"22nd Degree - Knight of the Royal Axe or Prince of Libanus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

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 indulgent ; 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

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 thzn 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 ta 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 (o 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 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 born); 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 mischief of which are now countervailed by the healthful tone of society, would breed universal disease, and wreak 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 solidness 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 indulgerice. 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 andestors, and not heir to their wealth. And yet we are, almost all of us, anxious to put our children, or to insure that our grandchildren shall be put, on this road to indulgence, luxury, vice, degradation, and ruin ; this headship 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 professions 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 destroytive 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 modern wealth will follow in the sad train of all past examples. 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, mechanics, 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 sublimed 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 imitations. To embody these portraitures in our lives is fhe 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 practice 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 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 magnatemous 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 researched 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 pafh of daily care and toil, full of recelebrated sacrifices; in the
suffering, and sometimes insulted suffering, that wears to the world a cheerful brow; in the Iong 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 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 suffer 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.