorance and knowledge. 
The normal condition of man is that of progress. Philosophy is a kind of  journey, ever learning, yet never arriving at the ideal perfection of truth. A 
Mason should, like the wise Socrates, assume the modest title of a "lover of  wisdom"; for he must ever long after something more excellent than he  possesses, something still beyond his reach, which he desires to make  eternally his own.

Thus the philosophic sentiment came to be associated with the poetical and  the religious, under the comprehensive name of Love. Before the birth of 
Philosophy, Love had received but scanty and inadequate homage. This  mightiest and most ancient of gods, coeval with the existence of religion and  of the world, had been  p. 692  indeed unconsciously felt, but had neither been worthily honored nor  directly celebrated in hymn or paen. In the old days of ignorance it could  scarcely have been recognized. In order that it might exercise its proper  influence over religion and philosophy, it was necessary that the God of 
Nature should cease to be a God of terrors, a personification of mere Power  or arbitrary Will, a pure and stern Intelligence, an inflictor of evil, and an  unrelenting Judge. The philosophy of Plato, in which this charge became  forever established, was emphatically a mediation of Love. With him, the  inspiration of Love first kindled the light of arts and imparted them to  mankind; and not only the arts of mere existence, but the heavenly art of  wisdom, which supports the Universe. It inspires high and generous deeds  and noble self-devotion. Without it, neither State nor individual could do  anything beautiful or great. Love is our best pilot, confederate, supporter,  and saviour; the ornament and governor of all things human and divine; and  he with divine harmony forever soothes the minds of men and gods.

Man is capable of a higher Love, which, marrying mind with mind and with  the Universe, brings forth all that is noblest in his faculties, and lifts him  beyond himself. This higher love is neither mortal nor immortal, but a  power intermediate between the human and the Divine, filling up the mighty  interval, and binding the Universe together. He is chief of those celestial  emissaries who carry to the gods the prayers of men, and bring down to men  the gifts of the gods. "He is forever poor, and far from being beautiful as  mankind imagine, for he is squalid and withered; he flies low along the  ground, is homeless and unsandalled; sleeping without covering before the  doors and in the unsheltered streets, and possessing so far his mother's  nature as being ever the companion of want. Yet, sharing also that of his  father, he is forever scheming to obtain things good and beautiful; he is  fearless, vehement, and strong; always devising some new contrivance;  strictly cautious and full of inventive, resource; a philosopher through his  whole existence, a powerful enchanter, and a subtle sophist."

The ideal consummation of Platonic science is the arrival at the  contemplation of that of which earth exhibits no express image or adequate  similitude, the Supreme Prototype of all beauty, pure and uncontaminated  with human intermixture of flesh or color, the Divine Original itself. To one  so qualified is given the prerogative  p. 693  of bringing forth not mere images and shadows of virtue, but virtue itself, as  having been conversant not with shadows, but with the truth; and having so  brought forth and nurtured a progeny of virtue, he becomes the friend of 
God, and, so far as such a privilege can belong to any human being,  immortal.

Socrates believed, like Heraclitus, in a Universal Reason pervading all  things and all minds, and consequently revealing itself in ideas. He therefore  sought truth in general opinion, and perceived in the communication of  mind with mind one of the greatest prerogatives of wisdom and the most  powerful means of advancement. He believed true wisdom to be an  attainable idea, and that the moral convictions of the mind, those eternal  instincts of temperance, conscientiousness, and justice, implanted in it by  the gods, could not deceive, if rightly interpreted.

This metaphysical direction given to philosophy ended in visionary  extravagance. Having assumed truth to be discover-able in thought, it  proceeded to treat thoughts as truths. It thus became an idolatry of notions,  which it considered either as phantoms exhaled from objects, or as portions  of the divine pre-existent thought; thus creating a mythology of its own, and  escaping from one thraldom only to enslave itself afresh. Theories and  notions indiscriminately formed and defended are the false gods or "idols"  of philosophy. For the word idolon means image, and a false mW-picture of 
God is as much an idol as a false wooden image of Him. Fearlessly  launching into the problem of universal being, the first philosophy  attempted to supply a compendious and decisive solution of every doubt. To  do this, it was obliged to make the most sweeping assumptions; and as  poetry had already filled the vast void between the human and the divine, by  personifying its Deity as man, so philosophy bowed down before the  supposed reflection of the divine image in the mind of the inquirer, who, in  worshipping his own notions, had unconsciously deified himself. Nature  thus was enslaved to common notions, and notions very often to words.

By the clashing of incompatible opinions, philosophy was gradually reduced  to the ignominious confession of utter incapacity, and found its check or  intellectual fall in skepticism. Xenophanes and Heraclitus mournfully  acknowledged the unsatisfactory result of all the struggles of philosophy, in  the admission of a universality of doubt; and the memorable effort of 
Socrates to rally  p. 694  the discomfited champions of truth, ended in a similar confession.

The worship of abstractions continued the error which personified Evil or  deified Fortune; and when mystical philosophy resigned its place to mystical  religion, it changed not its nature, but only its name. The great task  remained unperformed, of reducing the outward world and its principles to  the dominion of the intellect, and of reconciling the conception of the  supreme unalterable power asserted by reason, with the requisitions of  human sympathies.

A general idea of purpose and regularity in nature had been suggested by  common appearances to the earliest reflection. The ancients perceived a  natural order, a divine legislation, from which human institutions were  supposed to be derived, laws emblazoned in Heaven, and thence revealed to  earth. But the divine law was little more than an analogical inference from  human law, taken in the vulgar sense of arbitrary will or partial covenant. It  was surmised rather than discovered, and remained unmoral because  unintelligible. It mattered little, under the circumstances, whether the 
Universe were said to be governed by chance or by reason, since the latter,  if misunderstood, was virtually one with the former. "Better far," said 
Epicurus, "acquiesce in the fables of tradition, than acknowledge the  oppressive necessity of the physicists"; and Menander speaks of God, 
Chance, and Intelligence as undistinguishable. Law unacknowledged goes  under the name of Chance : perceived, but not understood, it becomes 
Necessity. The wisdom of the Stoic was a dogged submission to the  arbitrary behests of one; that of the Epicurean an advantage snatched by  more or less dexterous management from the equal tyranny of the other.

Ignorance sees nothing necessary, and is self abandoned to a power  tyrannical because defined by no rule, and paradoxical because permitting  evil, while itself assumed to be unlimited, all-powerful, and perfectly good.

A little knowledge, presuming the identification of the Supreme Cause with  the inevitable certainty of perfect reason, but omitting the analysis or  interpretation of it, leaves the mind chain-bound in the ascetic fatalism of  the Stoic. Free-will, coupled with the universal rule of Chance; or Fatalism  and Necessity, coupled with Omniscience and fixed and unalterable Law,  these are the alternatives, between which the human  p. 695  mind has eternally vacillated. The Supematuralists, contemplating a Being  acting through impulse, though with superhuman wisdom, and considering  the best courtier to be the most favored subject, combines contradictory  expedients, inconsistently mixing the assertion of free action with the  enervating service of petition; while he admits, in the words of a learned  archbishop, that "if the production of the things we ask for depend on  antecedent, natural, and necessary causes, our desires will be answered no  less by the omission than the offering of prayers, which, therefore, are a vain  thing."

The last stage is that in which the religion of action is made legitimate  through comprehension of its proper objects and conditions. Man becomes  morally free only when both notions, that of Chance and that of  incomprehensible Necessity, are displaced by that of Law. Law, as applied  to the Universe, means that universal, providential pre-arrangement, whose  conditions can be discerned and discretionally acted on by human  intelligence. The sense of freedom arises when the individual independence  develops itself according to its own laws, without external collisions or  hindrance; that of constraint, where it is thwarted or confined by other 
Natures, or where, by combination of external forces, the individual force is  compelled into a new direction. Moral choice would not exist safely, or even  at all, unless it were bounded by conditions determining its preferences.

Duty supposes a rule both intelligible and certain, since an uncertain rule  would be unintelligible, and if unintelligible, there could be no  responsibility. No law that is unknown can be obligatory; and that Roman 
Emperor was justly execrated, who pretended to promulgate his penal laws,  by putting them up at such a height that none could read them.

Man commands results, only by selecting among the contingent the pre¬  ordained results most suited to his purposes. In regard to absolute or divine  morality, meaning the final cause or purpose of those comprehensive laws  which often seem harsh to the individual, because inflexibly just and  impartial to the universal, speculation must take refuge in faith; the  immediate and obvious purpose often bearing so small a proportion to a  wider and unknown one, as to be relatively absorbed or lost. The rain that,  unseasonable to me, ruins my hopes of an abundant crop, does so because it  could not otherwise have blessed and prospered the crops of another kind of  a whole neighboring district of country. The  p. 696  obvious purpose of a sudden storm of snow, or an unexpected change of  wind, exposed to which I lose my life, bears small proportion to the great  results which are to flow from that storm or wind over a whole continent. So  always, of the good and ill which at first seemed irreconcilable and  capriciously distributed, the one holds its ground, the other diminishes by  being explained. In a world of a multitude of individuals, a world of action  and exertion, a world affording, by the conflict of interests and the clashing  of passions, any scope for the exercise of the manly and generous virtues,  even Omnipotence cannot make it, that the comfort and convenience of one  man alone shall always be consulted.

Thus the educated mind soon begins to appreciate the moral superiority of a  system of law over one of capricious interference; and as the jumble of  means and ends is brought into more intelligible perspective, partial or  seeming good is cheerfully resigned for the disinterested and universal. Self-  restraint is found not to imply self-sacrifice. The true meaning of what  appeared to be Necessity is found to be, not arbitrary Power, but Strength  and Force enlisted in the service of Intelligence. God having made us men,  and placed us in a world of change and eternal renovation, with ample  capacity and abundant means for rational enjoyment, we learn that it is folly  to repine because we are not angels, inhabiting a world in which change and  the clashing of interests and the conflicts of passion are unknown.

The mystery of the world remains, but is sufficiently cleared up to inspire  confidence. We are constrained to admit that if every man would but do the  best in his power to do, and that which he knows he ought to do, we should  need no better world than this. Man, surrounded by necessity, is free, not in  a dogged determination of isolated will, because, though inevitably  complying with nature's laws, he is able, proportionately to his knowledge,  to modify, in regard to himself, the conditions of their action, and so to  preserve an average uniformity between their forces and his own.

Such are some of the conflicting opinions of antiquity; and we have to some  extent presented to you a picture of the Ancient Thought. Faithful, as far as  it goes, it exhibits to us Man's Intellect ever struggling to pass beyond the  narrow bounds of the circle in which its limited powers and its short vision  confine it; and ever we find it travelling round the circle, like one lost in a  p. 697  wood, to meet the same unavoidable and insoluble difficulties. Science with  her many instruments, Astronomy, particularly, with her telescope, Physics  with the microscope, and Chemistry with its analyses and combinations,  have greatly enlarged our ideas of the Deity, by discovering to us the vast  extent of the Universe in both directions, its star-systems and its invisible  swarms of minutest animal life; by acquainting us with the new and  wonderful Force or Substance we call Electricity, apparently a link between 
Matter and Spirit: and still the Deity only becomes more incomprehensible  to us than ever, and we find that in our speculations we but reproduce over  and over again the Ancient Thought.

Where, then, amid all these conflicting opinions, is the True Word of a 
Mason?

My Brother, most of the questions which have thus tortured men's minds, it  is not within the reach and grasp of the Human Intellect to understand; but  without understanding, as we have explained to you heretofore, we may and  must believe.

The True Word of a Mason is to be found in the concealed and profound  meaning of the Ineffable Name of Deity, communicated by God to Moses;  and which meaning was long lost by the very precautions taken to conceal  it. The true pronunciation of that name was in truth a secret, in which,  however, was involved the far more profound secret of its meaning. In that  meaning is included all the truth than can be known by us, in regard to the  nature of God.

Long known as AL, AL SCHADAI, ALOHAYIM, and ADONAI; as the 
Chief or Commander of the Heavenly Armies; as the aggregate of the 
Forces [ALOHAYIM] of Nature; as the Mighty, the Victorious, the Rival of 
Bal and Osiris; as the Soul of Nature, Nature itself, a God that was but Man  personified, a God with human passions, the God of the Heathen with but a  mere change of name. He assumes, in His communications to Moses, the  name mrp [IHUH], and says to Him, PTN P®N PTN [AHIH ASHR AHIH], I 
AM WHAT I AM. Let us examine the esoteric or inner meaning of this 
Ineffable Name.

[HIH] is the imperfect tense of the verb To BE, of which PT’ [IHIH] is  the present; TIN [AHI— N being the personal pronoun "I" affixed] the first  person, by apocope; and, VT [IHI] the third. The verb has the following  forms: . . . Preterite, 3d person, masculine singular, PT [HIH], did exist,  was; 3d person corn.  p. 698  plural, TTl [HIU] . . . Present, 3d pers. masc. sing. PT' [IHIH], once NIT 
[IHUA], by apocope, TP ,TN [AHI, IHI] . . Infinitive, IT ,PT [HIH, HIU] . . . 
Imperative, 2d pers. masc. sing. PT [HIH], fem. 'in [HUI] . . . Participle,  masc. sing. Pin [HUH], ENS-EXISTING . . EXISTENCE.

The verb is never used, as the mere logical copula or connecting word, is,  was, etc., is used with the Greeks, Latins, and ourselves. It always implies  existence, actuality. The present form also includes the future sense, . . shall  or may be or exist. And PIP and NIP [EIUH and HUA] Chaldaic forms of the  imperfect tense of the verb, are the same as the Hebrew PIP and P’P [HUH  and HIH], and mean was, existed, became.

Now NIP and N’P [HUA and HIA] are the Personal Pronoun [Masculine and

Feminine], HE, SHE. Thus in Gen. iv. 20 we have the phrase, TH Xin [HUA 
HIH], HE WAS: and in Lev. xxi. 9, X’n n’3X nx [ATH ABIH HIA], HER 
Father. This feminine pronoun, however, is often written Xin [HUA], and X’n 
[HIA] occurs only eleven times in the Pentateuch. Sometimes the feminine  form means IT; but that pronoun is generally in the masculine form.

When either, n ,1 ,’,or X, [Yod, Vav, He, or Aleph] terminates a word, and  has no vowel either immediately preceding or following it, it is often  rejected; as in ’1 [GI], for X’S [GIA], a valley,

So X’n-Xin [HUA-HIA], He-She, could properly be written ’Tin [HU-HI]; or  by transposition of the letters, common with the Talmudists, nm’ [Iii-UH],  which is the Tetragrammaton or Ineffable Name.

In Gen. i. 27, it is said, "So the ALHIM created man in His image: in the  image of ALHIM created He him: MALE and FE-MALE created He them."

Sometimes the word was thus expressed; triangularly:  n  n i  n •* n  n i n '

And we learn that this designation of the Ineffable Name was, among the 
Hebrews, a symbol of Creation. The mysterious union of God with His  creatures was in the letter n, which they considered to be the Agent of 
Almighty Power; and to enable the possessor of the Name to work miracles.

The Personal Pronoun Xin [HUA], HE, is often used by itself.  p. 699  to express the Deity. Lee says that in such cases, IHUH, IH, or ALHIM, or  some other name of God, is understood', but there is no necessity for that. It  means in such cases the Male, Generative, or Creative Principle or Power.

It was a common practice with the Talmudists to conceal secret meanings  and sounds of words by transposing the letters.

The reversal of the letters of words was, indeed, anciently common  everywhere. Thus from Neitha , the name of an Egyptian Goddess, the 
Greeks, writing backward, formed Athene, the name of Minerva. In Arabic  we have Nahid, a name of the planet Venus, which, reversed, gives Dihan, 
Greek, in Persian, Nihcid, Nature; which Sir William Jones writes also 
Nahid. Strabo informs us that the Armenian name of Venus was Anaitis.

Tien , Heaven, in Chinese, reversed, is Neit, or Neith, worshipped at Sais in 
Egypt. Reverse Neitha, drop the i, and add an e, and we, as before said, 
Athene. Mitra was the name of Venus among the ancient Persians. 
Herodotus, who tells us this, also infonns us that her name, among the 
Scythians, was Artim pasa. Artim is Mitra, reversed. So, by reversing it, the 
Greeks formed Artemis, Diana.

One of the meanings of Rama, in Sanscrit, is Kama, the Deity of Love. 
Reverse this, and we have Amur, and by changing a into o. Amor, the Latin  word for Love. Probably, as the verb is Amare, the oldest reading was Amur  and not Amor. So Dipaka, in Sanscrit, one of the meanings whereof is love,  is often written Dipuc. Reverse this, and we have, adding o, the Latin word 
Cupido.

In Arabic, the radical letters rhm, pronounced rahm, signify the trunk,  compassion, mercy; this reversed, we have mhr, in Persic, love and the Sun. 
In Hebrew we have Lah, the heart; and in Chaldee, Bal, the heart; the  radical letters of both being h and /.

The Persic word for head is Sar. Reversed, this becomes Ras in Arabic and 
Hebrew, Raish in Chaldee, Rash in Samaritan, and Ryas in Ethiopic; all  meaning head, chief, etc. In Arabic we have Kid, in the sense of ride,  regulation, article of agreement, obligation; which, reversed, becomes,  adding e, the Greek dike justice. In Coptic we have Chlom, a crown. 
Reversed, we have in Hebrew, Moloch or Malec, a King, or he who wears a  crown.

In the Kou-onen, or oldest Chinese writing, by Hieroglyphics, ® Ge [Hi or 
Khi, with the initial letter modified], was the Sun: in Persic, Gwar and in

Turkish Giun. Yue [ ®], was the Moon;  p. 700  in Sanscrit Uh, and in Turkish Ai. It will be remembered that, in Egypt and  elsewhere, the Sun was originally feminine, and the Moon masculine. In 
Egypt, Ioh was the moon: and in the feasts of Bacchus they cried  incessantly, Euo'iSabvil Euoi'Bakhe] Io Bakhe\ Io Bakhel

Bunsen gives the following personal pronouns for he and she:

II He

|| She

|Christian Aramaic

Hina

||hi

|jewish Aramaic

II™

||Hi

|Hebrew

II™’

||ee’

|Arabic

||Huwa

IlHiya

Thus the Ineffable Name not only embodies the Great Philosophical Idea,  that the Deity is the ENS, the TO ON, the Absolute Existence, that of which  the Essence is To Exist, the only Substance of Spinoza, the BEING, that  never could not have existed, as contradistinguished from that which only  becomes, not Nature or the Soul of Nature, but that which created Nature;  but also the idea of the Male and Female Principles, in its highest and most  profound sense; to wit, that God originally comprehended in Himself all that  is: that matter was not co-existent with Him, or independent of Him; that He  did not merely fashion and shape a pre-existing chaos into a Universe; but  that His Thought manifested itself outwardly in that Universe, which so  became, and before was not, except as comprehended in Him: that the

Generative Power or Spirit, and Productive Matter, ever among the ancients  deemed the Female, originally were in God; and that He Was and Is all that 
Was, that Is, and that Shall be: in Whom all else lives, moves, and has its  being.

This was the great Mystery of the Ineffable Name; and this true arrangement  of its letters, and of course its true pronunciation and its meaning, soon  became lost to all except the select few to whom it was confided; it being  concealed from the common people, because the Deity thus metaphysically  named was not that personal and capricious, and as it were tangible God in  whom they believed, and who alone was within the reach of their rude  capacities.

Diodorus says that the name given by Moses to God was IAfi. Theodorus  says that the Samaritans termed God IABE , but the Jews LAfi. Philo Byblius  gives the form IEYfi; and Clemens  p. 701  of Alexandria LAOY. Macrobius says that it was an admitted axiom among  the Heathen, that the triliteral IAfi was the sacred name of the Supreme 
God. And the Clarian oracle said: "Learn thou that IAfi is the great God 
Supreme, that ruleth over all." The letter I signified Unity. A and fi are the  first and last letters of the Greek Alphabet.

Hence the frequent expression: "I am the First, and I am the Last; and  besides Me there is no other God. I am A and fi, the First and the Last. I am 
A and fi, the Beginning and the Ending, which Is, and Was, and Is to come:  the Omnipotent." For in this we see shadowed forth the same great truth;  that God is all in all—the Cause and the Effect-the beginning, or Impulse, or 
Generative Power: and the Ending, or Result, or that which is produced: that 
He is in reality all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be; in this  sense, that nothing besides Himself has existed eternally, and co-eternally  with Him, independent of Him, and self-existent, or self-originated.

And thus the meaning of the expression, ALOHAYIM, a plural noun, used,  in the account of the Creation with which Genesis commences, with a  singular verb, and of the name or title IHUH-ALHIM, used for the first time  in the 4th verse of the 2d chapter of the same book, becomes clear. The 
ALHIM is the aggregate unity of the manifested Creative Forces or Powers  of Deity, His Emanations; and IHUH-ALHIM is the ABSOLUTE Existence,  or Essence of these Powers and Forces, of which they are Active 
Manifestations and Emanations.

This was the profound truth hidden in the ancient allegory and covered from  the general view with a double veil. This was the esoteric meaning of the  generation and production of the Indian, Chaldtean, and Phoenician  cosmogonies ; and the Active and Passive Powers, of the Male and Female 
Principles; of Heaven and its Luminaries generating, and the Earth  producing; all hiding from vulgar view, as above its comprehension, the  doctrine that matter is not eternal, but that God was the only original 
Existence, the ABSOLUTE, from Whom everything has proceeded, and to 
Whom all returns: and that all moral law springs not from the relation of  things, but from His Wisdom and Essential Justice, as the Omnipotent 
Legislator. And this Taut WORD is with entire accuracy said to have been  lost\ because its meaning was lost, even among the Hebrews, although we  still find the name (its real  p. 702  meaning unsuspected), in the Hu of the Druids and the FO -Hi of the 
Chinese.

When we conceive of the Absolute Truth, Beauty, or Good, we cannot stop  short at the abstraction of either. We are forced to refer each to some living  and substantial Being, in which they have their foundations, some being that  is the first and last principle of each.

Moral Truth, like every other universal and necessary truth, cannot remain a  mere abstraction. Abstractions are unrealities. In ourselves, moral truth is  merely conceived of. There must be somewhere a Being that not only  conceives of, but constitutes it. It has this characteristic; that it is not only, to  the eyes of our intelligence, an universal and necessary truth, but one  obligatory on our will. It is A LAW. We do not establish that law ourselves.

It is imposed on us despite ourselves: its principle must be without us. It  supposes a legislator. He cannot be the being to whom the law applies; but  must be one that possesses in the highest degree all the characteristics of  moral truth. The moral law, universal and necessary, necessarily has as its  author a necessary being;—composed of justice and charity, its author most  be a being possessing the plenitude of both.

As all beautiful and all true things refer themselves, these to a Unity which  is absolute TRUTH, and those to a Unity which is absolute BEAUTY, so all  the moral principles centre in a single principle, which is THE GOOD. Thus  we arrive at the conception of GOOD in itself, the ABSOLUTE Good,  superior to all particular duties, and determinate in those duties. This 
Absolute Good must necessarily be an attribute of the Absolute BEING. 
There cannot be several Absolute Beings; the one in whom are realized 
Absolute Truth and Absolute Beauty being different from the one in whom  is realized Absolute Good. The Absolute necessarily implies absolute Unity. 
The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are not three distinct essences: but  they are one and the same essence, considered in its fundamental attributes:  the different phases which, in our eyes, the Absolute and Infinite Perfection  assumes. Manifested in the World of the Finite and Relative, these three  attributes separate from each other, and are distinguished by our minds,  which can comprehend nothing except by division. But in the Being from 
Whom they emanate, they are indivisibly united; and this Being, at once  triple and one, Who  p. 703  sums up in Himself perfect Beauty, perfect Truth, and the perfect Good, is 
GOD.

God is necessarily the principle of Moral Truth, and of personal morality. 
Man is a moral person, that is to say, one endowed with reason and liberty. 
He is capable of Virtue: and Virtue has with him two principal fonns,  respect for others and love of others, justice and charity.

The creature can possess no real and essential attribute which the Creator  does not possess. The effect can draw its reality and existence only from its  cause. The cause contains in itself, at least, what is essential in the effect.

The characteristic of the effect is inferiority, short-coming, imperfection. 
Dependent and derivate, it bears in itself the marks and conditions of  dependence; and its imperfection proves the perfection of the cause; or else  there would be in the effect something immanent, without a cause.

God is not a logical Being, whose Nature may be explained by deduction,  and by means of algebraic equations. When, setting out with a primary  attribute, the attributes of God are deduced one from the other, after the  manner of the Geometricians and Scholastics, we have nothing but  abstractions. We must emerge from this empty dialectic, to arrive at a true  and living God. The first notion which we have of God, that of an Infinite 
Being, is not given us a priori, independently of all experience. It is our  consciousness of ourself, as at once a Being and a limited Being, that  immediately raises us to the conception of a Being, the principle of our  being, and Himself without limits. If the existence that we possess forces us  to recur to a cause possessing the same existence in an infinite degree, all  the substantial attributes of existence that we possess equally require each an  infinite cause. God, then, is no longer the Infinite, Abstract, Indeterminate 
Being, of which reason and the heart camiot lay hold, but a real Being,  determinate like ourselves, a moral person like ourself; and the study of our  own souls will conduct us, without resort to hypothesis, to a conception of 
God, both sublime and having a connection with ourselves.

If man be free, God must be so. It would be strange if, while the creature has  that marvellous power of disposing of himself, of choosing and willing  freely, the Being that has made him should be subject to a necessary  development, the cause of which, though  p. 704  in Himself, is a sort of abstract, mechanical, or metaphysical power, inferior  to the personal, voluntary cause which we are, and of which we have the  clearest consciousness. God is free because we are: but he is not free as we  are. He is at once everything that we are, and nothing that we are. He  possesses the same attributes as we, but extended to infinity. He possesses,  then, an infinite liberty, united to an infinite intelligence; and as His  intelligence is infallible, exempt from the uncertainty of deliberation, and  perceiving at a glance where the Good is, so His liberty accomplishes it  spontaneously and without effort.

As we assign to God that liberty which is the basis of our existence, so also  we transfer to His character, from our own, justice and charity. In man they  are virtues: in God, His attributes. What is in us the laborious conquest of  liberty, is in Him His very nature. The idea of the right, and the respect paid  to the right, are signs of the dignity of our existence. If respect of rights is  the very essence of justice, the Perfect Being must know and respect the  rights of the lowest of His creatures; for He assigned them those rights. In 
God resides a sovereign justice, that renders to every one what is due him,  not according to deceitful appearances, but according to the truth of things. 
And if man, a limited being, has the power to go out of himself, to forget his  own person, to love another like himself, and devote himself to his  happiness, dignity, and perfection, the Perfect Being must have, in an  infinite degree, that disinterested tenderness, that Charity, the Supreme 
Virtue of the human person. There is in God an infinite tenderness for His  creatures, manifested in His giving us existence, which He might have  withheld; and every day it appears in innumerable marks of His Divine 
Providence.

