Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of FreemasonryPike, Albert
Religion
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
Pike, Albert
Freemasons
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 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 ruin and despair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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