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
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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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