Plato well understood that love of God, and expresses it in these great  words: "Let us speak of the cause which led the Supreme Arranger of the 
Universe to produce and regulate that Universe. He was good; and he who is  good has no kind of ill-will. Exempt from that. He willed that created things  should be, as far as possible, like Himself." And Christianity in its turn said, 
"God has so loved men that He has given them His only Son."

It is not correct to affirm, as is often done, that Christianity has in some sort  discovered this noble sentiment. We must not lower human nature, to raise 
Christianity. Antiquity knew, described, and practised charity; the first  feature of which, so touching, and  p. 70S  thank God! so common, is goodness, as its loftiest one is heroism. Charity is  devotion to another; and it is ridiculously senseless to pretend that there ever  was an age of the world, when the human soul was deprived of that part of  its heritage, the power of devotion. But it is certain that Christianity has  diffused and popularized this virtue, and that, before Christ, these words  were never spoken: "LOVE ONE ANOTHER; FOR THAT IS THE 
WHOLE LAW." Charity presupposes Justice. He who truly loves his  brother respects the rights of his brother; but he does more, he forgets his  own. Egoism sells or takes. Love delights in giving. In God, love is what it  is in us; but in an infinite degree. God is inexhaustible in His charity, as He  is inexhaustible in His essence. That Infinite Omnipotence and Infinite 
Charity, which, by an admirable good-will, draws from the bosom of its  immense love the favors which it incessantly bestows on the world and on  humanity, teaches us that the more we give, the more we possess.

God being all just and all good. He can will nothing but what is good and  just. Being Omnipotent, whatever He wills He can do, and consequently  does. The world is the work of God: it is therefore perfectly made.

Yet there is disorder in the world, that seems to impugn the justice and  goodness of God.

A principle indissolubly connected with the very idea of good, tells us that  every moral agent deserves reward when he does well, and punishment  when he does ill. This principle is universal and necessary. It is absolute. If  it does not apply in this world, it is false, or the world is badly ordered.

But good actions are not always followed by happiness, nor evil ones by  misery. Though often this fact is more apparent than real; though virtue, a  war against the passions, full of dignity but full of sorrow and pain, has the  latter as its condition, yet the pains that follow vice are greater; and virtue  conduces most to health, strength, and long life;—though the peaceful  conscience that accompanies virtue creates internal happiness; though public  opinion generally decides correctly on men's characters, and rewards virtue  with esteem and consideration, and vice with con-tempt and infamy; and  though, after all, justice reigns in the world, and the surest road to happiness  is still that of virtue, yet there are exceptions. Virtue is not always rewarded.  nor vice punished, in this life.  p. 706

The data of this problem are these: 1st. The principle of merit and demerit  within us is absolute: every good action ought to be rewarded, every bad one  punished: 2d. God is just as He is all-powerful: 3d. There are in this world  particular cases, contradicting the necessary and universal law of merit and  demerit. What is the result?

To reject the two principles, that God is just, and the law of merit and  demerit absolute, is to raze to the foundations the whole edifice of human  faith.

To maintain them, is to admit that the present life is to be terminated or  continued elsewhere. The moral person who acts well or ill, and awaits  reward or punishment, is comiected with a body, lives with it, makes use of  it, depends upon it in a measure, but is not it. The body is composed of parts. 
It diminishes or increases, it is divisible even to infinity. But this something  which has a consciousness of itself, and says "I, ME”; that feels itself free  and responsible, feels too that it is incapable of division, that it is a being  one and simple', that the ME cannot be halved, that if a limb is cut off and  thrown away, no part of the ME goes with it: that it remains identical with  itself under the variety of phenomena which successively manifest it. This  identity, indivisibility, and absolute unity of the person, are its spirituality,  the very essence of the person. It is not in the least an hypothesis to affirm  that the soul differs essentially from the body. By the soul we mean the  person, not separated from the consciousness of the attributes which  constitute it,— thought and will. The Existence without consciousness is an  abstract being, and not a person. It is the person, that is identical, one,  simple. Its attributes, developing it, do not divide it. Indivisible, it is  indissoluble, and may be immortal. If absolute justice requires this  immortality, it does not require what is impossible. The spirituality of the  soul is the condition and necessary foundation of immortality: the law of  merit and demerit the direct demonstration of it. The first is the  metaphysical, the second the moral proof. Add to these the tendency of all  the powers of the soul toward the Infinite, and the principle of final causes,  and the proof of the immortality of the soul is complete.

God, therefore, in the Masonic creed, is INFINITE TRUTH, INFINITE 
BEAUTY, INFINITE GOODNESS. He is the Holy of Holies, as Author of  the Moral Law, as the PRINCIPLE of Liberty, of  p. 707

[paragraph continues] Justice, and of Charity, Dispenser of Reward and Punishment. 
Such a God is not an abstract God; but an intelligent and free person. Who  has made us in His image, from Whom we receive the law that presides over  our destiny, and Whose judgment we await. It is His love that inspires us in  our acts of charity: it is His justice that governs our justice, and that of  society and the laws. We continually remind ourselves that He is infinite;  because otherwise we should degrade His nature: but He would be for us as  if He were not, if His infinite nature had not forms inherent in ourselves, the  forms of our own reason and soul.

When we love Truth, Justice, and Nobility of Soul, we should know that it is 
God we love underneath these special forms, and should unite them all into  one great act of total piety. We should feel that we go in and out continually  in the midst of the vast forces of the Universe, which are only the Forces of 
God; that in our studies, when we attain a truth, we confront the thought of 
God; when we leam the right, we learn the will of God laid down as a rule  of conduct for the Universe; and when we feel disinterested love, we should  know that we partake the feeling of the Infinite God. Then, when we  reverence the mighty cosmic force, it will not be a blind Fate in an Atheistic  or Pantheistic world, but the Infinite God, that we shall confront and feel  and know. Then we shall be mindful of the mind of God, conscious of God's  conscience, sensible of His sentiments, and our own existence will be in the  infinite being of God.

The world is a whole, which has its harmony; for a God who is One, could  make none but a complete and harmonious work. The harmony of the 
Universe responds to the unity of God, as the indefinite quantity is the  defective sign of the infinitude of God. To say that the Universe is God, is to  admit the world only, and deny God. Give it what name you please, it is  atheism at bottom. On the other hand, to suppose that the Universe is void of 
God, and that He is wholly apart from it, is an insupportable and al-most  impossible abstraction. To distinguish is not to separate. 1 distinguish, but do  not separate myself from my qualities and effects. So God is not the 
Universe, although He is everywhere present in spirit and in truth.

To us, as to Plato, absolute truth is in God. It is God Himself under one of 
His phases. In God, as their original, are the immutable principles of reality  and cognizance. In Him things receive  p. 708  at once their existence and their intelligibility. It is by participating in the 
Divine reason that our own reason possesses something of the Absolute. 
Every judgment of reason envelopes a necessary truth, and every necessary  truth supposes the necessary Existence.

Thus, from every direction,—from metaphysics, aesthetics, and morality  above ail, we rise to the same Principle, the common centre, and ultimate  foundation of all truth, all beauty, all good. The True, the Beautiful, the 
Good, are but diverse revelations of one and the same Being. Thus we reach  the threshold of religion, and are in communion with the great philosophies  which all proclaim a God; and at the same time with the religions which  cover the earth, and all repose on the sacred foundation of natural religion;  of that religion which reveals to us the natural light given to all men,  without the aid of a particular revelation. So long as philosophy does not  arrive at religion, it is below all worships, even the most imperfect; for they  at least give man a Father, a Witness, a Consoler, a Judge. By religion,  philosophy connects itself with humanity, which, from one end of the world  to the other, aspires to God, believes in God, hopes in God. Philosophy  contains in itself the common basis of all religious beliefs; it, as it were,  borrows from them their principle, and returns it to them surrounded with  light, elevated above uncertainty, secure against all attack.

From the necessity of His Nature, the Infinite Being must create and  preserve the Finite, and to the Finite must, in its forms, give and  communicate of His own kind. We cannot conceive of any finite thing  existing without God, the Infinite basis and ground thereof; nor of God  existing without something. God is the necessary logical condition of a  world, its necessitating cause; a world, the necessary logical condition of 
God, His necessitated consequence. It is according to His Infinite Perfection  to create, and then to preserve and bless whatever He creates. That is the  conclusion of modern metaphysical science. The stream of philosophy runs  down from Aristotle to Hegel, and breaks off with this conclusion: and then  again recurs the ancient difficulty. If it be of His nature to create,—if we  cannot conceive of His existing alone, without creating, without having  created, then what He created was co-existent with Himself. If He could  exist an instant without creating, He could as well do so for a  p. 709  myriad of eternities. And so again comes round to us the old doctrine of a 
God, the Soul of the Universe, and co-existent with it. For what He created  had a beginning ; and however long since that creation occurred, an eternity  had before elapsed. The difference between a beginning and no beginning is  infinite.

But of some things we can be certain. We are conscious of ourselves—of  ourselves if not as substances, at least as Powers to be, to do, to suffer. We  are conscious of ourselves not as self-originated at all or as self-sustained  alone; but only as dependent, first for existence, ever since for support.

Among the primary ideas of consciousness, that are inseparable from it, the  atoms of self-consciousness, we find the idea of God. Carefully examined  by the scrutinizing intellect, it is the idea of God as infinite, perfectly  powerful, wise, just, loving, holy; absolute being with no limitation. This  made us, made all, sustains us, sustains all; made our body, not by a single  act, but by a series of acts extending over a vast succession of years,—for  man's body is the resultant of all created things,—made our spirit, our mind,  conscience, affections, soul, will, appointed for each its natural mode of  action, set each at its several aim. Thus self-consciousness leads us to  consciousness of God, and at last to consciousness of an infinite God. That  is the highest evidence of our own existence, and it is the highest evidence  of His.

If there is a God at all, He must be omnipresent in space. Beyond the last 
Stars He must be, as He is here. There can be no mote that peoples the  sunbeams, no little cell of life that the microscope discovers in the seed-  sporule of a moss, but He is there.

He must also be omnipresent in time. There was no second of time before  the Stars began to bum, but God was in that second. In the most distant  nebulous spot in Orion's belt, and in every one of the millions that people a  square inch of limestone, God is alike present. He is in the smallest  imaginable or even unimaginable portion of time, and in every second of its  most vast and unimaginable volume; His Here conterminous with the All of 
Space, His Now coeval with the All of Time.

Through all this Space, in all this Time, His Being extends, spreads  undivided, operates unspent; God in all His infinity, perfectly powerful,  wise, just, loving, and holy. His being is an infinite activity, a creating, and  so a giving of Himself to the  p. 710

[paragraph continues] World. The World's being is a becoming, a being created and  continued. It is so now, and was so, incalculable and unimaginable millions  of ages ago.

All this is philosophy, the unavoidable conclusion of the human mind. It is  not the opinion of Coleridge and Kant, but their science', not what they  guess, but what they know.

In virtue of this in-dwelling of God in matter, we say that the world is a  revelation of Him, its existence a show of His. He is in His work. The  manifold action of the Universe is only His mode of operation, and all  material things are in communion with Him. All grow and move and live in 
Him, and by means of Him, and only so. Let Him withdraw from the space  occupied by anything, and it ceases to be. Let Him withdraw any quality of 
His nature from anything, and it ceases to be. All must partake of Him, He  dwelling in each, and yet transcending all.

The failure of fanciful religion to become philosophy, does not preclude  philosophy from coinciding with true religion. Philosophy, or rather its  object, the divine order of the Universe, is the intellectual guide which the  religious sentiment needs; while exploring the real relations of the finite, it  obtains a constantly improving and self-correcting measure of the perfect  law of the Gospel of Love and Liberty, and a means of carrying into effect  the spiritualism of revealed religion. It establishes law, by ascertaining its  terms; it guides the spirit to see its way to the amelioration of life and the  increase of happiness. While religion was stationary, science could not walk  alone; when both are admitted to be progressive, their interests and aims  become identified. Aristotle began to show how religion may be founded on  an intellectual basis; but the basis he laid was too narrow. Bacon, by giving  to philosophy a definite aim and method, gave it at the same time a safer and  self-enlarging basis. Our position is that of intellectual beings surrounded by  limitations; and the latter being constant, have to intelligence the practical  value of laws, in whose investigation and application consists that  seemingly endless career of intellectual and moral progress which the  sentiment of religion inspires and ennobles. The title of Saint has commonly  been claimed for those whose boast it has been to despise philosophy; yet  faith will stumble and sentiment mislead, unless knowledge be present, in  amount and quality sufficient to purify the one and to give beneficial  direction to the other.  p. 711

Science consists of those matured inferences from experience which all  other experience confirms. It is no fixed system superior to revision, but that  progressive mediation between ignorance and wisdom in part conceived by 
Plato, whose immediate object is happiness, and its impulse the highest kind  of love. Science realizes and unites all that was truly valuable in both the old  schemes of mediation; the heroic, or system of action and effort; and the  mystical theory of spiritual, contemplative communion. "Listen to me," says 
Galen, "as to the voice of the Eleusinian Hierophant, and believe that the  study of nature is a mystery no less important than theirs, nor less adapted to  display the wisdom and power of the Great Creator. Their lessons and  demonstrations were obscure, but ours are clear and unmistakable."

To science we owe it that no man is any longer entitled to consider himself  the central point around which the whole Universe of life and motion  revolves—the immensely important individual for whose convenience and  even luxurious ease and indulgence the whole Universe was made. On one  side it has shown us an infinite Universe of stars and suns and worlds at  incalculable distances from each other, in whose majestic and awful  presence we sink and even our world sinks into insignificance; while, on the  other side, the microscope has placed us in communication with new worlds  of organized livings beings, gifted with senses, nerves, appetites, and  instincts, in every tear and in every drop of putrid water.

Thus science teaches us that we are but an infinitesimal portion of a great  whole, that stretches out on every side of us, and above and below us,  infinite in its complications, and which infinite wisdom alone .can  comprehend. Infinite wisdom has arranged the infinite succession of beings,  involving the necessity of birth, decay, and death, and made the loftiest  virtues possible by providing those conflicts, reverses, trials, and hardships,  without which even their names could never have been invented.

Knowledge is convertible into power, and axioms into rules of utility and  duty. Modern science is social and communicative. It is moral as well as  intellectual; powerful, yet pacific and disinterested; binding man to man as  well as to the Universe; filling up the details of obligation, and cherishing  impulses of virtue, and, by affording clear proof of the consistency and  identity of all  p. 712  interests, substituting co-operation for rivalry, liberality for jealousy, and  tending far more powerfully than any other means to realize the spirit of  religion, by healing those inveterate disorders which, traced to their real  origin, will be found rooted in an ignorant assumption as to the penurious  severity of Providence, and the consequent greed of selfish men to confine  what seemed as if extorted from it to themselves, or to steal from each other  rather than quietly to enjoy their own.

We shall probably never reach those higher forms containing the true  differences of things, involving the full discovery and correct expression of  their very self or essence. We shall ever fall short of the most general and  most simple nature, the ultimate or most comprehensive law. Our widest  axioms explain many phenomena, but so too in a degree did the principles  or elements of the old philosophers, and the cycles and epicycles of ancient  astronomy. We cannot in any case of causation assign the whole of the  conditions, nor though we may reproduce them in practice, can we mentally  distinguish them all, without knowing the essences of the things including  them; and we therefore must not unconsciously ascribe that absolute  certainty to axioms, which the ancient religionists did to creeds, nor allow  the mind, which ever strives to insulate itself and its acquisitions, to forget  the nature of the process by which it substituted scientific for common  notions, and so with one as with the other lay the basis of self-deception by  a pedantic and superstitious employment of them.

Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must  accompany all the stages of man's onward progress. His intellectual life is a  perpetual beginning, a preparation for a birth. The faculty of doubting and  questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be  useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason. Knowledge is always  imperfect, or complete only in a prospectively boundless career, in which  discovery multiplies doubt, and doubt leads on to new discovery. The boast  of science is not so much its manifested results, as its admitted imperfection  and capacity of unlimited progress. The true religious philosophy of an  imperfect being is not a system of creed, but, as Socrates thought, an infinite  search or approximation. Finality is but another name for bewilderment or  defeat. Science gratifies the religious feeling without arresting it, and  p. 713  opens out the unfathomable mystery of the One Supreme into more explicit  and manageable Forms, which express not indeed His Essence, which is  wholly beyond our reach and higher than our faculties can climb, but His 
Will, and so feeds an endless enthusiasm by accumulating forever new  objects of pursuit. We have long experienced that knowledge is profitable,  we are beginning to find out that it is moral, and we shall at last discover it  to be religious.

God and truth are inseparable; a knowledge of God is possession of the  saving oracles of truth. In proportion as the thought and purpose of the  individual are trained to conformity with the rule of right prescribed by 
Supreme Intelligence, so far is his happiness promoted, and the purpose of  his existence fulfilled. In this way a new life arises in him; he is no longer  isolated, but is a part of the eternal hannonies around him. His erring will is  directed by the influence of a higher will, informing and moulding it in the  path of his true happiness.

Man's power of apprehending outward truth is a qualified privilege; the  mental like the physical inspiration passing through a diluted medium; and  yet, even when truth, imparted, as it were, by intuition, has been specious, or  at least imperfect, the intoxication of sudden discovery has ever claimed it  as full, infallible, and divine. And while human weakness needed ever to  recur to the pure and perfect source, the revelations once popularly accepted  and valued assumed an independent substantiality, perpetuating not  themselves only, but the whole mass of derivative forms accidentally  connected with them, and legalized in their names. The mists of error  thickened under the shadows of prescription, until the free light again broke  in upon the night of ages, redeeming the genuine treasure from the  superstition which obstinately doted on its accessories.

Even to the Barbarian, Nature reveals a mighty power and a wondrous  wisdom, and continually points to God. It is no wonder that men worshipped  the several things of the world. The world of matter is a revelation of fear to  the savage in Northern climes; he trembles at his deity throned in ice and  snow. The lightning, the stonn, the earthquake startle the rude man, and he  sees the divine in the extraordinary.

The grand objects of Nature perpetually constrain men to think of their 
Author. The Alps are the great altar of Europe; the nocturnal  p. 714  sky has been to mankind the dome of a temple, starred all over with  admonitions to reverence, trust, and love. The Scriptures for the human race  are writ in earth and Heaven. No organ or miserere touches the heart like the  sonorous swell of the sea or the ocean-wave's immeasurable laugh. Every  year the old world puts on new bridal beauty, and celebrates its Whit- 
Sunday, when in the sweet Spring each bush and tree dons reverently its  new glories. Autumn is a long All-Saints' day; and the harvest is 
Hallowmass to Mankind. Before the human race marched down from the  slopes of the Himalayas to take possession of Asia, Chaldea, and Egypt,  men marked each annual crisis, the solstices and the equinoxes, and  celebrated religious festivals therein; and even then, and ever since, the  material was and has been the element of communion between man and 
God.

Nature is full of religious lessons to a thoughtful man. He dissolves the  matter of the Universe, leaving only its forces; he dissolves away the  phenomena of human history, leaving only immortal spirit; he studies the  law, the mode of action of these forces and this spirit, which make up the  material and the human world, and cannot fail to be fdled with reverence,  with trust, with boundless love of the Infinite God, who devised these laws  of matter and of mind, and thereby bears up this marvellous Universe of  things and men. Science has its New Testament; and the beatitudes of 
Philosophy are profoundly touching. An undevout astronomer is mad. 
Familiarity with the grass and the trees teaches us deeper lessons of love and  trust than we can glean from the writings of Fenelon and Augustine. The  great Bible of God is ever open before mankind. The eternal flowers of 
Heaven seem to shed sweet influence on the perishable blossoms of the  earth. The great sermon of Jesus was preached on a mountain, which  preached to Him as He did to the people, and His figures of speech were  first natural figures of fact.

If to-morrow I am to perish utterly, then I shall only take counsel for to-day,  and ask for qualities which last no longer. My fathers will be to me only as  the ground out of which my bread-corn is grown; dead, they are but the  rotten mould of earth, their memory of small concern to me. Posterity!—I  shall care nothing for the future generations of mankind! I am one atom in  the trunk of a tree, and care nothing for the roots below, or the branch  above. I shall sow such seed only as will bear harvest  p. 715  to-day. Passion may enact my statutes to-day, and ambition repeal them to¬  morrow. I will know no other legislators. Morality will vanish, and  expediency take its place. Heroism will be gone; and instead of it there will  be the savage ferocity of the he-wolf, the brute cunning of the she-fox, the  rapacity of the vulture, and the headlong daring of the wild bull; but no  longer the cool, calm courage that, for truth's sake, and for love's sake, looks  death firmly in the face, and then wheels into line ready to be slain. 
Affection, friendship, philanthropy, will be but the wild fancies of the  monomaniac, fit subjects for smiles or laughter or for pity.

But knowing that we shall live forever, and that the Infinite God loves all of  us, we can look on all the evils of the world, and see that it is only the hour  before sunrise, and that the light is coming; and so we also, even we, may  light a little taper, to illuminate the darkness while it lasts, and help until the  day-spring come. Eternal morning follows the night: a rainbow scarfs the  shoulders of every cloud that weeps its rain away to be flowers on land and  pearls at sea: Life rises out of the grave, the soul cannot be held by fettering  flesh. No dawn is hopeless; and disaster is only the threshold of delight.

Beautifully, above the great wide chaos of human errors, shines the calm,  clear light of natural human religion, revealing to us God as the Infinite 
Parent of all, perfectly powerful, wise, just, loving, and perfectly holy too. 
Beautiful around stretches off every way the Universe, the Great Bible of 
God. Material nature is its Old Testament, millions of years old, thick with  eternal truths under our feet, glittering with everlasting glories over our  heads; and Human Nature is the New Testament from the Infinite God,  every day revealing a new page as Time turns over the leaves. Immortality  stands waiting to give a recompense for every virtue not rewarded, for every  tear not wiped away, for every sorrow undeserved, for every prayer, for  every pure intention and emotion of the heart. And over the whole, over 
Nature, Material and Human, over this Mortal Life and over the eternal Past  and Future, the infinite Loving-kindness of God the Father comes enfolding  all and blessing everything that ever was, that is, that ever shall be.

Everything is a thought of the Infinite God. Nature is His prose, and man 
His Poetry. There is no Chance, no Fate; but God's Great Providence,  enfolding the whole Universe in its  p. 716  bosom, and feeding it with everlasting life. In times past there has been evil  which we cannot understand; now there are evils which we camiot solve, nor  make square with God's perfect goodness by any theory our feeble intellect  enables us to frame. There are sufferings, follies, and sins for all mankind,  for every nation, for every man and every woman. They were all foreseen by  the infinite wisdom of God, all provided for by His infinite power and  justice, and all are consistent with His infinite love. To believe otherwise  would be to believe that He made the world, to amuse His idle hours with  the follies and agonies of mankind, as Domitian was wont to do with the  wrigglings and contortions of insect agonies. Then indeed we might  despairingly unite in that horrible utterance of Heine: "Alas, God's Satire  weighs heavily on me! The Great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes  of Heaven, is bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little,  earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful  attempts at jesting, in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath 
Him, in humor, in colossal mockery."

No, no! God is not thus amused with and prodigal of human suffering. The  world is neither a Here without a Hereafter, a body without a soul, a chaos  with no God; nor a body blasted by a soul, a Here with a worse Hereafter, a  world with a God that hates more than half the creatures He has made. There  is no Savage, Revengeful, and Evil God: but there is an Infinite God, seen  everywhere as Perfect Cause, everywhere as Perfect Providence,  transcending all, yet in-dwelling everywhere, with perfect power, wisdom,  justice, holiness, and love, providing for the future welfare of each and all,  foreseeing and forecaring for every bubble that breaks on the great stream of  human life and human history.

The end of man and the object of existence in this world, being not only  happiness, but happiness in virtue and through virtue, virtue in this world is  the condition of happiness in another life, and the condition of virtue in this  world is suffering, more or less frequent, briefer or longer continued, more  or less intense. Take away suffering, and there is no longer any resignation  or humanity, no more self-sacrifice, no more devotedness, no more heroic  virtues, no more sublime morality. We are subjected to suffering, both  because we are sensible, and because we ought to be virtuous. If there were  no physical evil, there would be no possible virtue, and the world would be  badly adapted to the destiny of man.  p. 717

[paragraph continues] The apparent disorders of the physical world, and the evils  that result from them, are not disorders and evils that occur despite the  power and goodness of God. God not only allows, but wills them. It is His  will that there shall be in the physical world causes enough of pain for man,  to afford him occasions for resignation and courage.

Whatever is favorable to virtue, whatever gives the moral liberty more  energy, whatever can serve the greater moral development of the human  race, is good. Suffering is not the worst condition of man on earth. The  worst condition is the moral brutalization which the absence of physical evil  would engender.

External or internal physical evil connects itself with the object of existence,  which is to accomplish the moral law here below, whatever the  consequences, with the firm hope that virtue unfortunate will not fail to be  rewarded in another life. The moral law has its sanction and its reason in  itself. It owes nothing to that law of merit and demerit that accompanies it,  but is not its basis. But, though the principle of merit and demerit ought not  to be the determining principle of virtuous action, it powerfully concurs with  the moral law, because it offers virtue a legitimate ground of consolation  and hope.

Morality is the recognition of duty, as duty, and its accomplishment,  whatever the consequences.

Religion is the recognition of duty in its necessary harmony with goodness;  a harmony that must have its realization in another life, through the justice  and omnipotence of God.

Religion is as true as morality; for once morality is admitted, its  consequences must be admitted.

The whole moral existence is included in these two words, harmonious with  each other: DUTY and HOPE.

Masonry teaches that God is infinitely good. What motive, what reason,  and, morally speaking, what possibility can there be to Infinite Power and 
Infinite Wisdom, to be anything but good? Our very sorrows, proclaiming  the loss of objects inexpressibly dear to us, demonstrate His Goodness. The 
Being that made us intelligent cannot Himself be without intelligence; and 
He Who has made us so to love and to sorrow for what we love, must  number love for the creatures He has made, among His infinite attributes. 
Amid all our sorrows, we take refuge in the assurance that He loves us; that 
He does not capriciously, or through indifference,  p. 718  and still less in mere anger, grieve and afflict us; that He chastens us, in  order that by His chastisements, which are by His universal law only the  consequences of our acts, we may be profited; and that He could not show  so much love for His creatures, by leaving them unchastened, untried,  undisciplined. We have faith in the Infinite; faith in God's Infinite Love; and  it is that faith that must save us.

No dispensations of God's Providence, no suffering or bereavement is a  messenger of wrath: none of its circumstances are indications of God's 
Anger. He is incapable of Anger; higher above any such feelings than the  distant stars are above the earth. Bad men do not die because God hates  them. They die because it is best for them that they should do so; and, bad as  they are, it is better for them to be in the hands of the infinitely good God,  than anywhere else.

