"29th Degree - Grand Scottrish Knight of St Andrew" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others confess it everywhere, and we must confess here, how reluctantly soever, that the age which we represent is narrowed and not enlarged by its discoveries, and has lost a larger world than it has gained. If we cannot go as far as the satirist who says that our self-adored century
its broad clown's back turns broadly on the glory of the stars, we can go with him when he adds,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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