Darkness and gloom lie upon the paths of men. They stumble at difficulties,  are ensnared by temptations, and perplexed by trouble. They are anxious,  and troubled, and fearful. Pain and affliction and sorrow often gather around  the steps of their earthly pilgrimage. All this is written indelibly upon the  tablets of the human heart. It is not to be erased; but Masonry sees and reads  it in a new light. It does not expect these ills and trials and sufferings to be  removed from life; but that the great truth will at some time be believed by  all men, that they are the means, selected by infinite wisdom, to purify the  heart, and to invigorate the soul whose inheritance is immortality, and the  world its school.

Masonry propagates no creed except its own most simple and Sublime One;  that universal religion, taught by Nature and by Reason. Its Lodges are  neither Jewish, Moslem, nor Christian Temples. It reiterates the precepts of  morality of all religions. It venerates the character and commends the  teachings of the great and good of all ages and of all countries. It extracts  the good and not the evil, the truth, and not the error, from all creeds; and  acknowledges that there is much which is good and true in all.

Above all the other great teachers of morality and virtue, it reveres the  character of the Great Master Who, submissive to the will of His and our 
Father, died upon the Cross. All must admit, that if the world were filled  with beings like Him, the great ills of society would be at once relieved. For  all coercion, injury, selfishness, and revenge, and all the wrongs and the  greatest sufferings  p. 719  of life, would disappear at once. These human years would be happy; and  the eternal ages would roll on in brightness and beauty; and the still, sad  music of Humanity, that sounds through the world, now in the accents of  grief, and now in pensive melancholy, would change to anthems, sounding  to the March of Time, and bursting out from the heart of the world.

If every man were a perfect imitator of that Great, Wise, Good Teacher,  clothed with all His faith and all His virtues, how the circle of Life's ills and  trials would be narrowed! The sensual passions would assail the heart in  vain. Want would no longer successfully tempt men to act wrongly, nor  curiosity to do rashly. Ambition, spreading before men its Kingdoms and its 
Thrones, and offices and honors, would cause none to swerve from their  great allegiance. Injury and insult would be shamed by forgiveness.

"Father," men would say, "forgive them; for they know not what they do." 
None would seek to be enriched at another's loss or expense. Every man  would feel that the whole human race were his brothers. All sorrow and pain  and anguish would be soothed by a perfect faith and an entire trust in the 
Infinite Goodness of God. The world around us would be new, and the 
Heavens above us; for here, and there, and everywhere, through all the  ample glories and splendors of the Universe, all men would recognize and  feel the presence and the beneficent care of a loving Father.

However the Mason may believe as to creeds, and churches, and miracles,  and missions from Heaven, he must admit that the Life and character of Him  who taught in Galilee, and fragments of Whose teachings have come down  to us, are worthy of all imitation. That Life is an undenied and undeniable 
Gospel. Its teachings cannot be passed by and discarded. All must admit that  it would be happiness to follow and perfection to imitate Him. None ever  felt for Him a sincere emotion of contempt, nor in anger accused Him of  sophistry, nor saw immorality lurking in His doctrines; however they may  judge of those who succeeded Him, and claimed to be His apostles. Divine  or human, inspired or only a reforming Essene, it must be agreed that His  teachings are far nobler, far purer, far less alloyed with error and  imperfection, far less of the earth earthly, than those of Socrates, Plato, 
Seneca, or Mahomet, or any other of the great moralists and Reformers of  the world.  p. 720

If our aims went as completely as His beyond personal care and selfish  gratification; if our thoughts and words and actions were as entirely  employed upon the great work of benefiting our kind—the true work which  we have been placed here to do-as His were; if our nature were as gentle  and as tender as His; and if society, country, kindred, friendship, and home  were as dear to us as they were to Him, we should be at once relieved of  more than half the difficulties and the diseased and painful affections of our  lives. Simple obedience to rectitude, instead of self-interest; simple self¬  culture and self-improvement, instead of constant cultivation of the good  opinion of others; single-hearted aims and purposes, instead of improper  objects, sought and approached by devious and crooked ways, would free  our meditations of many disturbing and irritating questions.

Not to renounce the nobler and better affections of our natures, nor  happiness, nor our just dues of love and honor from men; not to vilify  ourselves, nor to renounce our self-respect, nor a just and reasonable sense  of our merits and deserts, nor our own righteousness of virtue, does 
Masonry require, nor would our imitation of Him require; but to renounce  our vices, our faults, our passions, our self-flattering delusions; to forego all  outward advantages, which are to be gained only through a sacrifice of our  inward integrity, or by anxious and petty contrivances and appliances; to  choose and keep the better part; to secure that, and let the worst take care of  itself; to keep a good conscience, and let opinion come and go as it will; to  retain a lofty self-respect, and let low self-indulgence go; to keep inward  happiness, and let outward advantages hold a subordinate place; to renounce  our selfishness, and that eternal anxiety as to what we are to have, and what  men think of us; and be content with the plenitude of God's great mercies,  and so to be happy. For it is the inordinate devotion to self, and  consideration of self, that is ever a stumbling-block in the way; that spreads  questions, snares, and difficulties around us, darkens the way of Providence,  and makes the world a far less happy one to us than it might be.

As He taught, so Masonry teaches, affection to our kindred, tenderness to  our friends, gentleness and forbearance toward our inferiors, pity for the  suffering, forgiveness of our enemies; and to wear an affectionate nature and  gentle disposition as the garment of our life, investing pain, and toil, and  agony, and even death.  p. 721  with a serene and holy beauty. It does not teach us to wrap ourselves in the  garments of reserve and pride, to care nothing for the world because it cares  nothing for us, to withdraw our thoughts from society because it does us not  justice, and see how patiently we can live within the confines of our own  bosoms, or in quiet communion, through books, with the mighty dead. No  man ever found peace or light in that way. Every relation, of hate, scorn, or  neglect, to mankind, is full of vexation and torment. There is nothing to do  with men but to love them, to admire their virtues, pity and bear with their  faults, and forgive their injuries. To hate your adversary will not help you;  to kill him will help you still less: nothing within the compass of the 
Universe will help you, but to pity, forgive, and love him.

If we possessed His gentle and affectionate disposition, His love and  compassion for all that err and all that offend, how many difficulties, both  within and without us, would they relieve! How many depressed minds  should we console! How many troubles in society should we compose! How  many emnities soften! How many a knot of mystery and misunderstanding  would be untied by a single word, spoken in simple and confiding truth!

How many a rough path would be made smooth, and how many a crooked  path be made straight! Very many places, now solitary, would be made glad;  very many dark places be filled with light.

Morality has its axioms, like the other sciences; and these axioms are, in all  languages, justly termed moral truths. Moral truths, considered in  themselves, are equally as certain as mathematical truths. Given the idea of  a deposit, the idea of keeping it faithfully is attached to it as necessarily, as  to the idea of q, triangle is attached the idea that its three angles are equal to  two right angles. You may violate a deposit; but in doing so, do not imagine  that you change the nature of things, or make what is in itself a deposit  become your own property. The two ideas exclude each other. You have but  a false semblance of property: and all the efforts of the passions, all the  sophisms of interest, will not overturn essential differences. Therefore it is  that a moral truth is so imperious; because, like all truth, it is what it is, and  shapes itself to please no caprice. Always the same, and always present,  little as we may like it, it inexorably condemns, with a voice always heard,  but not always regarded, the insensate and guilty  p. 722  will which thinks to prevent its existing, by denying, or rather by pretending  to deny, its existence.

The moral truths are distinguished from other truths by this singular  characteristic: so soon as we perceive them, they appear to us as the rule of  our conduct. If it is true that a deposit is made in order to be returned to its  legitimate possessor, it must be returned. To the necessity of believing the  truth, the necessity of practising it is added.

The necessity of practising the moral truths is obligation. The moral truths,  necessary to the eye of reason, are obligatory on the will. The moral  obligation, like the moral truth which is its basis, is absolute. As necessary  truths are not more or less necessary, so obligation is not more or less  obligatory. There are degrees of importance among different obligations;  but there are no degrees in the obligation itself. One is not nearly obliged,  almost obliged; but wholly so, or not at all. If there be any place of refuge  against the obligation, it ceases to exist.

If the obligation is absolute , it is immutable and universal. For if what is  obligation to-day may not be so to-morrow, if what is obligatory for me may  not be so for you, the obligation differing from itself, it would be relative  and contingent. This fact of absolute, immutable, universal obligation is  certain and manifest. The good is the foundation of obligation. If it be not,  obligation has no foundation; and that is impossible. If one act ought to be  done, and another ought not, it must be because evidently there is an  essential difference between the two acts. If one be not good and the other  bad, the obligation imposed on us is arbitrary.

To make the Good a consequence, of anything whatever, is to annihilate it.

It is the first, or it is nothing. When we ask an honest man why, despite his  urgent necessities, he has respected the sanctity of a deposit, he answers,  because it was his duty. Asked why it was his duty, he answers, because it  was right, was just, was good. Beyond that there is no answer to be made,  but there is also no question to be asked. No one pennits a duty to be  imposed on him without giving himself a reason for it: but when it is  admitted that the duty is commanded by justice, the mind is satisfied; for it  has arrived at a principle beyond which there is nothing to seek, justice  being its own principle. The primary truths include their own reason: and  justice, the essential distinction between good and evil, is the first truth of  morality.  p. 723

Justice is not a consequence', because we cannot ascend to any principle  above it. Moral truth forces itself on man, and does not emanate from him. It  no more becomes subjective, by appearing to us obligatory, than truth does  by appearing to us necessary. It is in the very nature of the true and the good  that we must seek for the reason of necessity and obligation. Obligation is  founded on the necessary distinction between the good and the evil; and it is  itself the foundation of liberty. If man has his duties to perform, he must  have the faculty of accomplishing them, of resisting desire, passion, and  interest, in order to obey the law. He must be free; therefore he is so, or  human nature is in contradiction with itself. The certainty of the obligation  involves the corresponding certainty of free will.

It is the will that is free: though sometimes that will may be ineffectual. The  power to do must not be confounded with the power to will. The former may  be limited', the latter is sovereign. The external effects may be prevented: the  resolution itself cannot. Of this sovereign power of the will we are  conscious. We feel in ourselves, before it becomes determinate, the force  which can determine itself in one way or another. At the same time when I  will this or that, I am equally conscious that I can will the contrary. I am  conscious that I am the master of my resolution: that I may check it,  continue it, retake it. When the act has ceased, the consciousness of the  power which produced if has not. That consciousness and the power remain,  superior to all the manifestations of the power. Wherefore free-will is the  essential and ever-subsisting attribute of the will itself.

At the same time that we judge that a free agent has done a good or a bad  act, we form another judgment, as necessary as the first; that if he has done  well, he deserves compensation; if ill, punishment. That judgment may be  expressed in a manner more or less vivid, according as it is mingled with  sentiments more or less ardent. Sometimes it will be a merely kind feeling  toward a virtuous agent, and moderately hostile to a guilty one; sometimes  enthusiasm or indignation. The judgment of merit and demerit is intimately  connected with the judgment of good and evil. Merit is the natural right  which we have to be rewarded; demerit the natural right which others have  to punish us. But whether the reward is received, or the punishment  undergone, or not, the merit or demerit equally subsists. Punishment and  reward are  p. 724  the satisfaction of merit and demerit, but do not constitute them. Take away  the former, and the latter continue. Take away the latter, and there are no  longer real rewards or punishments. When a base man encompasses our  merited honors, he has obtained but the mere appearance of a reward; a  mere material advantage. The reward is essentially moral; and its value is  independent of its form. One of those simple crowns of oak with which the  early Romans rewarded heroism, was of more real value than all the wealth  of the world, when it was the sign of the gratitude and admiration of a  people. Reward accorded to merit is a debt; without merit it is an alms or a  theft.

The Good is good in itself, and to be accomplished, whatever the  consequences. The results of the Good cannot but be fortunate. Happiness,  separated from the Good, is but a fact to which no moral idea is attached. As  an effect of the Good, it enters into the moral order, completes and crowns  it.

Virtue without happiness, and crime without misery, is a contradiction and  disorder. If virtue suppose sacrifice (that is, suffering), eternal justice  requires that sacrifice generously accepted and courageously borne, shall  have for its reward the same happiness that was sacrificed: and it also  requires that crime shall be punished with unhappiness, for the guilty  happiness which it attempted to procure.

This law that attaches pleasure and sorrow to the good and the evil, is, in  general, accomplished even here below. For order rules in the world;  because the world lasts. Is that order sometimes disturbed? Are happiness  and sorrow not always distributed in legitimate proportion to crime and  virtue? The absolute judgment of the Good, the absolute judgment of  obligation, the absolute judgment of merit and demerit, continue to subsist,  inviolable and imprescriptible; and we cannot help but believe that He Who  has implanted in us the sentiment and idea of order, cannot therein Himself  be wanting; and that He will, sooner or later, re-establish the holy harmony  of virtue and happiness, by means belonging to Himself.

The Judgment of the Good, the decision that such a thing is goad, and that  such another is not,-this is the primitive fact, and reposes on itself. By its  intimate resemblances to the judgment of the true and the beautiful, it shows  us the secret affinities of morality, metaphysics, and esthetics. The good, so  especially  p. 725  united to the true, is distinguished from it, only because it is truth put in  practice. The good is obligatory. These are two indivisible but not identical  ideas. The idea of obligation reposes on the idea of the Good. In this  intimate alliance, the former borrows from the latter its universal and  absolute character.

The obligatory good is the moral law. That is the foundation of all morality. 
By it we separate ourselves from the morality of interest and the morality of  sentiment. We admit the existence of those facts, and their influence; but we  do not assign them the same rank.

To the moral law, in the reason of man, corresponds liberty in action.

Liberty is deduced from obligation, and is a fact irresistibly evident. Man, as  free, and subject to obligation, is a moral person; and that involves the idea  of rights. To these ideas is added that of merit and demerit; which supposes  the distinction between good and evil, obligation and liberty; and creates the  idea of reward and punishment.

The sentiments play no unimportant part in morality. All the moral  judgments are accompanied by sentiments that respond to them. From the  secret sources of enthusiasm the human will draws the mysterious virtue  that makes heroes. Truth enlightens and illumines. Sentiment wanns and  inclines to action. Interest also bears its part; and the hope of happiness is  the work of God, and one of the motive powers of human action.

Such is the admirable economy of the moral constitution of man. His

Supreme Object, the Good: his law, Virtue, which often imposes upon him  suffering, thus making him to excel all other created beings known to us.

But this law is harsh, and in contradiction with the instinctive desire for  happiness. Wherefore the Beneficent Author of his being has placed in his  soul, by the side of the severe law of duty, the sweet, delightful force of  sentiment. Generally he attaches happiness to virtue; and for the exceptions,  for such there are, he has placed Hope at the end of the journey to be  travelled.

Thus there is a side on which morality touches religion. It is a sublime  necessity of Humanity to see in God the Legislator supremely wise, the 
Witness always present, the infallible judge of virtue. The human mind, ever  climbing up to God, would deem the foundations of morality too unstable, if  it did not place in God the first principle of the moral law. Wishing to give  to the  p. 726  moral law a religious character, we run the risk of taking from it its moral  character. We may refer it so entirely to God as to make His will an  arbitrary degree. But the will of God, whence we deduce morality, in order  to give it authority, itself has no moral authority, except as it is just. The 
Good comes from the will of God alone; but from His will, in so far as it is  the expression of His wisdom and justice. The Eternal Justice of God is the  sole foundation of Justice, such as Humanity perceives and practises it. The 
Good, duty, merit and demerit, are referred to God, as everything is referred  to him; but they have none the less a proper evidence and authority.

Religion is the crown of Morality, not its base. The base of Morality is in  itself.

The Moral Code of Masonry is still more extensive than that developed by  philosophy. To the requisitions of the law of Nature and the law of God, it  adds the imperative obligation of a con-tract. Upon entering the Order, the 
Initiate binds to himself every Mason in the world. Once enrolled among the  children of Light, every Mason on earth becomes his brother, and owes him  the duties, the kindnesses, and the sympathies of a brother. On every one he  may call for assistance in need, protection against danger, sympathy in  sorrow, attention in sickness, and decent burial after death. There is not a 
Mason in the world who is not bound to go to his relief, when he is in  danger, if there be a greater probability of saving his life than of losing his  own. No Mason can wrong him to the value of anything, knowingly,  himself, nor suffer it to be done by others, if it be in his power to prevent it. 
No Mason can speak evil of him, to his face or behind his back. Every 
Mason must keep his lawful secrets, and aid him in his business, defend his  character when unjustly assailed, and protect, counsel, and assist his widow  and his otphans. What so many thousands owe to him, he owes to each of  them. He has solemnly bound himself to be ever ready to discharge this  sacred debt. If he fails to do it he is dishonest and forsworn; and it is an  unparalleled meanness in him to obtain good offices by false pretences, to  receive kindness and service, rendered him under the confident expectation  that he will in his turn render the same, and then to disappoint, without  ample reason, that just expectation.

Masonry holds him also, by his solemn promise, to a purer life, a nobler  generosity, a more perfect charity of opinion and action; to be tolerant,  catholic in his love for his race, ardent in his zeal  p. 727  for the interest of mankind, the advancement and progress of humanity.

Such are, we think, the Philosophy and the Morality, such the TRUE 
WORD of a Master Mason.

The world, the ancients believed, was governed by Seven Secondary 
Causes; and these were the universal forces, known to the Hebrews by the  plural name ELOHIM. These forces, analogous and contrary one to the  other, produce equilibrium by their contrasts, and regulate the movements of  the spheres. The Hebrews called them the Seven great Archangels, and gave  them names, each of which, being a combination of another word with AL,  the first Phoenician Nature-God, considered as the Principle of Light,  represented them as His manifestations. Other peoples assigned to these 
Spirits the government of the Seven Planets then known, and gave them the  names of their great divinities.

So, in the Kabala, the last Seven Sephiroth constituted ATIK YOMIN, the 
Ancient of Day s; and these, as well as the Seven planets, correspond with  the Seven colors separated by the prism, and the Seven notes of the musical  octave.

Seven is the sacred number in all theogonies and all symbols, because it is  composed of 3 and 4. It represents the magical, power in its full force. It is  the Spirit assisted by all the Elementary Powers, the Soul served by Nature,  the Holy Empire spoken of in the clavicules of Solomon, symbolized by a  warrior, crowned, bearing a triangle on his cuirass, and standing on a cube,  to which are harnessed two Sphinxes, one white and the other black, pulling  contrary ways, and turning the head to look backward.

The vices are Seven, like the virtues; and the latter were anciently  symbolized by the Seven Celestial bodies then known as planets. FAITH, as  the converse of arrogant Confidence, was represented by the Sun; HOPE,  enemy of Avarice, by the Moon; CHARITY, opposed to Luxury, by Venus; 
FORCE, stronger than Rage, by Mars; PRUDENCE, the opposite of 
Indolence, by Mercury; TEMPERANCE, the antipodes of Gluttony, by 
Saturn; and JUSTICE, the opposite of Envy, by Jupiter.

The Kabalistic book of the Apocalypse is represented as closed with Seven 
Seals. In it we find the Seven genii of the Ancient Mythologies; and the  doctrine concealed under its emblems is the pure Kabala, already lost by the 
Pharisees at the advent of the Saviour. The pictures that follow in this  wondrous epic are so  p. 728  many pantacles, of which the numbers 3, 4, 7, and 12 are the keys.

The Cherub, or symbolic bull, which Moses places at the gate of the Edenic  world, holding a blazing sword, is a Sphinx, with the body of a bull and a  human head; the old Assyrian Sphinx whereof the combat and victory of 
Mithras were the hieroglyphic analysis. This armed Sphinx represents the  law of the Mystery, which keeps watch at the door of initiation, to repulse  the Profane. It also represents the grand Magical Mystery, all the elements  whereof the number 7 expresses, still without giving its last word. This 
"unspeakable word” of the Sages of the school of Alexandria, this word,  which the Hebrew Kabalists wrote; HlIT [IHUH], and translated by Kn’KnN, 
[ARARITA,] so expressing the threefoldness of the Secondary Principle, the  dualism of the middle ones, and the Unity as well of the first Principle as of  the end; and also the junction of the number 3 with the number 4 in a word  composed of four letters, but formed of seven by one triplicate and two  repeated,—this word is pronounced Ararita.

The vowels in the Greek language are also Seven in number, and were used  to designate the Seven planets.

Tsadok or Sydyc was the Supreme God in Phoenicia. His Seven Sons were  probably the Seven Cabiri; and he was the Heptaktis, the God of Seven 
Rays.

Kronos, the Greek Saturn, Philo makes Sanchoniathon say, had six sons,  and by Astarte Seven daughters, the Titanides. The Persians adored Ahura 
Masda or Ormuzd and the Six Amshaspands, the first three of whom were 
Lords of the Empires of Light, Fire, and Splendor; the Babylonians, Bal and  the Gods; the Chinese, Shangti, and the Six Chief Spirits; and the Greeks, 
Kronos, and the Six great Male Gods, his progeny, Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, 
Ares, Hephaistos, and Hermes; while the female deities were also Seven: 
Rhea, wife of Kronos, Here, Athene, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hestia, and 
Demetei. In the Orphic Theogony, Gaia produced the fourteen Titans, Seven  male and Seven female, Kronos being the most potent of the males; and as  the number Seven appears in these, nine by threes, or the triple triangle, is  found in the three Moerae or Fates, the three Centimanes, and the three 
Cyclopes, offspring of Ouranos and Gaia, or Heaven and Earth.

The metals, like the colors, were deemed to be Seven in number, and a metal  and color were assigned to each planet. Of  p. 729  the metals, gold was assigned to the Sun and silver to the Moon.

The palace of Deioces in Ecbatana had Seven circular walls of different  colors, the two innermost having their battlements covered respectively with  silvering and gilding.

And the Seven Spheres of Borsippa were represented by the Seven Stories,  each of a different color, of the tower or truncated pyramid of Bel at 
Babylon.

Pharaoh saw in his dream, which Joseph interpreted, Seven ears of wheat on  one stalk, full and good, and after them Seven ears, withered, thin, and  blasted with the East wind; and the Seven thin ears devoured the Seven  good ears; and Joseph interpreted these to mean Seven years of plenty  succeeded by Seven years of famine.

Connected with this Ebn Hesham relates that a flood of rain laid bare to  view a sepulchre in Yemen, in which lay a woman having on her neck Seven  collars of pearls, and on her hands and feet bracelets and ankle-rings and  armlets, Seven on each, with an inscription on a tablet showing that, after  attempting in vain to purchase grain of Joseph, she, Tajah, daughter of Dzu 
Shefar, and her people, died of famine.

Hear again the words of an adept, who had profoundly studied the mysteries  of science, and wrote, as the Ancient Oracles spoke, in enigmas; but who  knew that the theory of mechanical forces and of the materiality of the most  potent agents of Divinity, explains nothing, and ought to satisfy no one!

Through the veil of all the hieratic and mystic allegories of the ancient  dogmas, under the seal of all the sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or 
Thebes, on the worn stones of the ancient temples, and on the blackened  face of the sphinx of Assyria or Egypt, in the monstrous or marvellous  pictures which the sacred pages of the Vedas translate for the believers of 
India, in the strange emblems of our old books of alchemy, in the  ceremonies of reception practised by all the mysterious Societies, we find  the traces of a doctrine, everywhere the same, and everywhere carefully  concealed. The occult philosophy seems to have been the nurse or the  godmother of all religions, the secret lever of all the intellectual forces, the  key of all divine obscurities, and the absolute Queen of Society, in the ages  when it was exclusively reserved for the education of the Priests and Kings.  p. 730

It had reigned in Persia with the Magi, who perished one day, as the masters  of the world had perished, for having abused their power. It had endowed 
India with the most marvellous traditions, and an incredible luxury of  poetry, grace, and terror in its emblems: it had civilized Greece by the  sounds of the lyre of Otpheus: it hid the principles of all the sciences, and of  the whole progression of the human spirit, in the audacious calculations of 
Pythagoras: fable teemed with its miracles; and history, when it undertook  to judge of this unknown power, confounded itself with fable: it shook or  enfeebled empires by its oracles; made tyrants turn pale on their thrones, and  ruled over all minds by means of curiosity or fear. To this science, said the  crowd, nothing is impossible; it commands the elements, knows the  language of the planets, and controls the movements of the stars; the moon,  at its voice, falls, reeking with blood, from Heaven; the dead rise upright on  their graves, and shape into fatal words the wind that breathes through their  skulls. Controller of Love or Hate, this science can at pleasure confer on  human hearts Paradise or Hell: it disposes at will of all forms, and  distributes beauty or deformity as it pleases: it changes in turn, with the rod  of Circe, men into brutes and animals into men: it even disposes of Life or  of Death, and can bestow on its adepts riches by the transmutation of metals,  and immortality by its quintessence and elixir, compounded of gold and  light.

This is what magic had been, from Zoroaster to Manes, from Otpheus to 
Apollonius Thyaneus; when positive Christianity, triumphing over the  splendid dreams and gigantic aspirations of the school of Alexandria,  publicly crushed this philosophy with its anathemas, and compelled it to  become more occult and more mysterious than ever.

At the bottom of magic, nevertheless, was science, as at the bottom of 
Christianity there was love; and in the Evangelic Symbols we see the  incarnate WORD adored in its infancy by three magi whom a star guides 
(the ternary and the sign of the microcosm), and receiving from them gold  frankincense, and myrrh; another mysterious ternary, under the emblem  whereof are allegorically contained the highest secrets of the Kabala.

Christianity should not have hated magic; but human ignorance always fears  the unknown. Science was obliged to conceal itself, to avoid the  impassioned aggressions of a blind love. It  p. 731  enveloped itself in new hieroglyphs, concealed its efforts, disguised its  hopes. Then was created the jargon of alchemy, a continual deception for  the vulgar herd, greedy of gold, and a living language for the true disciples  of Hermes alone.

Resorting to Masonry, the alchemists there invented Degrees, and partly  unveiled their doctrine to their Initiates; not by the language of their  receptions, but by oral instruction afterward; for their rituals, to one who has  not the key, are but incomprehensible and absurd jargon.

Among the sacred books of the Christians are two works which the infallible  church does not pretend to understand, and never attempts to explain,—the  prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse; two cabalistic clavicules, reserved,  no doubt, in Heaven, for the exposition of the Magian kings; closed with 
Seven seals for all faithful believers; and perfectly clear to the unbeliever  initiated in the occult sciences.

For Christians, and in their opinion, the scientific and magical clavicules of 
Solomon are lost. Nevertheless, it is certain that, in the domain of  intelligence governed by the WORD, nothing that is written is lost. Only  those things which men cease to understand no longer exist for them, at least  as WORD; then they enter into the domain of enigmas and mystery.

The mysterious founder of the Christian Church was saluted in His cradle by  the three Magi, that is to say by the hieratic ambassadors from the three  parts of the known world, and from the three analogical worlds of the occult  philosophy.

In the school of Alexandria, Magic and Christianity almost take each other  by the hand under the auspices of Ammonius Saccos and Plato. The dogma  of Hermes is found almost entire in the writings attributed to Dionysius the 
Areopagite. Synesius traces the plan of a treatise on dreams, which was  subsequently to be commented on by Cardan, and composes hymns which  might serve for the liturgy of the Church of Swedenborg, if a church of  illuminati could have a liturgy.

To this epoch of ardent abstractions and impassioned logomachies belongs  the philosophical reign of Julian, an illuminatus and Initiate of the first  order, who believed in the unity of God and the universal Dogma of the 
Trinity, and regretted the loss of nothing of the old world but its magnificent  symbols and too graceful images. He was no Pagan, but a Gnostic, infected  with  p. 731  the allegories of Grecian polytheism, and whose misfortune it was to find  the name of Jesus Christ less sonorous than that of Orpheus.

We may be sure that so soon as Religion and Philosophy become distinct  departments, the mental activity of the age is in advance of its Faith; and  that, though habit may sustain the latter for a time, its vitality is gone.

The dunces who led primitive Christianity astray, by substituting faith for  science, reverie for experience, the fantastic for the reality; and the  inquisitors who for so many ages waged against Magism a war of  extermination, have succeeded in shrouding in darkness the ancient  discoveries of the human mind; so that we now grope in the dark to find  again the key of the phenomena of nature. But all natural phenomena  depend on a single and immutable law, represented by the philosophal stone  and its symbolic form, which is that of a cube. This law, expressed in the 
Kabala by the number 4, furnished the Hebrews with all the mysteries of  their divine Tetragram.

Everything is contained in that word of four letters. It is the Azof of the 
Alchemists, the Thot of the Bohemians, the Taro of the Kabalists. It supplies  to the Adept the last word of the human Sciences, and the Key of the Divine 
Power: but he alone understands how to avail himself of it who  comprehends the necessity of never revealing it. If (Edipus, in place of  slaying the Sphynx, had conquered it, and driven it into Thebes harnessed to  his chariot, he would have been King, without incest, calamities, or exile. If 
Psyche, by submission and caresses, had persuaded Love to reveal himself,  she would never have lost him. Love is one of the mythological images of  the grand secret and the grand agent, because it expresses at once an action  and a passion, a void and a plenitude, an arrow and a wound. The Initiates  ought to understand this, and, lest the profane should overhear, Masonry  never says too much.

When Science had been overcome in Alexandria by the fanaticism of the  murderers of Hypatia, it became Christian, or, rather, it concealed itself  under Christian disguises, with Ammonius, Synosius, and the author of the  books of Dionysius the Areopagite. Then it was necessary to win the pardon  of miracles by the appearances of superstition, and of science by a language  unintelligible. Hieroglyphic writing was revived, and pantacles and  p. 733  characters were invented, that summed up a whole doctrine in a sign, a  whole series of tendencies and revelations in a word. What was the object of  the aspirants to knowledge? They sought for the secret of the great work, or  the Philosophal Stone, or the perpetual motion, or the squaring of the circle,  or the universal medicine; formulas which often saved them from  persecution and general ill-will, by exposing them to the charge of folly; and  each of which expressed one of the forces of the grand magical secret. This  lasted until the time of the Roman de la Rose, which also expresses the  mysterious and magical meaning of the poem of Dante, borrowed from the 
High Kabalah, that immense and concealed source of the universal  philosophy.

It is not strange that man knows but little of the powers of the human will,  and imperfectly appreciates them; since he knows nothing as to the nature of  the will and its mode of operation. That his own will can move his arm, or  compel another to obey him; that his thoughts, symbolically expressed by  the signs of writing, can influence and lead other men, are mysteries as  incomprehensible to him, as that the will of Deity could effect the creation  of a Universe.

The powers of the will are as yet chiefly indefinite and unknown. Whether a  multitude of well-established phenomena are to be ascribed to the power of  the will alone, or to magnetism or some other natural agent, is a point as yet  unsettled; but it is agreed by all that a concentrated effort of the will is in  every case necessary to success.

That the phenomena are real is not to be doubted, unless credit is no longer  to be given to human testimony; and if they are real, there is no reason for  doubting the exercise heretofore, by many adepts, of the powers that were  then termed magical. Nothing is better vouched for than the extraordinary  performances of the Brahmins. No religion is supported by stronger  testimony; nor has any one ever even attempted to explain what may well be  termed their miracles.

How far, in this life, the mind and soul can act without and in-dependently  of the body, no one as yet knows. That the will can act at all without bodily  contact, and the phenomena of dreams, are mysteries that confound the  wisest and most learned, whose explanations are but a Babel of words.

Man as yet knows little of the forces of nature. Surrounded,  p. 734  controlled, and governed by them, while he vainly thinks himself  independent, not only of his race, but the universal nature and her infinite  manifold forces, he is the slave of these forces, unless he becomes their  master. He can neither ignore their existence nor be simply their neighbor.

There is in nature one most potent force, by means whereof a single man,  who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct it, could  revolutionize and change the face of the world.

This force was known to the ancients. It is a universal agent, whose 
Supreme law is equilibrium; and whereby, if science can but learn how to  control it, it will be possible to change the order of the Seasons, to produce  in night the phenomena of day, to send a thought in an instant round the  world, to heal or slay at a distance, to give our words universal success, and  make them reverberate everywhere.

This agent, partially revealed by the blind guesses of the disciples of 
Mesmer, is precisely what the Adepts of the middle ages called the  elementary matter of the great work. The Gnostics held that it composed the  igneous body of the Holy Spirit; and it was adored in the secret rites of the 
Sabbat or the Temple, under the hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the  hermaphroditic goat of Mendes.

There is a Life-Principle of the world, a universal agent, wherein are two  natures and a double current, of love and wrath. This ambient fluid  penetrates everything. It is a ray detached from the glory of the Sun, and  fixed by the weight of the atmosphere and the central attraction. It is the  body of the Holy Spirit, the universal Agent, the Serpent devouring his own  tail. With this electro-magnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, the  ancients and the alchemists were familiar. Of this agent, that phase of  modern ignorance tenned physical science talks incoherently, knowing  naught of it save its effects; and theology might apply to it all its pretended  definitions of spirit. Quiescent, it is appreciable by no human sense;  disturbed or in movement, none can explain its mode of action; and to term  it a "fluid," and speak of its "currents," is but to veil a profound ignorance  under a cloud of words.

Force attracts force, life attracts life, health attracts health. It is a law of  nature.  p. 735

If two children live together, and still more if they sleep together, and one is  feeble and the other strong, the strong will absorb the feeble, and the latter  will perish.

In schools, some pupils absorb the intellect of the others, and in every circle  of men some one individual is soon found, who possesses himself of the  wills of the others.

Enthralments by currents is very common; and one is carried away by the  crowd, in morals as in physics. The human will has an almost absolute  power in determining one's acts; and every external demonstration of a will  has an influence on external things.

Tissot ascribed most maladies to disorders of the will, or the perverse  influences of the wills of others. We become subject to the wills of others by  the analogies of our inclinations, and still more by those of our defects. To  caress the weaknesses of an individual, is to possess ourself of him, and  make of him an instrument in the order of the same errors or depravations. 
But when two natures, analogical in defects, are subordinated one to the  other, there is effected a kind of substitution of the stronger instead of the  weaker, and a genuine imprisonment of one mind by the other. Often the  weaker struggles, and would fain revolt; and then falls lower than ever in  servitude.

We each have some dominant defect, by which the enemy can grasp us. In  some it is vanity, in others indolence, in most egotism. Let a cunning and  evil spirit possess himself of this, and you are lost. Then you become, not  foolish, nor an idiot, but positively a lunatic, the slave of an impulse front  without. You have an instinctive horror for everything that could restore you  to reason, and will not even listen to representations that contravene your  insanity.

Miracles are the natural effects of exceptional causes.

The immediate action of the human will on bodies, or at least this action  exercised without visible means, constitutes a miracle in the physical order.

The influence exercised on wills or intellects, suddenly or within a given  time, and capable of taking captive the thoughts, changing the firmest  resolutions, paralyzing the most violent passions, constitutes a miracle in the  moral order.

The common error in relation to miracles is, to regard them as effects  without causes; as contradictions of nature; as sudden fictions of the Divine  imagination; and men do not reflect that a  p. 736  single miracle of this sort would break the universal harmony and re-plunge  the Universe into Chaos.

There are miracles impossible to God Himself: absurd miracles are so. If 
God could be absurd for a single instant, neither He nor the Universe would  exist an instant afterward. To expect of the Divine Free-Will an effect whose  cause is unacknowledged or does not exist, is what is tenned tempting God. 
It is to precipitate one's self into the void.

God acts by His works: in Heaven, by angels; on earth, by men.

In the heaven of human conceptions, it is humanity that creates God; and  men think that God has made them in His image, because they make Him in  theirs.

The domain of man is all corporeal nature, visible on earth; and if he does  not rule the planets or the stars, he can at least calculate their movement,  measure their distances, and identify his will with their influence: he can  modify the atmosphere, act to a certain point on the seasons, cure and afflict  with sickness other men, preserve life and cause death.

The absolute in reason and will is the greatest power which it is given to  men to attain; and it is by means of this power that what the multitude  admires under the name of miracles, are effected.

POWER is the wise use of the will, which makes Fatality itself serve to  accomplish the purposes of Sages.

Omnipotence is the most absolute Liberty; and absolute Liberty cannot exist  without a perfect equilibrium; and the columns JACHIN and BOAZ are also  the unlimited POWER and SPLENDOR OF PERFECTION of the Deity,  the seventh and eighth SEPF1IROTF1 of the Kabalah, from whose  equilibrium result the eternal permanence and Stability of His plans and  works, and of that perfect Success and undivided, unlimited Dominion,  which are the ninth and tenth SEPF1IROTH, and of which the Temple of 
Solomon, in its stately symmetry, erected without the sound of any tool of  metal being heard, is to us a symbol. "For Thine," says the Most Perfect of 
Prayers, "is the DOMINION, the POWER, and the GLORY, during all the  ages! Amen!"

The ABSOLUTE is the very necessity of BEING, the immutable law of 
Reason and of Truth. It is THAT WHICH IS. BUT THAT WHICH IS is in  some sort before HE WHO IS. God Himself is not without a reason of  existence. He does not exist accidentally. He could not not have been. His 
Existence, then, is necessitated.  p. 737  is necessary. He can exist only in virtue of a Supreme and inevitable 
REASON. That REASON, then, is THE ABSOLUTE; for it is in IT we  must believe, if we would that our faith should have a reasonable and solid  basis. It has been said in our times, that God is a Hypothesis; but Absolute 
Reason is not one: it is essential to Existence.

Saint Thomas said, "A thing is not just because God wills it, BUT GOD 
WILLS IT BECAUSE IT IS JUST." If he had deduced all the consequences  of this fine thought, he would have discovered the true Philosopher's Stone;  the magical elixir, to convert all the trials of the world into golden mercies. 
Precisely as it is a necessity for God to BE, so it is a necessity for Him to be  just, loving, and merciful. He cannot be unjust, cruel, merciless. He cannot  repeal the law of right and wrong, of merit and demerit; for the moral laws  are as absolute as the physical laws. There are impossible things. As it is  impossible to make two and two be five and not four; as it is impossible to  make a thing be and not be at the same time; so it is impossible for the Deity  to make crime a merit, and love and gratitude crimes. So, too, it was  impossible to make Man perfect, with his bodily senses and appetites, as it  was to make his nerves susceptible of pleasure and not also of pain.

Therefore, according to the idea of Saint Thomas, the moral laws are the  enactments of the Divine WILL, only because they are the decisions of the 
Absolute WISDOM and REASON, and the Revelations of the Divine 
NATURE. In this alone consists the right of Deity to enact them; and thus  only do we attain the certainty in Faith that the Universe is one Harmony.

To believe in the Reason of God, and in the God of Reason, is to make 
Atheism impossible. It is the Idolaters who have made the Atheists.

Analogy gives the Sage all the forces of Nature. It is the key of the Grand 
Arcanum, the root of the Tree of Life, the science of Good and Evil.

The Absolute, is REASON. Reason IS, by means of Itself. It IS BECAUSE 
IT IS, and not because we suppose it. IT IS, where nothing exists ; but  nothing could possibly exist without IT. Reason is Necessity, Law, the Rule  of all Liberty, and the direction of every Initiative. If God IS, HE IS by 
Reason. The conception of an Absolute Deity, outside of, or independent of, 
Reason, is the IDOL of Black Magic, the PHANTOM of the Daemon.  p. 738

The Supreme Intelligence is necessarily rational. God, in philosophy, can be  no more than a Hypothesis; but a Hypothesis imposed by good sense on 
Human Reason. To personify the Absolute Reason, is to determine the 
Divine Ideal.

NECESSITY, LIBERTY, and REASON! Behold the great and Supreme 
Triangle of the Kabalists!

FATALITY, WILL, and POWER! Such is the magical ternary which, in  human things, corresponds with the Divine Triangle.

FATALITY is the inevitable linking together, in succession, of effects and  causes, in a given order.

WILL is the faculty that directs the forces of the Intellect, so as to reconcile  the liberty of persons with the necessity of things.

The argument from these premises must be made by yourself. Each one of  us does that. "Seek," say the Holy Writings, "and ye shall find." Yet  discussion is not forbidden; and without doubt the subject will be fully  treated of in your hearing hereafter. Affirmation, negation, discussion,-it is  by these the truth is attained.

To explore the great Mysteries of the Universe and seek to solve its  manifold enigmas, is the chief use of Thought, and constitutes the principal  distinction between Man and the animals. Accordingly, in all ages the 
Intellect has labored to understand and explain to itself the Nature of the 
Supreme Deity.

That one Reason and one Will created and governed the Universe was too  evident not to be at once admitted by the philosophers of all ages. It was the  ancient religions that sought to multiply gods. The Nature of the One Deity,  and the mode in which the Universe had its beginning, are questions that  have always been the racks in which the human intellect has been tortured:  and it is chiefly with these that the Kabalists have dealt.

It is true that, in one sense, we can have no actual knowledge of the 
Absolute Itself, the very Deity. Our means of obtaining what is commonly  termed actual knowledge, are our senses only. If to see and feel be  biowledge, we have none of our own Soul, of electricity, of magnetism. We  see and feel and taste an acid or an alkali, and know something of the  qualities of each; but it is only when we use them in combination with other  substances, and learn their effects, that we really begin to know their nature. 
It is the combination and experiments of Chemistry that give  p. 739  as a knowledge of the nature and powers of most animal and vegetable  substances. As these are cognizable by inspection by our senses, we may  partially know them by that alone: but the Soul, either of ourself or of  another, being beyond that cognizance, can only be known by the acts and  words which are its effects. Magnetism and electricity, when at rest, are  equally beyond the jurisdiction of the senses; and when they are in action,  we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell only their effects. We do not know what  they are, but only what they do. We can know the attributes of Deity only  through His manifestations. To ask anything more, is to ask, not knowledge,  but something else, for which we have no name. God is a Power; and we  know nothing of any Power itself, but only its effects, results, and action,  and what Reason teaches us by analogy;

In these later days, in laboring to escape from all material ideas in regard to 
Deity, we have so refined away our notions of GOD, as to have no idea of 
Him at all. In struggling to regard Him as a pure immaterial Spirit, we have  made the word Spirit synonymous with nothing, and can only say that He is  a Somewhat, with certain attributes, such as Power, Wisdom, and 
Intelligence. To compare Him to LIGHT, would now be deemed not only  unphilosophical, but the equivalent of Atheism; and we find it necessary to  excuse and pity the ancients for their inadequate and gross ideas of Deity,  expressed in considering Him as the Light-Principle, the invisible essence or  substance from which visible Light flows.

Yet our own holy writings continually speak of Him as Light; and therefore  the Tsabeans and the Kabala may well be pardoned for doing the same;  especially since they did not regard Him as the visible Light known to us,  but as the Primordial Ether-Ocean from which light flows.

Before the creation, did the Deity dwell alone in the Darkness, or in the 
Light? Did the Light co-exist with Him, or was it created, after an eternity of  darkness? and if it co-existed, was it an effluence from Him, filling all space  as He also filled it, He and the Light at the same time filling the same place  and every place?

MILTON says, expressing the Hebraic doctrine:

"Hail, Holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born,

Or of th’ Eternal, co-etemal beam!

May I express thee unblamed, since God is Light, p. 740 
And never but in unapproached Light 
Dwelt from Eternity; dwelt then in Thee,

Bright effluence of bright Essence uncreate."

"The LIGHT," says the Book Omschim, or Introduction to the Kabala, 
"Supremest of all things, and most Lofty, and Limitless, and styled 
INFINITE, can be attained unto by no cogitation or speculation; and its 
VERY SELF is evidently withdrawn and removed beyond all intellection. It 
WAS, before all things whatever, produced, created, formed, and made by 
Emanation; and in it was neither Time, Head, or Beginning; since it always  existed, and remains forever, without commencement or end."

"Before the Emanations flowed forth, and created things were created, the 
Supreme Light was infinitely extended, and filled the whole WHERE; so  that with reference to Light no vacuum could be affirmed, nor any  unoccupied space; but the ALL was filled with that Light of the Infinite,  thus extended, whereto in every regard was no end, inasmuch as nothing  was, except that extended Light, which, with a certain single and simple  equality, was everywhere like unto itself."

AINSOPH is called Light , says the Introduction to the Sohar, because it is  impossible to express it by any other word.

To conceive of God as an actuality, and not as a mere non-substance or  name, which involved non -existence, the Kabala, like the Egyptians,  imagined Him to be "a most occult Light," AUR; not our material and  visible Light, but the Substance out of which Light flows, the fire, as  relative to its heat and flame. Of this Light or Ether, the Sun was to the 
Tsabeans the only manifestation or out-shining, and as such it was  worshipped, and not as the type of dominion and power. God was the Phos 
Noeton, the Light cognizable only by the Intellect, the Light-Principle, the 
Light-Ether, from which souls emanate, and to which they return.

Light, Fire, and Flame, with the Phoenicians, were the sons of Kronos. They  are the Trinity in the Chaldasan Oracles, the AOR of the Deity, manifested  in flame, that issues out of the invisible Fire.

In the first three Persian Amshaspands, Lords of LIGHT, FIRE, and 
SPLENDOR, we recognize the AOR, ZOHAR, and ZAYO, Light, Splendor,  and Brightness, of the Kabalah. The first of these is termed AOR MUPALA, 
Wonderful or Hidden Light, unrevealed, undisplayed—which is KETHER,  the first Emanation or Sephirah,  p. 741  the Will of Deity: the second is NESTAR, Concealed— which is 
HAKEMAH, the second Sephirah, or the Intellectual Potence of the Deity:  and the third is METANOTSATS, coruscating— which is BINAH, the third 
Sephirah, or the intellectual producing capacity. In other words, they are 
THE VERY SUBSTANCE of light, in the Deity: Fire, which is that light,  limited and furnished with attributes, so that it can be revealed, but yet  remains unrevealed, and its splendor or out-shining, or the light that goes  out from the fire.

Masonry is a search after Light. That search leads us directly back, as you  see, to the Kabalah. In that ancient and little understood medley of absurdity  and philosophy, the Initiate will find the source of many doctrines; and may  in time come to understand the Hermetic philosophers, the Alchemists, all  the Anti-papal Thinkers of the Middle Ages, and Emanuel Swedenborg.

The Hansavati Rich, a celebrated Sanscrit Stanza, says: "He is Hansa (the 
Sun), dwelling in light; Vasu, the atmosphere dwelling in the finnament; the  invoker of the gods (Agni), dwelling on the altar ( i.e ., the altar fire); the  guest (of the worshipper), dwelling in the house (the domestic fire); the  dweller amongst men (as consciousness); the dweller in the most excellent  orb, (the Sun); the dweller in truth; the dweller in the sky (the air); born in  the waters, in the rays of light, in the verity (of manifestation), in the Eastern  mountains; the Truth (itself)."

"In the beginning," says a Sanscrit hymn, "arose the Source of golden light. 
He was the only horn Lord of all that is. He established the earth and the  sky. Who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice?"

"He who gives life, He who gives strength; Whose blessing all the bright  gods desire; Whose shadow is immortality; Whose shadow is death ; Who is  the God, etc?"

"He through Whom the sky is bright and the earth for us; He through Whom  the Heaven was established, nay, the highest Heaven; He who measured out  the light in the air; Who is the God, etc?"

"He to Whom the Heaven and earth, standing firm by His will, look up  trembling inwardly; He over Whom the rising sun shines forth; Who is the 
God, etc?"

"Wherever the mighty water-clouds went, where they placed  p. 742  the seed and lit the fire, thence arose He Who is the only life of the bright  gods; Who is the God, etc?"

The WORD of God, said the Indian philosophy, is the universal 'and  invisible Light, cognizable by the senses, that emits its blaze in the Sun, 
Moon, Planets, and other Stars. Philo calls it the "Universal Light," which  loses a portion of its purity and splendor in descending from the intellectual  to the sensible world, manifesting itself outwardly from the Deity; and the 
Kabalah represents that only so much of the Infinite Light flowed into the  circular void prepared for creation within the Infinite Light and Wisdom, as  could pass by a canal like a line or thread. The Sephiroth, emanating from  the Deity, were the rays of His splendor.

The Chaldtean Oracles said: "The intellect of the Generator, stirred to  action, out-spoke, forming within itself, by intellection, universals of every  possible form and fashion, which issued out, flowing forth from the One 
Source . . . For Deity, impersonated as Dominion, before fabricating the  manifold Universe, posited an intellected and unchangeable universal, the  impression of the form whereof goes forth through the Universe; and that 
Universe, formed and fashioned accordingly, becomes visibly beautified in  infinitely varying types and forms, the Source and fountain whereof is one. .

. . Intellectual conceptions and forms from the Generative source,  succeeding each other, considered in relation to ever-progressing Time, and  intimately partaking of THE PRIMAL ETHER or FIRE; but yet all these 
Universals and Primal Types and Ideas flowed forth from, and are part of,  the first Source of the Generative Power, perfect in itself."

The Chaldteans termed the Supreme Deity ARAOR, Father of Light. From 
Him was supposed to flow the light above the world, which illuminates the  heavenly regions. This Light or Fire was considered as the Symbol of the 
Divine Essence, extending itself to inferior spiritual natures. Hence the 
Chaldtean oracles say: "The Father took from Himself, and did not confine 
His proper fire within His intellectual potency:" . . "All things are begotten  from one Fire."

The Tsabeans held that all inferior spiritual beings were emanations from  the Supreme Deity; and therefore Proclus says: "The progression of the gods  is one and continuous, proceeding downward from the intelligible and latent  unities, and terminating in the last partition of the Divine cause."  p. 743

It is impossible to speak clearly of the Divinity. Whoever attempts to  express His attributes by the help of abstractions, confines himself to  negatives, and at once loses sight of his ideas, in wandering through a  wilderness of words. To heap Superlatives on Superlatives, and call Him  best, wisest, greatest, is but to exaggerate qualities which- are found in man. 
That there exists one only God, and that He is a Perfect and Beneficent 
Being, Reason legitimately teaches us; but of the Divine Nature, of the 
Substance of the Deity, of the manner of His Existence, or of the mode of  creation of His Universe, the human mind is inadequate to form any just  conception. We can affix no clear ideas to Omnipotence, Omniscience, 
Infinity or Eternity; and we have no more right to attribute intelligence to 
Him, than any other mental quality of ourselves, extended indefinitely; or  than we have to attribute our senses to Him, and our bodily organs, as the

Hebrew writings do.

We satisfy ourselves with negativing in the Deity everything that constitutes  existence, so far as we are capable of conceiving of existence. Thus He  becomes to us logically nothing, Non-Ens. The Ancients saw no difference  between that and Atheism, and sought to conceive of Him as something real. 
It is a necessity of Human Nature. The theological idea, or rather non-idea,  of the Deity, is not shared or appreciated by the unlearned. To them, God  will always be The Father Who is in Heaven, a Monarch on His Throne, a 
Being with human feelings and human sympathies, angry at their misdeeds,  lenient if they repent, accessible to their supplications. It is the Humanity,  far more than the Divinity, of Christ, that makes the mass of Christians  worship Him, far more than they do the Father.

"The Light of the Substance of The Infinite," is the Kabalistic expression. 
Christ was, according to Saint John, "the Light that lighteth every man that  cometh into the. world"; and "that Light was the life of men." "The Light  shone in the darkness: and the darkness comprehended it not."

The ancient ideas in respect to Light were perhaps quite as correct as our  own. It does not appear that they ascribed to Light any of the qualities of  matter. But modem Science defines it to be a flood of particles of matter,  flowing or shot out from the Sun and Stars, and moving through space to  come to us. On the theories of mechanism and force, what force of attraction  here or  p. 744  repulsion at the Sun or at the most distant Star could draw or drive these  impalpable, weightless, infinitely minute particles, appreciably by the Sense  of Sight alone, so far through space? What has become of the immense  aggregate of particles that have reached the earth since the creation? Have  they increased its bulk? Why cannot chemistry detect and analyze them? If  matter, why can they travel only in right lines?

No characteristic of matter belongs to Light, or Heat, or flame, or to 
Galvanism, Electricity, and Magnetism. The electric spark is light, and so is  that produced by the flint, when it cuts off particles of steel. Iron, melted or  heated, radiates light; and insects, infusoria, and decayed wood emit it. Heat  is produced by friction and by pressure; to explain which, Science tells us of  latent Caloric, thus representing it to us as existing without its only known  distinctive quality. What quality of matter enables lightning, blazing from  the Heavens, to rend the oak? What quality of matter enables it to make the  circuit of the earth in a score of seconds?

Profoundly ignorant of the nature of these mighty agents of Divine Power,  we conceal our ignorance by words that have no meaning; and we might  well be asked why Light may not be an effluence from the Deity, as has  been agreed by all the religions of all the Ages of the World.

All truly dogmatic religions have issued from the Kabalah and return to it:  everything scientific and grand in the religious dreams of all the illuminati, 
Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, is borrowed from the 
Kabalah; all the Masonic associations owe to it their Secrets and their 
Symbols.

The Kabalah alone consecrates the alliance of the Universal Reason and the 
Divine Word; it establishes, by the counterpoises of two forces apparently  opposite, the eternal balance of being; it alone reconciles Reason with Faith, 
Power with Liberty, Science with Mystery; it has the keys of the Present, the 
Past, and the Future.

The Bible, with all the allegories it contains, expresses, in an incomplete and  veiled manner only, the religious science of the Hebrews. The doctrine of 
Moses and the Prophets, identical at bottom with that of the ancient 
Egyptians, also had its outward meaning and its veils. The Hebrew books  were written only to recall to memory the traditions; and they were written  in Symbols  p. 745  unintelligible to the Profane. The Pentateuch and the prophetic poems were  merely elementary books of doctrine, morals, or liturgy; and the hue secret  and traditional philosophy was only written afterward, under veils still less  transparent. Thus was a second Bible born, unknown to, or rather  uncomprehended by, the Christians; a collection, they say, of monstrous  absurdities; a monument, the adept says, wherein is everything that the  genius of philosophy and that of religion have ever formed or imagined of  the sublime; a treasure surrounded by thorns; a diamond concealed in a  rough dark stone.

One is filled with admiration, on penetrating into the Sanctuary of the 
Kabalah, at seeing a doctrine so logical, so simple, and at the same time so  absolute. The necessary union of ideas and signs, the consecration of the  most fundamental realities by the primitive characters; the Trinity of Words, 
Letters, and Numbers; a philosophy simple as the alphabet, profound and  infinite as the Word; theorems more complete and luminous than those of 
Pythagoras; a theology summed up by counting on one's fingers; an Infinite  which can be held in the hollow of an infant's hand; ten ciphers, and twenty-  two letters, a triangle, a square, and a circle,-these are all the elements of  the Kabalah. These are the elementary principles of the written Word,  reflection of that spoken Word that created the world!

This is the doctrine of the Kabalah, with which you will no doubt seek to  make yourself acquainted, as to the Creation.

The Absolute Deity, with the Kabalists, has no name. The terms applied to 
Him are B1»S TIK, AOR PASOT, the Most Simple [or Pure] Light, "called,  fpo px, AYEN SOPH, or INFINITE, before any Emanation. For then there  was no space or vacant place, but all was infinite Light."

Before the Deity created any Ideal, any limited and intelligible Nature, or  any form whatever, He was alone, and without fonn or similitude, and there  could be no cognition or comprehension of Him in any wise. He was  without Idea or Figure, and it is forbidden to form any Idea or Figure of 
Him, neither by the letter He (n), nor by the letter Yod (’), though these are  contained in the Holy Name; nor by any other letter or point in the world.

But after He created this Idea [this limited and existing-in-intellection 
Nature, which the ten Numerations, SEPHIROTH or  p. 746

[paragraph continues] Rays are], of the Medium, the First Man ADAM KADMON, 
He descended therein, that, by means of this Idea, He might be called by the  name TETRAGRAMMATON; that created things might have cognition of 
Him, in His own likeness.

When the Infinite God willed to emit what were to flow forth, He contracted 
Himself in the centre of His light, in such manner that that most intense light  should recede to a certain circumference, and on all sides upon itself. And  this is the first contraction, and termed ntjax Tsemsum.

■palp Q7N, ADAM KADMON, the Primal or First Man, is the first Aziluthic  emanant from the Infinite Light, immitted into the evacuated Space, and  from which, afterward, all the other degrees and systems had their  beginnings. It is. called the Adam prior to all the first. In it are imparted ten  spherical numerations; and thereafter issued forth the rectilinear figure of a  man in his sephirothic decade, as it were the diameter of the said circles; as  it were the axis of these spheres, reaching from their highest point to their  lowest; and from it depend all the systems.

But now, as the Infinite Light would be too excellent and great to be borne  and endured, except through the medium of this Adam Kadmon, its most 
Secret Nature preventing this, its illuminating light had again to emanate in  streams out of itself, by certain apertures, as it were, like windows, and  which are termed the ears, eyes, nostrils, and mouth.

The light proceeding from this Adam Kadmon is indeed but one; but in  proportion to its remoteness from the place of out-flowing, and to the grades  of its descent, it is more dense.

From the word btJN, ATSIL, to emanate or flow forth, comes the word nib’XN 
, ATSILOTH or Aziluth, Emanation, or the System of Emanants. When the  primal space was evacuated, the surrounding Light of the Infinite, and the 
Light immitted into the void, did not touch each other; but the Light of the 
Infinite flowed into that void through a line or certain slender canal; and that 
Light is the Emanative and emitting Principle, or the out-flow and origin of

Emanation: but the Light within the void is the emanant subordinate; and the  two cohere only by means of the aforesaid line.

Aziluth means specifically and principally the first system of the four 
Olamoth [mnbs?], worlds or systems; which is thence called the Aziluthic 
World.  p. 747

The ten Sephiroth of the general Aziluthic system are ten Nekudoth or 
Points.  ntl’S AINSOPH, AENSOPH, or AYENSOPH, is the title of the Cause of 
Causes, its meaning being "endless," because there is no limit to Its  loftiness, and nothing can comprehend it. Sometimes, also, the name is  applied to KETHER, or the CROWN, the first emanation, because that is the 
Throne of the Infinite, that is, its first and highest Seat, than which none is  higher, and because Ainsoph resides and is concealed therein: hence it  rejoices in the same name.

Before that anything was, says the Emech Hammelech , He, of His mere will,  proposed to Himself to make worlds . . . but at that time there was no vacant  space for worlds; but all space was filled with the light of His Substance,  which He had with fixed limits placed in the centre of Himself, and of the  parts whereof, and wherein, He was thereafter to effect a folding together.

What then did the Lord of the Will, that most perfectly free Agent, do? By 
His own estimation, He measured off within His own Substance the width  and length of a circular space to be made vacant, and wherein might be  posited the worlds aforesaid; and of that Light which was included within  the circle so measured, He compressed and folded over a certain portion . . .  and that Light He lifted higher up, and so a place was left unoccupied by the 
Primal Light.

But yet was not this space left altogether empty of that Light; for the  vestiges of the Primal Light still remained in the place where Itself had  been; and they did not recede therefrom.

Before the Emanations out-flowed, and created things were created, the 
Supreme Light was infinitely extended, and filled the whole Where', nothing  was, except that extended light, called AOR H’ AINSOPH, the Light of the  non-finite.

When it came into the mind of the Extended to will to make worlds, and by  forth-flowing to utter Emanations, and to emit as Light the perfection of His  active powers, and of His aspects and attributes, which was the impelling  cause of the creation of worlds; then that Light, in some measure  compressed, receded in every direction from a particular central point, and  on all sides of it drew back, and so a certain vacuum was left, called void  space, its circumference everywhere equidistant from that point which was  exactly in the centre of the space ... a certain void place and  p. 748  space left in Mid-Infinite: a certain Where was thereby constituted wherein 
Emanations might BE, and the Created, the Fashioned and the Fabricated.

This world of the garmenting,— this circular vacant space, with the vestiges  of the withdrawn light of the Infinite yet remaining, is the inmost garment,  nearest to His substance; and to it belongs the name AOR PENAI-AL, Light  of the Countenance of God.

An interspace surrounds this great circle, established between the light of the  very substance, surrounding the circle on its outside, and the substance  contained within the circle. This is called SPLENDOR EXCELSUS, in  contradistinction to Simple Splendor.

This light "of the vestige of the garment," is said to be, relatively to that of  the vestige of the substance, like a point in the centre of a circle. This light, a  point in the centre of the Great Light, is called Auir, Ether, or Space.

This Ether is somewhat more gross than the Light—not so Subtle—though  not perceptible by the Senses- is termed the Primal Ether—extends  everywhere; Philosophers call it the Soul of the World.

The Light so forth-shown from the Deity, cannot be said to be severed or  diverse from Him. "It is flashed forth from Him, and yet all continues to be  perfect unity . . . The Sephiroth, sometimes called the Persons of the Deity,  are His rays, by which He is enabled most perfectly to manifest Himself.

The Introduction to the Book SONAR says:

The first compression was effected, in order that the Primal Light might be  upraised, and a space become vacant. The second compression occurred  when the vestiges of the removed Light remaining were compressed into  points; and that compression was effected by means of the emotion of joy;  the Deity rejoicing, it had already been said, on account of His Holy People,  thereafter to come into being; and that joy being vehement, and a  commotion and exhilaration in the Deity being caused by it, so that He  flowed forth in His delight; and of this commotion an abstract power of  judgment being generated, which is a collection of the letters generated by  the points of the vestiges of Light left within the circle. For He writes the  finite expressions, or limited manifestations of Himself upon the Book, in  single letters.

Like as when water or fire, it had been said, is blown upon by the wind, it is  wont to be greatly moved, and with flashes like  p. 749  lightning to smite the eyes, and gleam and coruscate hither and thither, even  so The Infinite was moved within Himself, and shone and coruscated in that  circle, from the centre outward and again to the centre: and that commotion  we term exhilaration; and from that exhilaration, variously divided within 
Himself, was generated the potency of determining the fashioning of the  letters.

Of that exhilaration, it had also been said, was generated the determination  of forms, by which determination the Infinite detennined them within 
Himself, as if by saying: "Let this Sphere be the appointed place, wherein let  all worlds be created!"

He, by radiating and coruscating, effected the points, so that their sparkling  should smite the eyes like lightning. Then He combined diversely the single  points, until letters were fashioned thereof, in the similitude and image of  those wherewith THE BLESSED had set forth the decrees of His Wisdom.

It is not possible to attain to an understanding of the creation of man, except  by the mystery of letters; and in these worlds of The Infinite is nothing,  except the letters of the Alphabet and their combinations. All the worlds are 
Letters and Names; but He Who is the Author of all, has no name.

This world of the covering [or garment— vestimenti], [that is, the circular  vacant space, with the vestiges of the removed Light of The Infinite still  remaining after the first contraction and compression], is the inmost  covering, nearest to His substance; and to this covering belongs the general  name AUR PENIAL, Light of the Countenance of God: by which we are to  understand the Light of The Substance.

And after this covering was effected, He contracted it, so as to lift up the  lower moiety; . . . and this is the third contraction; and in this manner He  made vacant a space for the worlds, which had not the capacity to use the  great Light of the covering, the end whereof was lucid and excellent as its  beginning. And so [by drawing up the lower half and half the letters], are  made the Male and Female , that is, the anterior and posterior adhering  mutually to one another.

The vacant space effected by this retraction is called AUIR KADMON, the 
PRIMAL SPACE: for it was the first of all Spaces; nor was it allowable to  call it covering, which is AUR PENI-BAL, the Light of the Countenance of 
God.  p. 750

The vestiges of the Light of the Garment still remained there. And this  world of the garment has a name that includes all things , which is the name 
IHUH. Before the world of the vacant space was created, HE was, and His 
Name, and they alone; that is, AINSOPH and His garmenting.

The EMECH HAMMELECH says again:

The lower half of the garment [by the third retraction], was left empty of the  light of the garment. But the vestiges of that light remained in the place so  vacated . . . and this garment is called SHEKINAH, God in-dwelling; that is,  the place where rr Yod He, of the anterior [or male], and m Vav He, of the  posterior [or female], combinations of letters dwelt.

This vacant space was square, and is called the Primal Spacer and in 
Kabalah it is called Auira Kadmah, or Rasimu Adah, The Primal Space, or 
The Sublime Vestige. It is the vestige of the Light of the Garment, with  which is intermingled somewhat of the vestige of the Very Substance. It is  called Primal Ether, but not void Space. . . The Light of the Vestige still  remains in the place it occupied, and adheres there, like somewhat spiritual,  of extreme tenuity.

In this Ether are two Lights; that is, the Light of the SUBSTANCE, which  was taken away, and that of the Garment. There is a vast difference between  the two; for that of the Vestige of the Garment is, relatively to that of the 
Vestige of the Substance, like a point in the centre of a circle. And as the  only appropriate name for the Light of the Vestige of Ainsoph is AUR, 
Light, therefore the Light of the Vestige of the Garment could not be called  by that name; and so we term it a point , that is, Yod [’ or ’], which is that  point in the centre of Light. . . and this Light, a point in the centre of the 
Great Light, is called Auir, Ether, or Space.

This Ether is somewhat more gross than The Light.... not so subtle,  though not perceptible by the senses ... is termed the Primal Ether . . .  extends everywhere; whence the Philosophers call it The Soul of the World . 
. . Light is visible, though not perceptible. This Ether is neither perceptible  nor visible.

The Introduction to the Book Sohar continues, in the Section of the Letter 
Yod, etc:

Worlds could not be framed in this Primal Ether, on account of its extreme  tenuity and the excess of Light; and also because  p. 751  in it remained the vital Spirit of the Vestige of the Light Ainsoph, and that  of the Vestige of the Light of the Garment; whereby such manifestation was  prevented.

Wherefore HE directed the letter Yod, since it was not so brilliant as the 
Primal Ether, to descend, and take to itself the light remaining in the Primal 
Ether, and return above, with that Vestige which so impeded the  manifestation; which Yod did.

It descended below five times, to remove the vital Spirit of the Vestige of  the Light Ainsoph; and the Vestige of the Light and vital Spirit of the 
Garment from the Sphere of Splendor, so as to make of it ADAM, called 
KADMON. And by its return, manifestation is effected in the space below,  and a Vestige of the Sublime Brilliance yet remains there, existing as a 
Spherical Shape, and termed in the Sohar simply Tehiru, that is, Splendor;  and it is styled The First Matter. ... it being, as it were, vapor, and, as it  were, smoke. And as smoke is formless, not comprehended under any fixed  definite form, so this Sphere is a formless somewhat, since it seems to be  somewhat that is spherical, and yet is not limited.

The letter Yod, while adhering to the Shekinah, had adhering to himself the 
Light of the Shekinah, though his light was not so great as that of the 
Shekinah. But when he descended, he left that light of his own below, and  the Splendor consisted of it. After which there was left in Yod only a vestige  of that light, inasmuch as he could not re-ascend to the Shekinah and adhere  to it. Wherefore The Holy and Blessed directed the letter He [n, the female  letter], to communicate to Yod of her Light; and sent him forth, to descend  and share with that light in the Splendor aforesaid . . . and when he re¬  descended into the Sphere of Splendor, he diffused abroad in it the Light  communicated to him by the letter He.

And when he again ascended he left behind him the productive light of the  letter He, and thereof was constituted another Sphere, within the Sphere of 
Splendor; which lesser Sphere is termed in the Sohar KETHER AILAH, 
CORONA SUMMA, The Supreme Crown, and also ATIKA DI ATIKIM, 
Antiquus Antiquum, The Ancient of Ancients, and even AILIT I F AILIT, 
Causa Causarum, the Cause of Causes. But the Crown is very far smaller  than the Sphere of Splendor, so that within the latter an immense  unoccupied place and space is still left.  p. 752

The BETH ALOHIM says:

Before the Infinite God, the Supreme and First Good, formed objectively  within Himself a particular conception, definite, limited, and the object of  intellection, and gave form and shape to an intellectual conception and  image. HE was alone, companionless, without form or similitude, utterly  without Ideal or Figure ... It is forbidden to make of Him any figure  whatever, by any image in the world, neither by the letter He nor by the  letter Yod, nor by any other letter or point in the world.

But after He had formed this Idea, the particular conception, limited and  intelligible, which the Ten Numerations are, of the medium of transmission, 
Adam Kadmon, the Primal or Supreme Man, He by that medium descended,  and may, through that Idea, be called by the name IHUH, and so created  things have cognizance of Him, by means of His proper likeness.

Woe unto him who makes God to be like unto any mode or attribute  whatever, even were it to one of His own; and still more if he make Him like  unto the Sons of Men, whose elements are earthly, and so are consumed and  perish!

There can be no conception had of Him, except in so far as He manifests 
Himself, in exercising dominion by and through some attribute . . .

Abstracted from this, there can be no attribute, conception, or ideal of Him. 
He is comparable only to the Sea, filling some great reservoir, its bed in the  earth, for example; wherein it fashions for itself a certain concavity, so that  thereby we may begin to compute the dimensions of the Sea itself.

For example, the Spring and Source of the Ocean is a somewhat, which is  one. If from this Source or Spring there issues forth a certain fountain,  proportioned to the space occupied by the Sea in that hemispherical  reservoir, such as is the letter Yod, there the Source of Spring is the first  somewhat, and the fountain that flows forth from it is the second. Then let  there be made a great reservoir, as by excavation, and let this be called the 
Ocean, and we have the third thing, a vessel [ Vas ]. Now let this great  reservoir be divided into seven beds of rivers, that is, into seven oblong  reservoirs, so that from this ocean the waters may flow forth in- seven  rivers; and the Source, Fountain, and Ocean thus make ten in all.

The Cause of Causes made ten Numerations, and called the Source of 
Spring KETHER, Corona, the Crown, in which the idea  p. 753  of circularity is involved, for there is no end to the out-flow of Light; and  therefore He called this, like Himself, endless', for this also, like Him, has no  similitude or configuration, nor hath it any vessel or receptacle wherein it  may be contained, or by means whereof any possible cognizance can be had  of it.

After thus fonning the Crown, He constituted a certain smaller receptacle,  the letter Yod, and filled it from that source; and this is called "The Fountain  gushing with Wisdom," and, manifested in this. He called Himself WISE,  and the vessel He called HAKEMAH, Wisdom, Sapientia.

Then He also constituted a great reservoir, which He called the Ocean; and  to it He gave the name of BINAH, Understanding, Intelligentia. In this He  characterized Himself as Intelligent or Conceive/'. HE is indeed the 
Absolutely Wise and Intelligent, but Hakemah is not Absolute Wisdom of  itself, but is wise by means o f Binah, who fills Himself from it, and if this  supply were taken from it, would be dry and unintelligent.

And thereupon seven precious vessels become, to which are given the  following names: GEDULAH, Magnificence or Benignity [or KHASED, 
Mercy ]; GEBURAH, Austerity, Rigor or Severity, TEPHARETH, Beauty, 
NETSAKH, Victoiy; HOD, Glory, YESOD, Foundation or Basis; and 
MALAKOTH, Rule, Reign, Royalty, Dominion or Power. And in 
GEDULAH He took the character of Great and Benignant; in GEBURAH,  of Severe; in TEPHARETH, of Beautiful; in NETSAKH, of Overcoming; in 
HOD, of OUR GLORIOUS AUTHOR; in YESOD, of Just, by Yesod all  vessels and worlds being upheld; and in MALAKOTH He applied to 
Himself the title of King.

These numerations or Sephiroths are held in the Kabala to have been  originally contained in each other; that is, Kether contained the nine others, 
Hakemah contained Binah, and Binah contained the last seven.

For all things, says the commentary of Rabbi Jizchak Lorja, in a certain  most abstruse manner, consist or reside and are contained in Binah, and it  projects them, and sends them downward, species by species, into the  several worlds of Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Fabrication; all  whereof are derived from what are above them, and are termed their out-  flowings; for, from the potency which was their state there, they descend  into actuality.  p. 754

The INTRODUCTION says:

It is said in many places in the Sohar, that all things that emanate or are  created have their root above. Hence also the Ten Sephiroth have their root  above, in the world of the garment, with the very Substance of HIM. And 
AINSOPH had full consciousness and appreciation, prior to their actual  existence, of all the Grades and Impersonations contained unmanifested  within Himself, with regard to the essence of each, and its domination then  in potency . . . When He came to the Sephirah of the Impersonation 
Malakoth, which He then contained hidden within Himself, He concluded  within Himself that therein worlds should be framed; since the scale of the  first nine Sephiroths was so constituted, that it was neither fit nor necessary  for worlds to be framed from them', for all the attributes of these nine 
Superior Sephiroth could be assigned to Himself, even if He should never  operate outwardly; but Malakoth, which is Empire or Dominion, could not  be attributed to Him, unless He ruled over other Existences; whence from  the point Malakoth He produced all the worlds into actuality.

These circles are ten in number. Originated by points, they expanded in  circular shape. Ten Circles, under the mystery of the ten Sephiroth, and  between them ten Spaces; whence it appears that the sphere of Splendor is in  the centre of the space Malakoth of the First Occult Adam.

The First Adam, in the ten circles above the Splendor, is called the First  occult Adam; and in each of these spaces are formed many thousand worlds. 
The first Adam is involved in the Primal Ether, and is the analogue of the  world Binah.

Again the Introduction repeats the first and second descent of Yod into the  vacated space, to make the light there less great and subtile; the constitution  of the Tehiru, Splendor, from the light left behind there by him; the  communication of Light to him by the female letter He; the emission by him  of that Light, within the sphere of Splendor, and the formation thereof,  within the sphere, "of a certain sphere called the Supreme Crown," Corona 
Summa, KETHER, "wherein were contained, in potence, all the remaining 
Numerations, so that they were not distinguishable from it. Precisely as in  man exist the four elements, in potence specifically undistinguishable, so in  this Corona were in potence all the ten Numerations, specifically  undistinguishable." This Crown, it is  p. 755  added, was called, after the restoration, The Cause of Causes, and the 
Ancient of the Ancients.

The point, Kether, adds the Introduction, was the aggregate of all the Ten . . 
. when it first emanated, it consisted of all the Ten; and the Light which  extended from the Emanative Principle simultaneously flowed into it; and  beheld the two Universal [that is, the Unities out of which manifoldness  flows; as, for example, the idea, within the Deity, of Humanity as a Unit,  out of which the individuals were to flow], the Vessel or Receptacle  containing this immitted Light, and the Light Itself within it. And this Light  is the Substance of the point Kether; for the WILL of God is the Soul of all  things that are.

The Ainsophic Light, it had said, was infinite in every direction, and without  end or limit. To prevent it from flowing into and re-filling the quasi-vacant  space, occupied by an infinitely less Splendor, a partition between the  greater and lesser Splendor was necessary; and this partition, the boundary  of the sphere of Splendor, and a like one bounding the sphere Kether, were  called Vessels or Receptacles, containing, including, and enclosing within  themselves the light of the sphere. Imagine a sea of pellucid water, and in  the centre of it a spherical mass of denser and darker water. The outer  surface of this sphere, or its limits every way, is the vessel containing it. The 
Kabalah regards the vessels "as by their nature somewhat opaque, and not so  splendid as the light they enclose."

The contained Light is the Soul of the vessels, and is active in them, like the 
Human Soul in the human body. The Light of the Emanative Principle 
[Ainsoph] inheres in the vessels, as their Life, internal Light, and Soul. . . 
Kether emanated, with its Very Substance, at the same time as Substance  and Vessel, in like manner as the flame is annexed to the live coal, and as  the Soul pervades, and is within, the body. All the Numerations were  potentially contained in it.

And this potentiality is thus explained: When a woman conceives, a Soul is  immediately sent into the embryo which is to become the infant, in which 
Soul are then, potentially, all the members and veins of the body, which  afterward, from that potency of the Soul, become in the human body of the  child to be born.

Then the wisdom of God commanded that these Numerations  p. 756  potentially in Kether, should be produced from potentiality into actuality, in  order that worlds might consist; and HE directed Yod again to descend, and  to enter into and shine within Kether, and then to re-ascend: which was so  done. From which illumination and re-ascension, all the other numerations,  potentially in Kether, were manifested and disclosed; but they continued  still compacted together, remaining within Kether in a circle.

When God willed to produce the other emanations or numerations from 
Kether, it is added, HE sent Yod down again, to the upper part of Kether,  one-half of him to remain without and one-half to penetrate within the  sphere of Kether. Then HE sent the letter Vav into the Splendor, to pour out  its light on Yod: and thus,—

Yod received light from Vav, and thereby so directed his countenance that it  should illuminate and confer exceeding great energy on Hakemah, which yet  remained in Kether; so giving it the faculty to proceed forth therefrom; and  that it might collect and contain within itself, and there reveal, all the other  eight numerations, until that time in Kether.

The sphere of Kether opened, and thereout issued Hakemah, to remain  below Kether, containing in itself all the other numerations.

By a similar process, Binah, illuminated within Hakemah by a second Yod, 
"issued forth out of Hakemah, having within itself the Seven lower 
Numerations."

And since the vessel of Binah was excellent, and coruscated with rays of the  color of sapphire, and was so nearly of the same color as the vessel of 
Hakemah that there was scarcely any difference between them, hence it  would not quietly remain below Hakemah, but rose, and placed itself on his  left side.

And because the light from above profusely flowed into and accumulated in  the vessel of Hakemah, to so great an extent that it overflowed, and escaped,  coruscating, outside of that vessel, and, flowing off to the left,  communicated potency and increase to the vessel of Binah .... For Binah is  female

Binah, therefore, by means of this energy that flowed into it from the left  side of Hakemah, by virtue of the second Yod, came to possess such virtue  and potency, as to project beyond itself the Seven remaining vessels  contained within itself, and so emitted them all, continuously, one after the  other ... all connected and linked one with the other, like the links of a  chain.  p. 757

Three points first emanated, one under the other; Kether, Hakemah, and 
Binah; and, so far, there was no copulation. But afterward the positions of 
Hakemah and Binah changed, so that they were side by side, Kether  remaining above them; and then conjunction of the Male and Female, ABA  and IMMA, Father and Mother, as points.

He, from Whom all emanated, created Adam Kadmon, consisting of all the  worlds, so that in him should be somewhat from those above, and somewhat  from those below. Hence in Him was NEPHESCH [PSYCHE, anima  infima, the lowest spiritual part of man. Soul], from the world ASIAH,  which is one letter Fie of the Tetragrammaton; RUACH [ SPIRITUS, anima  media, the next higher spiritual part, or Spirit], from the world YEZIRAH,  which is the Vav of the Tetragrammaton; NESCHAMAH [the highest  spiritual part, mens or anima superior ], from the world BRIAH, which is the  other letter He-, and NESCHAMAH LENESCHAMAH, from the world 
ATSILUTH, which is the YOD of the Tetragrammaton.

And these letters [the Sephiroth] were changed from the spherical form into  the form of a person, the symbol of which person is the BALANCE, it being 
Male and Female . . . Hakemah on one side, Binah on the other, and Kether  over them: and so Gedulah on one side, Geburah on the other, and 
Tephareth under them.

The Book Omschim says: Some hold that the ten Sephiroth succeeded one  another in ten degrees, one above the other, in regular gradation, one  connected with the other in a direct line, from the highest to the lowest.

Others hold that they issued forth in three lines, parallel with each other, one  on the right hand, one on the left, and one in the middle; so that, beginning  with the highest and going down to the lowest, Hakemah, Khased [or 
Gedulah], and Netsach are one over the other, in a perpendicular line, on the  right hand; Binah, Geburah, and Hod on the left; and Kether, Tephareth, 
Yesod, and Malakoth in the middle: and many hold that all the ten subsist in  circles, one within the other, and all homocentric.

It is also to be noted, that the Sephirothic tables contain still another  numeration, sometimes called also a Sephirah, which is called Daath,  cognition. It is in the middle, below Hakemah and Binah, and is the result of  the conjunction of these two.

To Adam Kadmon, the Idea of the Universe, the Kabalah assigns a human  form. In this, Kether is the cranium, Hakemah and  p. 758

[paragraph continues] Binah the two lobes of the brain, Gedulah and Geburah the  two arms, Tephareth the trunk, Netsach and Hod the thighs, Yesod the male  organ, and Malkuth the female organ, of generation.

Yod is Hakemah, and He Dinah; Vav is Tephareth, and the last He,

Malkuth.

The whole, say the Books Mysterii or of Occultation, is thus summed up:

The intention of God The Blessed was to form Impersonations, in order to  diminish the Light. Wherefore HE constituted, in Macroprosopos, Adam 
Kadmon, or Arik Anpin, three Heads. The first is called, "The Head whereof  is no cognition"; the second, "The Head of that which is non-existent"; and  the third, "The Very Head of Macroprosopos"; and these three are Corona, 
Sapientia , and Informatio , Kether, Hakemah, and Binah, existent in the 
Corona of the World of Emanation, or in Macroprosopos; and these three  are called in the Sohar ATIKA KADISCHA, Senex Sanctissimus, The Most 
Holy Ancient. But the Seven inferior Royalties of the first Adam are called 
"The Ancient of Days"; and this Ancient of Days is the internal part, or 
Soul, of Macroprosopos.

The human mind has never struggled harder to understand and explain to  itself the process of creation, and of Divine manifestation, and at the same  time to conceal its thoughts from all but the initiated , than in the Kabalah. 
Hence, much of it seems at first like jargon. Macroprosopos or Adam 
Kadmon is, we have said, the idea or intellectual aggregate of the whole 
Universe, included and contained unevolved in the manifested Deity, 
Himself yet contained unmanifested in the Absolute. The Head, Kether, 
"whereof is no cognition," is the Will of the Deity, or the Deity as Will. 
Hakemah, the head "of that which is non-existent," is the Generative Power  of begetting or producing Thought; yet in the Deity, not in action, and  therefore non-existent. Binah, "the very or actual head” of Macroprosopos,  is the productive intellectual capacity, which, impregnated by Hakemah, is  to produce the Thought. This Thought is Daath; or rather, the result is 
Intellection, Thinking; the Unity, of which Thoughts are the manifold  outflo wings.

This may be illustrated by a comparison. Pain, in the human being, is a  feeling or sensation. It must be produced. To produce it, there must be, not  only the capacity to produce it, in the nerves, but also the power of  generating it by means of that capacity.  p. 759

[paragraph continues] This generative Power, the Passive Capacity which produces,  and the pain produced, are like Hakemah, Dinah, and Daath.

The four Worlds or Universals, Aziluth, Briah, Yetzirah, and Asiah, of 
Emanation, Creation, Formation, and Fabrication, are another enigma of the 
Kabalah. The first three are wholly within the Deity. The first is the 
Universe, as it exists potentially in the Deity, determined and imagined, but  as yet wholly formless and undeveloped, except so far as it is contained in 
His Emanations. The second is the Universe in idea, distinct within the 
Deity, but not invested with forms; a simple unity. The third is the same 
Universe in potence in the Deity, unmanifested, but invested with forms,-  the idea developed into manifoldness and individuality, and succession of  species and individuals; and the fourth is the potentiality become the 
Actuality, the Universe fabricated, and existing as it exists for us.

The Sephiroth, says the Porta Ccelorum, by the virtue of their Infinite 
Emanator, who uses them as a workman uses his tools, and who operates  with and through them, are the cause of existence of everything created,  formed, and fashioned, employing in their production certain media. But  these same Sephiroth, Persons and Lights, are not creatures per se, but  ideas, and Rays of THE INFINITE, which, by different gradations, so  descended from the Supreme Source as still not to be severed from It; but It,  through them, is extended to the production and government of all Entities,  and is the Single and Perfect Universal Cause of All, though becoming  determinate for this or the other operation, through this or that Sephiroth or 
MODE.

God produced all things by His Intellect and Will and free Determination. 
He willed to produce them by the mediation of His Sephiroth, and Persons .

. ... by which He is enabled most perfectly to manifest Himself; and that  the more perfectly, by producing the causes themselves, and the Causes of 
Causes, and not merely the viler effects.

God produced, in the first Originate, all the remaining causates. For, as He 
Himself is most simply One, and from One Simple Being One only can  immediately proceed, hence it results that from the First Supreme Infinite 
Unity flowed forth at the same time All and One. One, that is, in so far as  flowing from the Most Simple Unity, and being like unto It; but also All, in  so far as, departing from that perfect Singleness which can be measured  p. 760  by no other Singleness, it became, to a certain extent, manifold, though still 
Absolute and Perfect.

Emanation, says the same, is the Resulting displayed from the Unresulting,  the Finite from the Infinite, the Manifold and Composite from the Perfect 
Single and Simple, Potentiality from that which is Infinite Power and Act,  the mobile from that which is perennially permanent; and therefore in a  more imperfect and diminished mode than His Infinite Perfection is. As the 
First Cause is all things, in an unresulting and Infinite mode, so the Entities  that flow from Him are the First Causes, in a resulting and finite mode.

THE NECESSARY ENTITY, subsisting of Itself, as It cannot be dissevered  into the manifold, yet becomes, as it were, multiplied in the Causates, in  respect of their Nature, or of the Subsistences, Vessels, and openings  assigned to them; whereby the Single and Infinite Essence, being inclosed or  comprehended in these limits, bounds, or externalnesses, takes on Itself 
Definiteness of dimension, and becomes Itself manifold, by the  manifoldness of these envelopes.

As man [the unit of Humanity] is a microcosm, so Adam Kadmon is a  macrocosm, containing all the Causates of the First Cause.as the

Material Man is the end and completion of all creation, so in the Divine Man  is the beginning thereof. As the inferior Adam receives all things from all,  so the superior Adam supplies all things to all. As the fonner is the principle  of reflected light, so the latter is of Direct Light. The former is the terminus  of the Light, descending; the latter its terminus, ascending. As the Inferior  man ascends from the lowest matter even to the First Cause, so the Superior 
Adam descends from the Simple and Infinite Act, even to the lowest and  most attenuated Potence.

The Ternary is the bringing back of duality to unity.

The Ternary is the Principle of Number, because, bringing back the binary  to unity, it restores to it the same quantity whereby it had departed from  unity. It is the first odd number, containing in itself the first even number  and the unit, which are the Father and Mother of all Numbers; and it has in  itself the beginning, middle, and end.

Now, Adam Kadmon emanated from the Absolute Unity, and so is himself a  unit; but he also descends and flows downward into  p. 761  his own Nature, and so is duality. Again, he returns to the Unity, which he  hath in himself, and to The Highest, and so is the Ternary and Quaternary.

And this is why the Essential Name has four letters,—three different ones,  and one of them once repeated; since the first He is the wife of the Yod, and  the second He is the wife of the Vav.

Those media which manifest the First Cause, in Himself profoundly hidden,  are the Sephiroth, which emanate immediately from that First Cause, and by 
Its Nature have produced and do control all the rest.

These Sephiroth were put forth from the One First and Simple, manifesting 
His Infinite Goodness. They are the mirrors of His Truth, and the analogues  of His Supremest Essence, the Ideas of His Wisdom, and the representations  of His will; the receptacles of His Potency, and the instruments with which 
He operates; the Treasury of His Felicity, the dispensers of His Benignity,  the Judges of His Kingdom, and reveal His Law; and finally, the 
Denominations, Attributes, and Names of Him Who is above all and the

Cause of all.the ten categories, wherein all things are contained; the  universal genera, which in themselves include all things, and utter them  outwardly .... the Second Causes, whereby the First Cause effects,  preserves, and governs all things; the rays of the Divinity, whereby all  things are illumined and manifested; the Forms and Ideas and Species, out  whereof all things issue forth; the Souls and Potencies, whereby essence,  life, and movement are given to all things; the Standard of times, whereby  all things are measured; the incorporeal Spaces which, in themselves, hold  and inclose the Universe; the Supernal Monads to which all manifolds are  referred, and through them to The One and Simple; and finally the Formal 
Perfections, flowing forth from and still connected with the One Eminent 
Limitless Perfection, are the Causes of all dependent Perfections, and so  illuminate the elementary Intelligences, not adjoined to matter, and the  intellectual Souls, and the Celestial, Elemental and Element-produced  bodies.

The IDRA SUTA says:

HE, the Most Holy Hidden Eldest, separates Himself, and is ever more and  more separated from all that are; nor yet does HE in very deed separate 
Himself; because all things cohere with  p. 762

Him and HE with All. HE is All that is, the Most Holy Eldest of All, the 
Occult by all possible occultations.

When HE takes shape, HE produces nine Lights, which shine forth from 
Him, from His outforming. And those Lights out-shine from Him and emit  flames, and go forth and spread out on every side; as from one elevated 
Lamp the Rays are poured forth in every direction, and these Rays thus  diverging, are found to be, when one approaching has cognizance of them,  but a single Lamp.

The Space in which to create is fixed by THE MOST HOLY ANCIENT,  and illuminated by His inflowing, which is the Light of Wisdom, and the 
Beginning from which manifestation flows.

And HE is conformed in three Heads, which are but one Head; and these  three are extended into Microprosopos, and from them shines out all that is.

Then this Wisdom instituted investiture with form, whereby the  unmanifested and informous became manifested, putting on form; and  produced a certain outflow.

When this Wisdom is thus expanded by flowing forth, then it is called 
"Father of Fathers," the whole Universe of Things being contained and  comprehended in it. This Wisdom is the principle of all things, and in it  beginning and end are found.

The Book of the Abstruse, says the Siphra de Zeniutha, is that which  describes the equilibrium of the Balance. Before the Balance was, face did  not look toward face.

And the Commentary on it says: The Scales of the Balance are designated as 
Male and Female. In the Spiritual world Evil and Good are in equilibria,  and it will be restored, when of the Evil Good becomes, until all is Good. 
Also this other world is called the World of the Balance. For, as in the 
Balance are two scales, one on either side and the beam and needle between  them, so too in this world of restoration, the Numerations are arranged as  distinct persons. For Hakemah is on the right hand, on the side of Gedulah,  and Binah on the left, on the side of Geburah; and Kether is the beam of the 
Balance above them in the middle. So Gedulah or Khased is on one hand,  and Geburah on the other, and under these Tephareth; and Netsach is on one  side, and Hod on the other, and under these Yesod.

The Supreme Crown, which is the Ancient Most Holy, the most Hidden of  the Hidden, is fashioned, within the occult Wisdom, of both sexes, Male and 
Female.  p. 763

Hakemah, and Binah, the Mother, whom it impregnates, are quantitatively  equal. Wisdom and the Mother of Intellection go forth at once and dwell  together; for when the Intellectual Power emanates, the productive Source of  intellection is included in Him.

Before Adam Kadmon was fashioned into Male and Female, and the state of  equilibrium introduced, the Father and Mother did not look each other in the  face; for the Father denotes most perfect Love, and the Mother most perfect 
Rigor; and she averted her face.

There is no left [female], says the Idra Rabba, in the Ancient and Hidden 
One; but His totality is Right [male]. The totality of things is HUA, HE, and 
HE is hidden on every side.

Macroprosopos [Adam Kadmon] is not so near unto us as to speak to us in  the first person; but is designated in the third person, HUA, HE.

Of the letters it says:

Yod is male, He is female, Vav is both.

In Yod [’] are three Yods, the upper and the lower apex, and Vav in the  middle. By the upper apex is denoted the Supreme Kether; by Vav in the  middle, Hakemah; and by the lower apex, Binah.

The IDRA SUTA says:

The Universe was out-formed in the form of Male and Female. Wisdom,  pregnant with all that is, when it flowed and shone forth, shone altogether  under the form of male and female. Hakemah is the Father, and Binah is the 
Mother; and so the two are in equilibrium as male and female, and for this  reason, all things whatsoever are constituted in the form of male and female;  and if it were not so they would not exist.

This Principle, Hakemah, is the Generator of all things; and He and Binah  conjoin, and she shines within Him. When they thus conjoin, she conceives,  and the out-flow is Truth.

Yod impregnates the letter He and begets a son; and she, thus pregnant,  brings forth. The Principle called Father [the Male or Generative Principle]  is comprehended in Yod, which itself flows downward from the energy of  the Absolute Holy One.

Yod is the beginning and the end of all things that are. The stream that flows  forth is the Universe of things, which always becomes, having no cessation. 
And this becoming world is created by Yod: for Yod includes two letters.

All things are included in Yod; wherefore it is called the Father of all.  p. 764

All Categories whatever go forth from Hakemah; and in it are contained all  things, unmanifested; and the aggregate of all things, or the Unity in which  the many are, and out of which all flow, is the Sacred Name IHUH.

In the view of the Kabalists, all individuals are contained in species, and all  species in genera, and all particulars in a Universal, which is an idea,  abstracted from all consideration of individuals; not an aggregate of  individuals; but, as it were, an Ens, Entity or Being, ideal or intellectual, but  none the less real; prior to any individual, containing them all, and out of  which they are all in succession evolved.

If this discontents you, reflect that, supposing the theory correct, that all was  originally in the Deity, and that the Universe has proceeded forth from Him,  and not been created by Him out of nothing, the idea of the Universe,  existing in the Deity before its out-flow, must have been as real as the Deity 
Himself. The whole Human race, or Humanity, for example, then existed in  the Deity, not distinguished into individuals, but as a Unit, out of which the 
Manifold was to flow.

Everything actual must also first have been possible, before having actual  existence; and this possibility or potentiality was to the Kabalists a real Ens. 
Before the evolvement of the Universe, it had to exist potentially, the whole  of it, with all its individuals, included in a single Unity. This was the Idea or 
Plan of the Universe; and this had to be formed. It had to emanate from the 
Infinite Deity, and be o/Himself, though not His Very Self.

Geburah, Severity, the Sephirah opposite to and conjoined sexually with 
Gedulah, to produce Tephareth, Harmony and Beauty, is also called in the 
Kabalah "Judgment," in which term are included the ideas of limitation and  conditioning, which often seems, indeed, to be its principal sense; while 
Benignity is as often styled Infinite. Thus it is obscurely taught that in  everything that is, not only the Finite but also the Infinite is present; and that  the rigor of the stern law of limitation, by which everything below or beside  the Infinite Absolute is limited, bounded, and conditioned, is tempered and  modified by the grace, which so relaxes it that the Infinite, Unlimited, 
Unconditioned, is also everywhere present; and that it is thus the Spiritual  and Material Natures are in equilibria. Good everywhere counterbalancing 
Evil, Light everywhere in equilibrium with Darkness: from which again  results  p. 765  the Universal Harmony of things. In the vacant space effected for creation,  there at last remained a faint vestige or trace of Ainsophic Light, of the 
Light of the Substance of the Infinite. Man is thus both human and divine:  and the apparent antagonisms in his Nature are a real equilibrium, if he wills  it shall be so; from which results the Hannony, not only of Life and Action,  but of Virtue and Perfection.

To understand the Kabalistic idea of the Sephiroth, it must be borne in mind  that they were assigned, not only to the world of Emanation, Aziluth, but  also to each of the other worlds, Briah, Jezirah, and Asiah. They were not  only attributes of the Unmanifested Deity, not only Himself in limitation,  but His actual manifestations, or His qualities made apparent as modes; and  they were also qualities of the Universal Nature—Spiritual, Mental, and 
Material, produced and made existent by the outflow of Himself.

In the view of the Kabalah, God and the Universe were One, and in the One 
General, as the type or source, were included and involved, and from it have  been evolved and issued forth, the manifold and all particulars. Where,  indeed, does individuality begin? Is it the Hidden Source and Spring alone  that is the individual, the Unit, or is it the flowing fountain that fills the  ocean, or the ocean itself, or its waves, or the drops, or the vaporous  particles, that are the individuals? The Sea and the River—these are each 
One; but the drops of each are many. The tree is one; but its leaves are a  multitude: they drop with the frosts, and fall upon his roots; but the tree still  continues to grow, and new leaves come again in the Spring. Is the Human 
Race not the Tree, and are not individual men the leaves? How else explain  the force of will and sympathy, and the dependence of one man at every  instant of his life on others, except by the oneness of the race? The links that  bind all created things together are the links of a single Unity, and the whole 
Universe is One, developing itself into the manifold.

Obtuse commentators have said that the Kabalah assigns sexual  characteristics to the very Deity. There is no warrant for such an assertion,  anywhere in the Sohar or in any commentary upon it. On the contrary, the  whole doctrine of the Kabalah is based on the fundamental proposition, that  the Very Deity is Infinite, everywhere extended, without limitation or  determination, and therefore without any conformation whatever. In order to  commence  p. 766  the process of creation, it was necessary for Him, first of all, to effect a  vacant space within Himself. To this end the Deity, whose Nature is  approximately expressed by describing Him as Light filling all space,  formless, limitless, contracts Himself on all sides from a point within 
Himself, and thus effects a quasi-vacant space, in which only a vestige of 
His Light remains; and into this circular or spherical space He emits His 
Emanations, portions of His Light or Nature; and to some of these, sexual  characteristics are symbolically assigned.

The Infinite first limits Himself by flowing forth in the shape of Will, of  determination to act. This Will of the Deity, or the Deity as will, is Kether,  or the Crown, the first Sephirah. In it are included all other Emanations.

This is a philosophical necessity. The Infinite does not first will, and then, as  a sequence to, or consequence of, that determination, subsequently perform. 
To will and to act must be, with Him, not only simultaneous, but in reality  the same . . Nor does He, by His Omniscience, learn that a particular action  will be wise, and then, in consequence of being so convinced, first  determine to do the act, and then do it. His Wisdom and His Will, also, act  simultaneously; and, with Him, to decide that it was wise to create, was to  create. Thus His will contains in itself all the Sephiroth. This will,  determining Him to the exercise of intellection, to thought, to frame the Idea  of the Universe, caused the Power in Him to excite the intellectual Faculty  to exercise, and was that Power. Its SELF, which had flowed forth from 
Ainsoph as Will, now flows forth as the Generative Power to beget  intellectual action in the Intellectual Faculty, or Intelligence, Binah. The Act  itself, the Thought, the Intellection, producing the Idea, is Daath; and as the  text of the Siphra de Zeniutha says, The Power and Faculty, the Generative  and Productive, the Active and Passive, the Will and Capacity, which unite  to produce that Act of reflection or Thought or Intellection, are always in  conjunction. As is elsewhere said in the Kabalah, both of them are contained  and essentially involved in the result. And the Will, as Wisdom or 
Intellectual Power, and the Capacity or Faculty, are really the Father and 
Mother of all that is; for to the creation of anything, it was absolutely  necessary that The Infinite should form for Himself and in Himself, an idea  of what HE willed to produce or create: and, as there is no Time with Him,  to will was to create, to plan was to will and to  p. 767  create', and in the Idea, the Universe in potence, the universal succession of  tilings was included. Thenceforward all was merely evolution and  development.

Netsach and Hod, the Seventh and Eighth Sephiroth, are usually called in  the Kabalah, Victory and Glory. Netsach is the perfect Success, which, with  the Deity, to Whom the Future is present, attends, and to His creatures is to  result, from the plan of Equilibrium everywhere adopted by Him. It is the  reconciliation of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, Free-will and 
Necessity, God's omnipotence and Man's liberty; and the harmonious issue  and result of all, without which the Universe would be a failure. It is the  inherent Perfection of the Deity, manifested in His Idea of the Universe, and  in all the departments or worlds, spiritual, mental, or material, of that 
Universe; but it is that Perfection regarded as the successful result, which it  both causes or produces and is; the perfection of the plan being its success.

It is the prevailing of Wisdom over Accident; and it, in turn, both produces  and is the Glory and Laudation of the Great Infinite Contriver, whose plan is  thus Successful and Victorious.

From these two, which are one,—from the excellence and perfection of the 
Divine Nature and Wisdom, considered as Success and Glory, as the  opposites of Failure and Mortification, results what the Kabalah, styling it 
Yesod, Foundation or Basis, characterizes as the Generative member of the 
Symbolical human figure by which the ten Sephiroth are represented, and  from this flows Malakoth, Empire, Dominion, or Rule. Yesod is the 
Stability and Permanence, which would, in ordinary language, be said to  result from the perfection of the Idea or Intellectual Universal, out of which  all particulars are evolved; from the success of that scheme, and the  consequent Glory or Self-Satisfaction of the Deity; but which Stability and 
Permanence that Perfection, Success, and Glory really Is; since the Deity,  infinitely Wise, and to Whom the Past, Present, and Future were and always  will be one Now, and all space one HERE, had not to await the operation  and evolution of His plan, as men do the result of an experiment, in order to  see if it would succeed, and so to determine whether it should stand, and be  stable and permanent, or fall and be temporary. Its Perfection was its 
Success ; His Glory, its permanence and stability', and the Attributes of 
Permanence and Stability belong.  p. 768  like the others, to the Universe, material, mental, spiritual, and real, because  and as they belong to the Infinite Himself.

This Stability and Permanence causes continuance and generates succession. 
It is Perpetuity, and continuity without solution; and by this continuous  succession, whereby out of Death comes new Life, out of dissolution and  resolution comes reconstruction, Necessity and Fatality result as a  consequence: that is to say, the absolute control and dominion (Malakoth) of 
The Infinite Deity over all that He produces, and over chance and accident;  and the absolute non-existence in the Universe, in Time and in Space, of any  other powers or influences than those which, proceeding from Him, are and  camiot not be perfectly submissive to His will. This results, humanly  speaking; but in reality, the Perfection of the plan, which is its success. His  glory, and its stability, is also His Absolute Autocracy, and the utter absence  of Chance, Accident, or Antagonism. And, as the Infinite Wisdom or 
Absolute Reason rules in the Divine Nature itself, so also it does in its 
Emanations, and in the worlds or systems of Spirit, Soul, and Matter; in  each of which there is as little Chance or Accident or Unreasoning Fate, as  in the Divine Nature unmanifested.

This is the Kabalistic theory as to each of the four worlds;-1 st, of the 
Divine Nature, or Divinity itself, quantitatively limited and determined, but  not manifested into Entities, which is the world of Emanation, 2d, of the  first Entities, that is, of Spirits and Angels, which is the world of Creation', 
3d, of the first forms, souls, or psychical natures, which is the world of 
Formation or Fashioning', and, 4th, of Matter and Bodies, which is the  world of Fabrication, or, as it were, of manufacture. In each of these the 
Deity is present, as, in, and through the Ten Sephiroth. First of these, in  each, is Kether, the Crown, ring, or circlet, the HEAD. Next, in that Head,  as the two Hemispheres of the Brain, are Hakemah and Binah, and their  result and progeny, Daath. These three are found also in the Spiritual world,  and are universals in the psychical and material world, producing the lower 
Sephiroth. Then follow, in perfect Equilibrium, Law and Equity, Justice and 
Mercy, the Divine Infinite Nature and the Human Finite Nature, Good and 
Evil, Light and Darkness, Benignity and Severity, the Male and the Female  again, as Hakemah and Binah are, mutually tempering each other, and by  their intimate union producing the other Sephiroth.  p. 769

The whole Universe, and all the succession of entities and events were  present to The Infinite, before any act of creation; and His Benignity and 
Leniency, tempering and qualifying the law of rigorous Justice and  inflexible Retribution, enabled Him to create: because, but for it, and if He  could not but have administered the strict and stern law of justice, that  would have compelled Him to destroy, immediately after its inception, the 
Universe He purposed to create, and so would have prevented its creation. 
This Leniency, therefore, was, as it were, the very essence and quintessence  of the Permanence and Stability of the plan of Creation, and part of the Very 
Nature of the Deity. The Kabalah, therefore, designates it as Light and 
Whiteness, by which the Very Substance of Deity is symbolized. With this  agree Paul's ideas as to Law and Grace; for Paul had studied the Kabalah at  the feet of Gamaliel the Rabbi.

With this Benignity, the Autocracy of the dominion and control of the Deity  is imbued and interpenetrated. The former, poured, as it were, into the latter,  is an integral and essential part of it, and causes it to give birth to the  succession and continuance of the Universe. For Malakoth, in the Kabalah,  is female, and the matrix or womb out of which all creation is born.  w The Sephiroth may he arranged as on page 770 .

The Kabalah is the primitive tradition, and its entirety rests on the single  dogma of Magism, "the visible is for us the proportional measure of the  invisible." The Ancients, observing that equilibrium is in physics the  universal law, and that it results from the apparent opposition of two forces,  concluded from the physical to the metaphysical equilibrium, and thought  that in God, that is to say, in the first living and active cause, two properties  necessary to each other, should be recognized; stability and movement,  necessity and liberty, order dictated by reason and the self-rule of Supreme 
Will, Justice, and Love, and consequently Severity and Grace, Mercy or 
Benignity.

The idea of equilibrium among all the impersonations; of the male on one  side, and the female on the other, with the Supreme Will, which is also the 
Absolute Reason, above each two, holding the balance, is, according to the 
Kabalah, the foundation of all religions and all sciences, the primary and  immutable idea of things. The Sephiroth are a triple triangle and a circle, the  idea of the Ternary explained by the balance and multiplied by itself in the  p. 770

Click to enlarge 
Chart of the Sephiroth  p. 771  domain of the Ideal; then the realization of this Idea in forms.

Unity can only be manifested by the Binary. Unity itself and the idea of 
Unity are already two.

The human unity is made complete by the right and left. The primitive man  was of both sexes.

The Divinity, one in its essence, has two essential conditions as fundamental  bases of its existence-Necessity and Liberty.

The laws of the Supreme Reason necessitate and regulate liberty in God, 
Who is necessarily reasonable and wise.

Knowledge supposes the binary. An object known is indispensable to the  being that knows.

The binary is the generator of Society and the law. It is also the number of  the gnosis, a word adopted in lieu of Science, and expressing only the idea  of cognizance by intuition. It is Unity, multiplying itself by itself to create;  and therefore it is that the Sacred Symbols make Eve issue from the very  chest of Adam.

Adam is the human Tetragram, which is summed up in the mysterious Yod  of the Kabalah, image of the Kabalistic Phallus. Add to this Yod [’] the  ternary name of Eve, and you form the name of Jehova, the Divine 
Tetragram, the transcendent Kabalistic and magical word:  mrr

Thus it is that Unity, complete in the fecundity of the Ternary, fonns, with  it, the Quaternary, which is the key of all numbers, movements, and forms.

The Square, turning upon itself, produces the circle equal to itself, and the  circular movement of four equal angles turning around one point, is the  quadrature of the circle.

The Binary serves as a measure for Unity; and the relation of equality  between the Above and the Below, fonns with them the Ternary.

To us. Creation is Mechanism: to the Ancients it was Generation. The  world-producing egg figures in all cosmogonies; and modern science has  discovered that all animal production is oviparous. From this idea of  generation came the reverence everywhere paid the image of generative  power, which formed the Stauros of the Gnostics, and the philosophical 
Cross of the Masons.

Aleph is the man; Beth is the woman. One is the Principle;  p. 772  two is the Word. A.', is the Active; B is the Passive. Unity is Boaz, and  the Binary is Jachin.

The two columns, Boaz and Jachin, explain in the Kabalah all the mysteries  of natural, political, and religious antagonism.

Woman is man's creation; and universal creation is the female of the First 
Principle. When the Principle of Existence made Himself Creator, He  produced by emanation an ideal Yod; and to make room for it in the  plenitude of the uncreated Light, He had to hollow out a pit of shadow,  equal to the dimension detennined by His creative desire; and attributed by 
Him to the ideal Yod of radiating Light.

The nature of the Active Principle is to diffuse: of the Passive Principle, to  collect and make fruitful.

Creation is the habitation of the Creator-Word. To create, the Generative 
Power and Productive Capacity must unite, the Binary become Unity again  by the conjunction. The WORD is the First-BEGOTTEN, not the first  created Son of God.

SANCTA SANCTIS, we repeat again; the Holy things to the Holy, and to  him who is so, the mysteries of the Kabalah will be holy. Seek and ye shall  find, say the Scriptures: knock and it shall be opened unto you. If you desire  to find and to gain admission to the Sanctuary, we have said enough to show  you the way. If you do not, it is useless for us to say more, as it has been  useless to say so much.

The Hennetic philosophers also drew their doctrines from the Kabalah; and  more particularly from the Treatise Beth Alohim or Domus Dei , known as  the Pneumatica Kabalistica, of Rabbi Abraham Cohen Irira, and the 
Treatise De Revolutionihus Animarum of Rabbi Jitz-chak Lorja.

This philosophy was concealed by the Alchemists under their Symbols, and  in the jargon of a rude Chemistry,-a jargon incomprehensible and absurd  except to the Initiates; but the key to which is within your reach; and the  philosophy, it may be, worth studying. The labors of the human intellect are  always interesting and instructive.

To be always rich, always young, and never to die: such has been in all  times the dream of the Alchemists.

To change into gold, lead, mercury, and all the other metals; to possess the  universal medicine and elixir of life; such is the problem  p. 773  to be resolved, in order to accomplish this desire and realize this dream.

Like all the Mysteries of Magism, the Secrets of "the Great Work" have a  threefold signification: they are religious, philosophical, and natural.

The philosophal gold, in religion, is the Absolute and Supreme Reason: in  philosophy, it is the Truth; in visible nature, the Sun; in the subterranean and  mineral world, the most perfect and pure gold.

It is for this that the pursuit of the Great Work is called the Search for the 
Absolute; and the work itself, the work of the Sun.

All the masters of the Science admit that it is impossible to attain the  material results, unless there are found in the two higher Degrees all the  analogies of the universal medicine and of the philosophal stone.

Then, they say, the work is simple, easy, and inexpensive; otherwise, it  consumes fruitlessly the fortune and lives of the seekers.

The universal medicine for the Soul is the Supreme Reason and Absolute 
Justice; for the mind, mathematical and practical Truth; for the body, the 
Quintessence, a combination of light and gold.

The prima materia of the Great Work, in the Superior World, is enthusiasm  and activity; in the intermediate world, intelligence and industry; in the  lower world, labor: and, in Science, it is the Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt,  which by turns volatilized and fixed, compose the AZOTH of the Sages.

The Sulphur corresponds with the elementary form of the Fire; Mercury  with the Air and Water; and Salt with the Earth.

The Great Work is, above all things, the creation of man by himself; that is  to say, the fall and entire conquest which he effects of his faculties and his  future. It is, above all, the perfect emancipation of his will, which assures  him the universal empire of Azoth, and the domain of magnetism, that is,  complete power over the universal Magical agent.

This Magical agent, which the Ancient Hermetic philosophers disguised  under the name of "Prima Materia," determines the forms of the modifiable 
Substance; and the Alchemists said that by means of it they could attain the  transmutation of metals and the universal medicine.  p. 774

There are two Hermetic operations, one spiritual, the other material,  dependent the one on the other.

The whole Hermetic Science is contained in the dogma of Hermes, engraven  originally, it is said, on a tablet of emerald. Its sentences that relate to  operating the Great Work are as follows:

"Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross,  gently, with much industry.

"It ascends from earth to Heaven, and again descends to earth, and receives  the force of things above and below.

"Thou shalt by this means possess the glory of the whole world, and  therefore all obscurity shall flee away from thee.

"This is the potent force of all force, for it will overcome everything subtile,  and penetrate everything solid.

"So the world was created."

All the Masters in Alchemy who have written of the Great Work, have  employed symbolic and figurative expressions; being constrained to do so,  as well to repel the profane from a work that would be dangerous for them,  as to be well understood by Adepts, in revealing to them the whole world of  analogies governed by the single and sovereign dogma of Hermes.

So, in their language, gold and silver are the King and Queen, or the Sun  and Moon; Sulphur, the flying Eagle; Mercury, the Man-woman, winged,  bearded, mounted on a cube, and crowned with flames; Matter or Salt, the  winged Dragon; the Metals in ebullition, Lions of different colors; and,  finally, the entire work has for its symbols the Pelican and the Phcenix.

The Hennetic Art is, therefore, at the same time a religion, a philosophy,  and a natural science. As a religion, it is that of the Ancient Magi and the 
Initiates of all ages; as a philosophy, we may find its principles in the school  of Alexandria and the theories of Pythagoras; as a science, we must inquire  for its processes of Paracelsus, Nicholas Flamel, and Raymond Lulle.

The Science is a real one only for those who admit and understand the  philosophy and the religion; and its process will succeed only for the Adept  who has attained the sovereignty of will, and so become the King of the  elementary world: for the grand agent of the operation of the Sun, is that  force described in the Symbol of Hermes, of the table of emerald; it is the  universal magical power; the spiritual, fiery, motive power; it is the Od,  according to the Hebrews, and the Astral light, according to others.  p. 775

Therein is the secret fire, living and philosophical, of which all the Hermetic  philosophers speak with the most mysterious re-serve: the Universal Seed,  the secret whereof they kept, and which they represented only under the  figure of the Caduceus of Hermes.

This is the grand Hermetic arcanum. What the Adepts call dead matter are  bodies as found in nature; living matters are substances assimilated and  magnetized by the science and will of the operator.

So that the Great Work is more than a chemical operation; it is a real  creation of the human word initiated into the power of the Word of God.

The creation of gold in the Great Work is effected by transmutation and  multiplication.

Raymond Lulle says, that to make gold, one must have gold and mercury;  and to make silver, silver and mercury. And he adds: "I mean by mercury,  that mineral spirit so fine and pure that it gilds even the seed of gold, and  silvers that of silver." He meant by this, either electricity, or Od, the astral  light.

The Salt and Sulphur serve in the work only to prepare the mercury, and it is  to the mercury especially that we must assimilate, and, as it were,  incorporate with it, the magnetic agent. Paracelsus, Lulle, and Flamel alone  seem to have perfectly known this mystery.

The Great Work of Hermes is, therefore, an operation essentially magical,  and the highest of all, for it supposes the Absolute in Science and in Will. 
There is light in gold, gold in light, and light in all things.

The disciples of Hermes, before promising their adepts the elixir of long life  or the powder of projection, advised them to seek for the Philosophal Stone.

The Ancients adored the Sun , under the form of a black Stone, called 
Elagabalus, or Heliogabalus. The faithful are promised, in the Apocalypse, a  white Stone.

This Stone, says the Masters in Alchemy, is the true Salt of the philosophers,  which enters as one-third into the composition of Azoth. But Azoth is, as we  know, the name of the grand Hermetic Agent, and the true philosophical 
Agent: wherefore they represent their Salt under the form of a cubical Stone.

The Philosophal Stone is the foundation of the Absolute philosophy, the 
Supreme and unalterable Reason. Before thinking of  p. 776  the Metallic work, we must be firmly fixed on the Absolute principles of 
Wisdom; we must be in possession of this Reason, which is the touchstone  of Truth. A man who is the slave of prejudices will never become the King  of Nature and the Master of transmutations. The Philosophal Stone,  therefore, is necessary above all things. How shall it be found? Hermes tells  us, in his "Table of Emerald,” we must separate the subtile from the fixed,  with great care and extreme attention. So we ought to separate our  certainties from our beliefs, and make perfectly distinct the respective  domains of science and faith; and to comprehend that we do not know the  things we believe, nor believe anything that we come to know; and that thus  the essence of the things of Faith are the unknown and indefinite, while it is  precisely the contrary with the things of Science. Whence we shall conclude,  that Science rests on reason and experience, and Faith has for its bases  sentiment and reason.

The Sun and Moon of the Alchemists concur in perfecting and giving  stability to the Philosophal Stone. They correspond to the two columns of  the Temple, Jachin and Boaz. The Sun is the hieroglyphical sign of Truth,  because it is the source of Light; and the rough Stone is the symbol of 
Stability. Hence the Medieval Alchemists indicated the Philosophal Stone as  the first means of making the philosophical gold, that is to say, of  transforming all the vital powers figured by the six metals into Sun, that is,  into Truth and Light; which is the first and indispensable operation of the 
Great Work, which leads to the secondary adaptation, and enables the  creators of the spiritual and living gold, the possessors of the true  philosophical Salt, Mercury, and Sulphur, to discover, by the analogies of 
Nature, the natural and palpable gold.

To find the Philosophal Stone, is to have discovered the Absolute, as all the

Masters say. But the Absolute is that which admits of no errors, is the Fixed  from the Volatile, is the Law of the Imagination, is the very necessity of 
Being, is the immutable Law of Reason and Truth. The Absolute is that  which IS.

To find the Absolute in the Infinite, in the Indefinite, and in the Finite, this  is the Magnum Opus, the Great Work of the Sages, which Hermes called the 
Work of the Sun.

To find the immovable bases of true religious Faith, of Philosophical Truth,  and of Metallic transmutation, this is the secret of Hennes in its entirety, the 
Philosophal Stone.  p. 777

This stone is one and manifold; it is decomposed by Analysis, and re¬  compounded by Synthesis. In Analysis, it is a powder, the powder of  projection of the Alchemists; before Analysis, and in Synthesis, it is a stone.

The Philosophal Stone, say the Masters, must not be exposed to the  atmosphere, nor to the gaze of the Profane; but it must be kept concealed  and carefully preserved in the most secret place of the laboratory, and the  possessor must always carry on his person the key of the place where it is  kept.

He who possesses the Grand Arcanum is a genuine King, and more than a  king, for he is inaccessible to all fear and all empty hopes. In all maladies of  soul and body, a single particle from the precious stone, a single grain of the  divine powder, is more than sufficient to cure him. "Let him hear, who hath  ears to hear!" the Master said.

The Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury are but the accessorial elements and passive  instruments of the Great Work. All depends, as we have said, on the internal 
Magnet of Paracelsus. The entire work consists in projection: and the  projection is perfectly accomplished by the effective and realizable  understanding of a single word.

There is but a single important operation in the work; this consists in 
Sublimation, which is nothing else, according to Geber than the elevation of  dry matter, by means of fire, with adhesion to its proper vessel.

He who desires to attain to the understanding of the Grand Word and the  possession of the Great Secret, ought carefully to read the Hermetic  philosophers, and will undoubtedly attain initiation, as others have done; but  he must take, for the key of their allegories, the single dogma of Hermes,  contained in his table of Emerald, and follow, to class his acquisitions of  knowledge and direct the operation, the order indicated in the Kabalistic  alphabet of the Tarot.

Raymond Lulle has said that, to make gold, we must first have gold.

Nothing is made out of nothing; we do not absolutely create wealth; we  increase and multiply it. Let aspirants to science well understand, then, that  neither the juggler's tricks nor miracles are to be asked of the adept. The 
Hennetic science, like all the real sciences, is mathematically demonstrable. 
Its results, even material, are as rigorous as that of a correct equation.  p. 778

The Hennetic Gold is not only a true dogma, a light without Shadow, a 
Truth without alloy of falsehood; it is also a material gold, real, pure, the  most precious that can be found in the mines of the earth.

But the living gold, the living sulphur, or the true fire of the philosophers, is  to be sought for in the house of Mercury. This fire is fed by the air: to  express its attractive and expansive power, no better comparison can be used  than that of the lightning, which is at first only a dry and earthly exhalation,  united to the moist vapor, but which, by self-exhalation, takes a fiery nature,  acts on the humidity inherent in it, which it attracts to itself and transmutes  in its nature; after which it precipitates itself rapidly toward the earth,  whither it is attracted by a fixed nature like unto its own.

These words, in form enigmatic, but clear at bottom, distinctly express what  the philosophers mean by their Mercury, fecundated by Sulphur, and which  becomes the Master and regenerator of the Salt. It is the AZOTH, the  universal magnetic force, the grand magical agent, the Astral light, the light  of life, fecundated by the mental force, the intellectual energy, which they  compare to sulphur, on account of its affinities with the Divine fire.

As to the Salt, it is Absolute Matter. Whatever is matter contains salt; and all  salt [nitre] may be converted into pure gold by the combined action of 
Sulphur and Mercury, which sometimes act so rapidly, that the  transmutation may be effected in an instant, in an hour, without fatigue to  the operator, and almost without expense. At other times, and according to  the more refractory temper of the atmospheric media, the operation requires  several days, several months, and sometimes even several years.

Two primary laws exist in nature, two essential laws, which produce, by  counterbalancing each other, the universal equilibrium of things. These are  fixedness and movement, analogous, in philosophy, to Truth and Fiction,  and, in Absolute Conception, to Necessity and Liberty, which are the very  essence of Deity. The Hermetic philosophers gave the name fixed to  everything ponder-able, to everything that tends by its natural to central  repose and immobility; they term volatile everything that more naturally and  more readily obeys the law of movement; and they form their stone by  analysis, that is to say, by the volatilization of the Fixed, and then by  synthesis, that is, by fixing the volatile, which they effect  p. 779  by applying to the fixed, which they call their salt, the sulphurated Mercury,  or the light of life, directed and made omnipotent by a Sovereign Will. Thus  they master entire Nature, and their stone is found wherever there is salt,  which is the reason for saying that no substance is foreign to the Great 
Work, and that even the most despicable and apparently vile matters may be  changed into gold, which is true in this sense, that they all contain the  original salt-principle, represented in our emblems by the cubical stone.

To know how to extract from all matter the pure salt concealed in it, is to  have the Secret of the Stone. Wherefore this is a Saline stone, which the Od  or universal astral light decomposes or re-compounds: it is single and  manifold; for it may be dissolved like ordinary salt, and incorporated with  other substances. Obtained by analysis, we might tenn it the Universal 
Sublimate', found by way of synthesis, it is the true panacea of the ancients,  for it cures all maladies of soul and body, and has been styled, par-  excellence, the medicine of all nature. When one, by absolute initiation,  comes to control the forces of the universal agent, he always has this stone  at his disposal, for its extraction is then a simple and easy operation, very  distinct from the metallic projection or realization. This stone, when in a  state of sublimation, must not be exposed to contact with the atmospheric  air, which might partially dissolve it and deprive it of its virtue; nor could its  emanations be inhaled without danger. The Sage prefers to preserve it in its  natural envelopes, assured as he is of extracting it by a single effort of his  will, and a single application of the Universal Agent to the envelopes, which  the Kabalists call cortices, the shells, bark, or integuments.

Hieroglyphically to express this law of prudence, they gave their Mercury,  personified in Egypt as Hermanubis, a dog's head; and to their Sulphur,  represented by the Baphomet of the Temple, that goafs head which brought  into such disrepute the occult Mediaeval associations.

Let us listen for a few moments to the Alchemists themselves, and endeavor  to learn the hidden meaning of their mysterious words.

The RITUAL of the Degree of Scottish Elder MASTER, and Knight of 
Saint Andrew, being the fourth Degree of Ramsay, it is said upon the title-  page, or of the Reformed or Rectified Rite of Dresden, has these passages:  p. 780

"O how great and glorious is the presence of the Almighty God which  gloriously shines from between the Cherubim!

"How adorable and astonishing are the rays of that glorious Light, that sends  forth its bright and brilliant beams from the Holy Ark of Alliance and 
Covenant!

"Let us with the deepest veneration and devotion adore the great Source of

Life, that Glorious Spirit who is the Most Merciful and Beneficent Ruler of  the Universe and of all the creatures it contains!

"The secret knowledge of the Grand Scottish Master relates to the  combination and transmutation of different substances; where-of that you  may obtain a clear idea and proper understanding, you are to know that all  matter and all material substances are composed of combinations of three  several substances, extracted from the four elements, which three substances

-&■ A.  in combination are, VX , Salt, * , Sulphur , and

Spirit. The first of these produces Solidity, the second Softness, and the third  the Spiritual, vaporous particles. These three compound substances work  potently together; and therein consists the true process for the transmutation  of metals.

"To these three substances allude the three golden basins, in the first of  which was engraved the letter M •'•, in the second, the letter G •'•, and in the  third nothing. The first, M , is the initial letter of the Hebrew word 
Malakh, which signifies Salt; and the second, G , of the Hebrew word 
Geparaith, which signifies Sulphur, and as there is no word in Hebrew to  express the vaporous and intangible Spirit, there is no letter in the third  basin.

"With these three principal substances you may effect the transmutation of  metals, which must be done by means of the five points or rules of the 
Scottish Mastership.

"The first Master's point shows us the Brazen Sea, wherein must always be  rain-water; and out of this rain-water the Scottish Masters extract the first  substance, which is Salt; which salt must afterward undergo a seven-fold  manipulation and purification, before it will be properly prepared. This  seven-fold purification is symbolized by the Seven Steps of Solomon's 
Temple, which symbol is furnished us by the first point or rule of the 
Scottish Masters.

"After preparing the first substance, you are to extract the

Ln A  p. 781  second, Sulphur, out of the purest gold, to which must then be added the  purified or celestial Salt. They are to be mixed as the Art directs, and then  placed in a vessel in the form of a SHIP, in which it is to remain, as the Ark  of Noah was afloat, one hundred and fifty days, being brought to the first  damp, warm degree of fire, that it may putrefy and produce the mineral  fermentation. This is the second point or rule of the Scottish Masters."

If you reflect, my Brother, that it was impossible for any one to imagine that  either common salt or nitre could be extracted from rain-water, or sulphur  from pure gold, you will no doubt suspect that some secret meaning was  concealed in these words.

The Kabalah considers the immaterial part of man as threefold, consisting of 
NEPHESCH, RUACH, and NESCHAMAH, Psyche, Spiritus, and Mens, or 
Soul, Spirit, and Intellect. There are Seven Holy Palaces, Seven Heavens  and Seven Thrones; and Souls are purified by ascending through Seven 
Spheres. A Ship, in Hebrew, is Ani; and the same word means I, Me, or 
Myself.

The RITUAL continues:

"Multiplying the substance thus obtained, is the third operation, which is  done by adding to them the animate, volatile Spirit', which is done by means  of the water of the Celestial Salt, as well as by the Salt, which must daily be  added to it very carefully, and strictly observing to put neither too much nor  too little; inasmuch as, if you add too much, you will destroy that growing  and multiplying substance; and if too little, it will be self-consumed and  destroyed, and shrink away, not having sufficient substantiality for its  preservation. This third point or rule of the Scottish Masters gives us the  emblem of the building of the Tower of Babel, used by our Scottish 
Masters, because by irregularity and want of due proportion and harmony  that work was stopped; and the workmen could proceed no further.

"Next comes the fourth operation, represented by the Cubical Stone, whose  faces and angles are all equal. As soon as the work is brought to the  necessary point of multiplication, it is to be submitted to the third Degree of 
Fire, wherein it will receive the due proportion of the strength and substance  of the metallic particles of the Cubical Stone; and this is the fourth point or  rule of the Scottish Masters.

"Finally, we come to the fifth and last operation, indicated to us by the 
Flaming Star. After the work has become a duly-proportioned  p. 782  substance, it is to be subjected to the fourth and strongest Degree of fire,  wherein it must remain three times twenty-seven hours; until it is thoroughly  glowing, by which means it becomes a bright and shining tincture,  wherewith the lighter metals may be changed, by the use of one part to a  thousand of the metal. Wherefore this Flaming Star shows us the fifth and  last point of the Scottish Masters.

"You should pass practically through the five points or rules of the Master,  and by the use of one part to a thousand, trans-mute and ennoble metals.

You may then in reality say that your age is a thousand years."

In the oration of the Degree, the following hints are given as to its true  meaning:

"The three divisions of the Temple, the Outer Court, Sanctuary, and Floly of 
Holies, signify the three Principles of our Holy Order, which direct to the  knowledge of morality, and teach those most practical virtues that ought to  be practised by mankind. Therefore the Seven Steps which lead up to the 
Outer Court of the Temple, are the emblem of the Seven-fold Light which  we need to possess, before we can arrive at the height of knowledge, in  which consist the ultimate limits of our order.

"In the Brazen Sea we are symbolically to purify ourselves from all  pollutions, all faults and wrongful actions, as well those committed through  error of judgment and mistaken opinion, as those intentionally done;  inasmuch as they equally prevent us from arriving at the knowledge of True

Wisdom. We must thoroughly cleanse and purify our hearts to their inmost  recesses, before we can of right contemplate that Flaming Star , which is the  emblem of the Divine and Glorious Shekinah, or presence of God; before  we may dare approach the Throne of Supreme Wisdom."

In the Degree of The True Mason [Le Vrai Magon\, styled in the title-page  of its Ritual the 23d Degree of Masonry, or the 12th of the 5th class, the 
Tracing-board displays a luminous Triangle, with a great Yod in the centre.

"The Triangle," says the Ritual, "represents one God in three Persons; and  the great Yod is the initial letter of the last word.

"The Dark Circle represents the Chaos, which in the beginning God created.

"The Cross within the Circle, the Light by means whereof He developed the 
Chaos.  p. 783

"The Square, the four Elements into which it was resolved.

"The Triangle, again, the three Principles [Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury],  which the intermingling of the elements produced.

"God creates ; Nature produces'. Art multiplies. God created Chaos; Nature  produced it; God, Nature, and Art, have perfected it.

"The Altar of Perfumes indicates the Fire that is to be applied to Nature.

The two towers are the two furnaces, moist and dry, in which it is to be  worked. The bowl is the mould of oak that is to inclose the philosophal egg.

"The two figures surmounted by a Cross are the two vases, Nature and Art,  in which is to be consummated the double marriage of the white woman  with the red Servitor, from which marriage will spring a most Potent King.

"Chaos means universal matter, formless, but susceptible of all forms. Form  is the Light inclosed in the seeds of all species; and its home is in the 
Universal Spirit.

"To work on universal matter, use the internal and external fire: the four  elements result, the Principia Principiorum and Inmediata ; Fire, Air, Water, 
Earth. There are four qualities of these elements—the warm and dry, the cold  and moist. Two appertain to each element: The dry and cold, to the Earth;  the cold and moist, to Water; the moist and wann, to the Air; and the warm  and dry, to Fire: whereby the Fire connects with the Earth; all the elements,  as Flermes said, moving in circles.

"From the mixture of the four Elements and of their four qualities, result the  three Principles,—Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt. These are the philosophical,  not the vulgar.

"The philosophical Mercury is a Water and SPIRIT, which dissolves and  sublimates the Sun; the philosophical Sulphur, a fire and a SOUL, which  mollifies and colors it; the philosophical Salt, an Earth and a BODY, which  coagulates and fixes it; and the whole is done in the bosom of the Air.

"From these three-Principles result the four Elements duplicated, or the 
Grand Elements, Mercury, Sulphur, Salt, and Glass', two of which are  volatile,—the Water [Mercury] and the Air [Sulphur], which is oil; for all  substances liquid in their nature avoid fire, which takes from the one [water]  and burns the other [oil]; but the other two are dry and solid, to wit, the Salt,  wherein Fire is contained, and the pure Earth, which is the Glass', on  p. 784  both of which the Fire has no other action than to melt and refine them,  unless one makes use of the liquid alkali; for, just as each element consists  of two qualities, so these great duplicated Elements partake, each of two of  the simple elements, or, more properly speaking, of all the four, according to  the greater or less degree of each,-the Mercury partaking more of the 
Water, to which it is assigned; the Oil or Sulphur, more of the Air; the Salt,  of the Fire; and the Glass, of the Earth; which is found, pure and clear, in the  centre of all the elementary composites, and is the last to disengage itself  from the others.

"The four Elements and three Principles reside in all the Compounds, 
Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral; but more potently in some than in others.

"The Fire gives them Movement; the Air, Sensation; the Water, Nutriment;  and the Earth, Subsistence.

"The four duplicated Elements engender THE STONE, if one is careful  enough to supply them with the proper quantity of fire, and to combine them  according to their natural weight. Ten parts of Air make one of Water; ten of 
Water, one of Earth; and ten of Earth, one of Fire; the whole by the Active 
Symbol of the one, and the Passive Symbol of the other, whereby the  conversion of the Elements is effected."

The Allusion of the Ritual, here, is obviously to the four Worlds of the 
Kabalah. The ten Sephiroth of the world Briah proceed from Malakoth, the  last of the ten Emanations of the world Aziluth; the ten Sephiroth of the  world Yezirah, from Malakoth of Brian; and the ten of the world Asiah,  from Malakoth of Yezirah. The Pass-word of the Degree is given as 
Metralon, which is a corruption of METATRON, the Cherub, who and 
Sandalphon are in the Kabalah the Chief of the Angels. The Active and 
Passive Symbols are the Male and Female.

The Ritual continues:

"It is thereby evident that, in the Great Work, we must employ ten parts of  philosophical Mercury to one of Sun or Moon.

"This is attained by Solution and Coagulation. These words mean that we  must dissolve the body and coagulate the spirit; which operations are  effected by the moist and dry bath.

"Of colors, black is the Earth; white, the Water; blue, the Air; and red, the 
Fire; wherein also are involved very great secrets and mysteries.  p. 785

"The apparatus employed in 'The Great Work' consists of the Moist bath, the 
Dry bath, the Vases of Nature and Art, the bowl of oak, lutum sapientice, the 
Seal of Hermes, the tube, the physical lamp, and the iron rod.

"The work is perfected in seventeen philosophical months, according to the  mixture of ingredients. The benefits reaped from it are of two kinds—one  affecting the soul, and the other the body. The former consist in knowing 
God, Nature, and ourself, and those to the body are wealth and health.

"The Initiate traverses Heaven and Earth. Heaven is the World manifest to  the Intelligence, subdivided into Paradise and Hell; Earth is the World  manifest to the Senses, also subdivided into the Celestial and that of the 
Elements.

"There are Sciences specially connected with each of these. The one is  ordinary and common ; the other, mystic and secret. The World cognizable  by the Intellect has the Hermetic Theology and the Kabalah; the Celestial 
Astrology; and that of the Elements, Chemistry, which by its  decompositions and separations, effected by fire, reveals all the most hidden  secrets of Nature, in the three kinds of Compound Substances. This last  science is styled 'Hermetic,' or 'The operating of the Great Work.'"

The Ritual of the Degree of Kabalistic and Hermetic Rose * , has these  passages:

"The true Philosophy, known and practised by Solomon, is the basis on  which Masonry is founded.

"Our Ancient Masons have concealed from us the most important point of  this Divine Art, under hieroglyphical characters, which are but enigmas and  parables, to all the Senseless, the Wicked, and the Ambitious.

"He will be supremely fortunate, who shall, by arduous labor, discover this  sacred place of deposite, wherein all naked the sublime Truth is hidden; for  he may be assured that he has found the True Light, the True Felicity, the 
True Heavenly Good. Then may it truly be said that he is one of the True 
Elect; for it is the only real and most Sublime Science of all those to which a  mortal can aspire: his days will be prolonged, and his soul freed of all vices  and corruption; into which" (it is added, to mislead, as if from fear too much  would be disclosed), "the human race is often led by indigence."  p. 786

As the symbolism of the Hall and the language of the ritual mutually explain  each other, it should be noted here, that in this Degree the columns of the  hall, 12 in number, are white variegated with black and red. The hangings  are black, and over that crimson.

Over the throne is a great Eagle, in gold, on a black ground. In the centre of  the Canopy the Blazing Star in gold, with the letter Yod in its centre. On the  right and left of the throne are the Sun in gold and the Moon in silver. The  throne is ascended to by three Steps. The hall and ante-room are each  lighted by ten lights, and a single one at the entrance. The colors, black,  white, and crimson appear in the clothing; and the Key and Balance are  among the symbols.

The duty of the Second Grand Prior, says the Ritual, is "to see if the Chapter  is hermetically sealed; whether the materials are ready, and the elements;  whether the Black gives place to the White, and the White to the Red."

"Be laborious," it says, "like the Star, and procure the light of the Sages, and  hide yourself from the Stupid Profane and the Ambitious, and be like the 
Owl, which sees only by night, and hides itself from treacherous curiosity."

"The Sun, on entering each of his houses, should be received there by the  four elements, which you must be careful to invite to accompany you, that  they may aid you in your undertaking; for without them the House would be  melancholy: wherefore you will give him to feast upon the four elements.

"When he shall have visited his twelve houses, and seen you attentive there  to receive him, you will become one of his chiefest favorites, and he will  allow you to share all his gifts. Matter will then no longer have power over  you; you will, so to say, be no longer a dweller on the earth; but after certain  periods you will give back to it a body which is its own, to take in its stead  one altogether Spiritual. Matter is then deemed to be dead to the world.

"Therefore it must be re-vivified, and made to be born again from its ashes,  which you will effect by virtue of the vegetation of the Tree of Life,  represented to us by the branch of acacia. Whoever shall learn to  comprehend and execute this great work, will know great things, say the 
Sages of the work; but whenever you depart from the centre of the Square  and the Compass you will no longer be able to work with success.  p. 787

"Another Jewel is necessary for you, and in certain undertakings cannot be  dispensed with. It is what is termed the Kabalistic pantacle . . . This carries  with it the power of commanding the spirits of the elements. It is necessary  for you to know how to use it, and that you will learn by perseverance if you  are a lover of the science of our predecessors the Sages.

"A great Black Eagle, the King of Birds. He alone it is that can fire the Sun,  material in its nature, that has no form, and yet by its form develops color. 
The black is a complete harbinger of the work: it changes color and assumes  a natural form, out whereof will emerge a brilliant Sun.

"The birth of the Sun is always announced by its Star, represented by the 
Blazing Star, which you will know by its fiery color; and it is followed in its  course by the silvery lustre of the Moon.

"A rough Ashlar is the shapeless stone which is to be prepared in order to  commence the philosophical work; and to be developed, in order to change  its form from triangular to cubic, after the separation from it of its Salt, 
Sulphur, and Mercury, by the aid of the Square, Level, Plumb, and Balance,  and all the other Masonic implements which we use symbolically.

"Here me put them to philosophical use, to constitute a well-proportioned  edifice, through which you are to make pass the crude material, analogous to  a candidate commencing his initiation into our Mysteries. When we build  we must observe all the rules and proportions; for otherwise the Spirit of 
Life cannot lodge therein. So you will build the great tower, in which is to  burn the fire of the Sages, or, in other words, the fire of Heaven; as also the 
Sea of the Sages, in which the Sun and Moon are to bathe. That is the basin  of Purification, in which will be the water of Celestial Grace, water that doth  not soil the hands, but purifies all leprous bodies.

"Let us labor to instruct our Brother, to the end that by his toils he may  succeed in discovering the principle of life contained in the profundity of  matter, and known by the name of Alkahest.

"The most potent of the names of Deity is ADONAI. Its power is to put the 
Universe in movement; and the Knights who shall be fortunate enough to  possess it, with weight and measure, shall have at their disposition all the  potences that inhabit it, the Elements,  p. 788  and the cognizance of all the virtues and sciences that man is capable of  knowing. By its power they would succeed in discovering the primary metal  of the Sun, which holds within itself the Principle of the germ, and  wherewith we can put in alliance and six other metals, each of which  contains the principles and primitive seed of the grand philosophical work.

"The six other metals are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Luna;  vulgarly known as Lead, Tin, Iron, Copper, Quicksilver, and Silver. Gold is  not included; because it is not in its nature a metal. It is all Spirit and  incorruptible; wherefore it is the emblem of the Sun, which presides over the 
Light.

"The vivifying Spirit, called Alkahest, has in itself the generative virtue of  producing the triangular Cubical Stone, and contains in itself all the virtues  to render men happy in this world and in that to come. To arrive at the  composition of that Alkahest, we begin by laboring at the science of the  union of the four Elements which are to be educed from the three Kingdoms  of Nature, Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal; the rule, measure, weight, and  equipoise whereof have each their key. We then employ in one work the  animals, vegetables, and minerals, each in his season, which make the space  of the Houses of the Sun, where they have all the virtues required.

"Something from each of the three Kingdoms of Nature is assigned to each 
Celestial House, to the end that everything may be done in accordance with  sound philosophical rules; and that everything maybe thoroughly purified in  its proper time and place in order to be presented at the wedding-table of the 
Spouse and the six virgins who hold the mystic shovel, without a common  fire, but with an elementary fire, that comes primarily by attraction, and by  digestion in the philosophical bed lighted by the four elements.

"At the banquet of the Spouses, the viands, being thoroughly, purified, are  served in Salt, Sulphur, Spirit, and Oil; a sufficient quantity thereof is taken  every month, and therewith is compounded, by means of the Balance of 
Solomon, the Alkahest, to serve the Spouses, when they are laid on the  nuptial bed, there to engender their embryo, producing for the human race  immense treasures, that will last as long as the world endures.

"Few are capable of engaging in this great work. Only the true Free-Masons  may of right aspire to it; and even of them,  p. 789  very few are worthy to attain it, because most of them are ignorant of the 
Clavicules and their contents, and of the Pantacle of Solomon, which  teaches how to labor at the great work.

"The weight raised by Solomon with his balance was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; which  contains 25 times unity, 2 multiplied by 2; 3 multiplied by 3; 4 multiplied by 
4; 5 multiplied by 5, and once 9; these numbers thus involving the squares  of 5 and 2, the cube of 2, the square of the square of 2, and the square of 3."

Thus far the Ritual, in the numbers mentioned by it, is an allusion to the

47th problem of Euclid, a symbol of Blue Masonry, entirely out of place  there, and its meaning unknown. The base of the right-angled triangle being 
3, and the perpendicular 4, the hypothenuse is 5, by the rule that the sum of  the squares of the two former equals the square of the latter,—3x3 being 9;  and 4x4, 16; and 9+16 being 25, the square of 5. The triangle contains in its  sides the numbers 1, 2, and 3. The Perpendicular is the Male; the Base, the 
Female; the Hypothenuse, the product of the two.

To fix the volatile, in the Hermetic language, means to materialize the spirit;  to volatilize the fixed is to spiritualize matter.

To separate the subtile from the gross, in the first operation,  p. 790  which is wholly internal, is to free our soul from all prejudice and all vice. 
This is effected by the use of the philosophical SALT, that is to say, of 
WISDOM; of MERCURY, that is to say, of personal aptitude and labor; and  of SULPHUR, which represents the vital energy, and the ardor of the will. 
Thus we succeed in changing into spiritual gold such things even as are of  least value, and even the foul things of the earth.

It is in this sense we are to understand the parables of the Hermetic  philosophers and the prophets of Alchemy; but in their works, as in the 
Great Work, we must skillfully separate the subtile from the gross, the  mystic from the positive, allegory from theory. If you would read them with  pleasure and understanding^, you must first understand them allegorically  in their entirety and then descend from allegories to realities by way of the  correspondences or analogies indicated in the single dogma:

"What is above is like what is below; and what is below is like what is  above."

The treatise "Minerva Mundi ," attributed to Hennes Trismegistus, contains,  under the most poetical and profound allegories, the dogma of the self¬  creation of beings, or of the law of creation that results from the accord of  two forces, these which the Alchemists called the Fixed and the Volatile,  and which are, in the Absolute, Necessity and Liberty.

When the Masters in Alchemy say that it needs but little time and expense to  accomplish the works of Science, when they affirm, above all, that but a  single vessel is necessary, when they speak of the Great and Single furnace,  which all can use, which is within the reach of all the world, and which men  possess without knowing it, they allude to the philosophical and moral 
Alchemy. In fact, a strong and determined will can, in a little while, attain  complete independence; and we all possess that chemical instrument, the  great and single athanor or furnace, which serves to separate the subtile from  the gross, and the fixed from the volatile. This instrument, complete as the  world, and accurate as the mathematics themselves, is designated by the 
Sages under the emblem of the Pentagram or Star with five points, the  absolute sign of human intelligence.

The end and perfection of the Great Work is expressed, in alchemy, by a  triangle surmounted by a cross: and the letter Tau, n, the last of the Sacred  alphabet, has the same meaning.  p. 791

The "elementary fire," that comes primarily by attraction, is evidently 
Electricity or the Electric Force, primarily developed as magnetism, and in  which is perhaps the secret of life or the vital force.

Paracelsus, the great Reformer in medicine, discovered magnetism long  before Mesmer, and pushed to its last consequences this luminous  discovery, or rather this initiation into the magic of the ancients, who  understood the grand magical agent better than we do, and did not regard the 
Astral Light, Azoth, the universal magnetism of the Sages, as an animal and  particular fluid, emanating only from certain special beings.

The four Elements, the four symbolic animals, and the re-duplicated 
Principles correspond with each other, and are thus arranged by the 
Hermetic Masons:

Azoru 
The Eagle. 
Aik.

Hi'S al IX 
TIES

The Air and Earth represent the Male Principle; and the Fire and Water  belong to the Female Principle. To these four forms correspond the four  following philosophical ideas.

Spirit: Matter: Movement: Repose.

Alchemy reduces these four things to three:

The Absolute: the Fixed: the Volatile.

Reason: Necessity; Liberty: are the synonyms of these three words.

As all the great Mysteries of God and the Universe are thus hidden in the 
Ternary, it everywhere appears in Masonry and in the Hermetic Philosophy  under its mask of Alchemy. It even  p. 792  appears where Masons do not suspect it; to teach the doctrine of the  equilibrium of Contraries, and the resultant Harmony.

The double triangle of Solomon is explained by Saint John in a remarkable  manner: There are, he says, three witnesses in Heaven,—the Father, the 
Word, and the Holy Spirit; and three witnesses on earth,—the breath, water,  and blood. He thus agrees with the Masters of the Hermetic Philosophy,  who give to their Sulphur the name of Ether, to their Mercury the name of  philosophical water, to their Salt that of blood of the dragon, or menstruum  of the earth. The blood, or Salt, corresponds by opposition with the Father;  the Azothic, or Mercurial water, with the Word, or Logos; and the breath,  with the Holy Spirit. But the things of High Symbolism can be well  understood only by the true children of Science.

Alchemy has its Symbolic Triad of Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury,—man  consisting, according to the Hermetic philosophers, of Body, Soul, and 
Spirit. The Dove, the Raven, and the Phoenix are striking Symbols of Good  and Evil, Light and Darkness, and the Beauty resulting from the equilibrium  of the two.

If you would understand the true secrets of Alchemy, you must study the  works of the Masters with patience and assiduity. Every word is often an  enigma; and to him who reads in haste, the whole will seem absurd. Even  when they seem to teach that the Great Work is the purification of the Soul,  and so to deal only with morals, they most conceal their meaning, and  deceive all but the Initiates.

Yod [a or ’] is termed in the Kabalah the opifex, workman of the Deity. It is,  says the Porta Ccelorum, single and primal, like one, which is the first  among numbers; and like a point, the first before all bodies. Moved  lengthwise, it produces a line, which is Vau, and this moved sidewise  produces a superficies, which is Daleth. Thus Vau [7] becomes Daleth [1];  for movement tends from right to left; and all communication is from above  to below. The plenitude of Yod, that is, the name of this letter, spelled, is IV, 
Y-O-D. Vau [which represents 6] and Daleth [4] are 10; like Yod, their  principle.

Yod, says the Siphra de Zeniutha, is the Symbol of Wisdom and of the 
Father.

The Principle called Father, says the Idra Suta, is comprehended in Yod,  which flows downward from the Holy influence,  p. 793  wherefore Yod is the most occult of all the letters; for he is the beginning  and end of all things. The Supernal Wisdom is Yod; and all things are  included in Yod, who is therefore called Father of Fathers, or the Generator  of the Universal. The Principle of all things is called the House of all things:  wherefore Yod is the beginning and end of all things; as it is written: "Thou  halt made all things in Wisdom." For The All is termed Wisdom; and in it 
The All is contained; and the summary of all things is the Holy Name.

Yod, says the Siphra de Zeniutha, signifying the Father, approaches the  letter He, which is the Mother; and by the combination of these two is  denoted that luminous influence wherewith Binah is imbued by the Supernal 
Wisdom.

In the name IP’, says the same, are included the Father, Mother, and 
Microprosopos, their issue. He, impregnated by Vau, produced 
Microprosopos, or Seir Anpin.

Wisdom, Hakemah, is the Principle of all things: it is the Father of Fathers,  and in it are the beginning and end of all things. Microprosopos, the second 
Universal, is the issue of Wisdom, the Father, and Binah, the Mother, and is  composed of the six Numerations, Geburah, Gedulah, and Tephareth, 
Netsach, Hod , and Yesod; is represented under the form of a man, and said  to have at first occupied the place afterward filled by the world Briah [of 
Creation], but afterward to have been raised to the Aziluthic sphere, and  received Wisdom, Intelligence, and Cognition [Daath] from the Supernal 
Wisdom and Intellectuality.

Vau, in the tri-literal word, denotes these six members of Microprosopos. 
For this latter is. formed after the fashion of Macroprosopos, but without 
Kether, the will, which remains in the first prototype or Universal; though  invested with a portion of the Divine Intellectual Power and Capacity. The  first Universal does not use the first person, and is called in the third person, 
Nin, HUA, HE: but the second Universal speaks in the first person, using the  word ’IS ANI, I.

The IDRA RABBA, or Synodus Magna, one of the books of the Sohar,  says:

The Eldest of the Eldest [the Absolute Deity] is in Microprosopos. All  things are one: all was, all is, all will be: there neither will be, nor is, nor has  been, mutation.

But He conformed Himself, by the formings, into a form that contains all  forms, in a form which comprehends all genera.  p. 794

This form is in the likeness of His form; and is not that fonn but its  analogue: wherefore the human form is the form of all above and below,  which are included in it: and because it embraces all above and below. The 
Most Holy so took form, and so Microprosopos was configured. All things  are equally one, in each of the two Universals; but in the second His ways  are divided, and judgment is on our side, and on the side that looks toward  us, also, they differ.

These Secrets are made known only to the reapers in the Holy Field.

The Most Holy Ancient is not called ATHAH, Thou, but Hun, He: but in 
Microprosopos, where is the beginning of things. He has the name ATHAH,  and also AB, Father. From Him is the beginning, and He is called Thou, and  is the Father of Fathers. He issues from the Non-Ens; and therefore is  beyond cognition.

Wisdom is the Principle of the Universe, and from it thirty-two ways  diverge: and in them the law is contained, in twenty-two letters and ten  words. Wisdom is the Father of Fathers, and in this Wisdom is found the 
Beginning and the End: wherefore there is a wisdom in each Universal, one  above, the other below.

The Commentary of Rabbi Chajun Vital, on the Siphra de Zeniutha, says: At  the beginning of emanation, Microprosopos issued from the Father, and was  intermingled with the Mother, under the mysteries of the letter,n [Fie],  resolved in 17, that is, Daleth and Vau; by which Vau is denoted 
Microprosopos: because Vau is six, and he is constituted of the six parts that  follow Flakemah and Binah. And, according to this conception, the Father is  called Father of Fathers, because from Flim these Fathers proceed,

Benignity, Severity, and Beauty. Microprosopos was then like the letter Vau  in the letter He, because He had no head; but when He was now born, three  brains were constituted for Him, by the flow of Divine Light from above.

And as the world of restitution [after the vessels of the Sephiroth below 
Binah had been broken, that from the fragments evil might be created] is  instituted after the fashion of the Balance, so also is it fonned throughout in  the human form. But Malakoth, Regnum, is a complete and separate person,  behind Microprosopos, and in conjunction with him, and the two are called  man.  p. 795

The first world [of Inanity] could not continue and did not subsist, because it  had no human conformation nor the system of the Balance, the Sephiroth  being points, one below the other. The first Adam [Microprosopos, as  distinguished from Macroprosopos, the first Occult Adam] was the  beginning, wherein the ten Numerations proceeded forth from potence into  act.

Microprosopos is the second garment or interposed medium, with respect to  the Elder Most Holy, who is the name Tetragrammaton; and he is called 
Alohim; because the former is Absolute Commiseration; while in 
Macroprosopos his lights have the nature of Severities, with respect to the  elder Universal; though they are Commiseration, with respect to the lights of 
Malakoth and the three lower worlds.

All the conformations of Macroprosopos come from the first Adam; who, to  interpose a second covering, caused a single spark to issue from the sphere  of Severity, of whose five letters is generated the name Alohim. With this  issued from the brain a most subtle air, which takes its place on the right  hand, while the spark of fire is on the left. Thus the white and red do not  intermix, that is, the Air and Fire, which are Mercy and Judgment.

Microprosopos is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, his 
Severities being the Evil.

REGNUM, to which is given the name of Word of The Lord, superinvests 
Heaven, as the six members of the Degree Tephareth are called, and these  become and are constituted by that superior vestiture. For every  conformation and constitution is effected by means of veiling, because  occultation here is the same as manifestation, the excess of light being  veiled, so that, diminished in intensity and degree, it may be received by  those below. Those six members conceived of as contained in Binah, are  said to be in the World of Creation; as in Tephareth, in that of Formation;  and as in Malakoth, in that of Fabrication.

Before the institution of equilibrium, face was not toward face: 
Microprosopos and his wife issuing forth back to back, and yet cohering. So  above; before the prior Adam was conformed into male and female, and the  state of equilibrium established, the Father and Mother were not face to  face. For the Father denotes the most perfect Love; and the Mother the most  perfect Rigor. And the seven supernal sons who proceeded from her, from 
Binah, who brought forth seven, were all most perfect rigors, having no  p. 796  connection with a root in the Most Holy Ancient; that is, they were all dead ,  destroyed, shattered; but they were placed in equilibrium, in the equipoise of  the Occult Wisdom, when it was conformed into male and female, Rigor  and Love, and they were then restored, and there was given them a root  above.

The Father is Love and Mercy, and with a pure and subtle Aur or Benignity  impregnates the Mother, who is Rigor and Severity of Judgments; and the  product is the brain of Microprosopos.

It was determined, says the Introduction to the Book Sohar, by the Deity, to  create Good and Evil in the world, according to what is said in Isaiah, "who  makes the bight and creates the Evil." But the Evil was at first occult, and  could not be generated and brought forth, except by the sinning of the First 
Adam. Wherefore He determined that the numerations first emanated, from 
Benignity downward, should be destroyed and shattered by the excessive  influx of His Light; His intention being to create of them the worlds of 
Evils. But the first three were to remain and subsist, that among the  fragments should be neither Will, Intellectual Power, nor the Capacity of 
Intellection of the Divinity. The last seven numerations were points , like the  first three, each subsisting independently, unsustained by companionship;  which was the cause of their dying and being shattered.

There was then no Love between them, but only a two-fold Fear; Wisdom,  for example, fearing lest it should ascend again to its Source in Kether; and  also lest it should descend into Binah. Hence there was no union between  any two, except Hakemah and Binah, and this imperfect, with averted faces. 
This is the meaning of the saying, that the world was created by Judgment,  which is fear. And so that world could not subsist, and the Seven Kings  were dethroned, until the attribute of Compassion was adjoined to it, and  then restoration took place. Thence came Love and Union, and six of the  parts were united into one person; for Love is the attribute of Compassion or 
Mercy.

Binah produced the Seven Kings, not successively, but all together. The 
Seventh is Regnum, called a stone, the corner-stone, because on it are  builded the palaces of the three lower worlds.

The first six were shattered into fragments; but Regnum was crushed into a  formless mass, lest the malignant demons created from the fragments of the  others should receive bodies from it, since from it came bodies and vitality 
[Nephesch],  p. 797

From the fragments of the vessels came all Evils; judgments, turbid waters,  impurities, the Serpent, and Adam Belial [Baal], But their internal light re¬  ascended to Binah, and then flowed down again into the worlds Briah and 
Yezirah, there to form vestiges of the Seven Numerations. The Sparks of the  great Influence of the shattered vases descending into the four spiritual  elements, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, and thence into the inanimate,  vegetable, living, and speaking kingdoms, became Souls.

Selecting the suitable from the unsuitable lights, and separating the good  from the evil, the Deity first restored the universality of the Seven Kings of  the World Aziluth, and afterward the three other Worlds.

And though in them were both good and evil, still this evil did not develop  itself in act, since the Severities remained, though mitigated; some portion  of them being necessary to prevent the fragments of the integuments from  ascending. These were also left, because connection of two is necessary to  generation. And this necessity for the existence of Severity is the mystery of  the pleasure and wannth of the generative appetite; and thence Love  between husband and wife.

If the Deity, says the Introduction, had not created worlds and then  destroyed them, there could have been no evil in the world, but all things  must have been good. There would have been neither reward nor  punishment in the world. There would have been no merit in righteousness,  for the Good is known by the evil, nor would there have been fruitfulness or  multiplication in the world. If all carnal concupiscence were enchained for  three days in the mouth of the great abyss, the egg of one of the days would  be wanting to the sick man. In time to come it will be called Laban [pb~  white], because it will be whitened of its impurity, and will return to the  realm Israel, and they will pray the Lord to give them the appetite of carnal  concupiscence, for the begetting of children.

The intention of God was, when He created the world, that His creatures  should recognize His existence. Therefore He created evils, to afflict them  withal when they should sin, and Light and Blessing to reward the just. And  therefore man necessarily has free-will and election, since Good and Evil  are in the World.

And these kings died, says the Commentary, because the condition of  equilibrium did not yet exist, nor was Adam Kadmon  p. 798  formed male and female. They were not in contact with what was alive: nor  had any root in Adam Kadmon; nor was Wisdom which outflowed from 
Him, their root, nor did they connect with it. For all these were pure mercies  and most simple Love; but those were rigorous judgments. Whence face  looked not toward face; nor the Father toward the Mother, because from her  proceeded judgments. Nor Macroprosopos toward Microprosopos. And 
Regnum, the last numeration, was empty and inane. It has nothing of itself;  and, as it were, was nothing, receiving nothing from them. Its need was, to  receive Love from the Male; for it is mere rigor and judgment; and the Love  and Rigor must temper each other, to produce creation, and its multitudes  above and below. For it was made to be inhabited; and when rigorous  judgments rule in it, it is inane because its processes cannot be carried on.

Wherefore the Balance must needs be instituted, that there might be a root  above, so that judgments might be restored and tempered, and live and not  again die. And Seven Conformations descend; and all things become in  equilibrium, and the needle of the Balance is the root above.

In the world Yezirah, says the Pneumatica Kabalistica, ’ de-notes Kether; rp 
, Hakemah and Binah; and in 1 , Gedulah, Geburah, and Tephareth; and thus 
Vau is Beauty and Harmony. The Man is Hakemah; the Eagle, Binah; the 
Lion, Gedulah; and the Ox, Geburah. And the mysterious circle is thus  formed by the Sohar and all the Kabalists: Michael and the face of the Lion  are on the South, and the right hand, with the letter Yod . and Water; 
Gabriel and the face of the Ox, on the North, and left hand, with the first n  of the Tetragrammaton and Fire; Uriel and the face of the Eagle, on the East  and forward, with 1 and Air; and Raphael and the face of the Man, on the 
West, and backward with the last n, and Earth. In the same order, the four  letters represent the four worlds.

Rabbi Schimeon Ben Jochai says that the four animals of the Mysterious 
Chariot, whose wheels are Netsach and Had, are Gedulah, whose face is the 
Lion's; Geburah, with that of the Ox; Tephareth, with that of the Eagle; and 
Malakoth, with that of the Man.

The Seven lower Sephiroth, says the Msch Mezareph , will represent Seven 
Metals; Gedulah and Geburah, Silver and Gold;  p. 799

[paragraph continues] Tephareth, Iron; Netsach and Hod . Tin and Copper; Yesod, 
Lead; and Malakoth will be the metallic Woman and Morn of the Sages, the  field wherein are to be sowed the Seeds of the Secret Minerals, to wit, the 
Water of Gold; but in these such mysteries are concealed as no tongue can  utter.

The word TON, Amas, is composed of the initials of the three Hebrew words  that signify Air, Water, and Fire; by which, say the Kabalists, are denoted 
Benignity, Judicial Rigor, and Mercy or Compassion mediating between  them.

Malakoth, says the Apparatus, is called Haikal, Temple or Palace, because it  is the Palace of the Degree Tephareth, which is concealed and contained in  it, and Haikal denotes the place in which all things are contained.

For the better understanding of the Kabalah, remember that Kether, or the 
Crown, is treated of as a person, composed of the ten Numerations, and as  such termed Arik Anpin, or Macroprosopos:

That Hakemah is a person, and termed Abba, or Father.

That Binah is a person, and termed Mother , Imma:

That Tephareth, including all the Numerations from Khased or Gedulah to 
Yesod, is a person, called Seir Anpin, or Microprosopos. These 
Numerations are six in number, and are represented by the interlaced  triangle, or the Seal of Solomon.

And Malakoth is a person, and called the wife of Microprosopos. Vau  represents the Beauty or Harmony, consisting of the six parts which  constitute Seir Anpin.

The wife, Malakoth, is said to be behind the husband, Seir, and to have no  other cognition of him. And this is thus explained: That every cognizable  object is to be known in two ways: a priori, which is when it is known by  means of its cause, or of itself; or, a posteriori when it is known by its  effects. The most nearly perfect mode of cognition is, when the intellect  knows the thing itself, in itself, and through itself. But if it knows the thing  by its similitude or idea, or species separate from it, or by its effects and  operations, the cognition is much feebler and more imperfect. And it is thus  only that Regnum, the wife of Seir, knows her husband, until face is turned  to face, when they unite, and she has the more nearly perfect knowledge. 
For then the Deity, as limited and manifested in Seir and the Universe are  one.

Vau is Tephareth, considered as the Unity in which are  p. 800  the six members, of which itself is one. Tephareth, Beauty, is the column  which supports the world, symbolized by the column of the junior Warden  in the Blue Lodges. The world was first created by Judgment: and as it  could not so subsist, Mercy was conjoined with Judgment, and the Divine 
Mercies sustain the Universe.

God, says the Idra Suta, formed all things in the form of male and female,  since otherwise the continuance of things was impossible. The All-  embracing Wisdom, issuing and shining from the Most Holy Ancient, shines  not otherwise than as male and female. Wisdom as the Father, Intelligence  the Mother, are in equilibrium as male and female, and they are conjoined,  and one shines in the other. Then they generate, and are expanded in the 
Truth. Then the two are the Perfection of all things, when they are coupled;  and when the Son is in them, the summary of all things is in one.

These things are intrusted only to the Holy Superiors, who have entered and  gone out and known the ways of the Most Holy God, so as not to err in  them, to the right hand or to the left: For these things are hidden; and the  lofty Holinesses shine in them, as light flows from the splendor of a lamp.