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
Napoleon died upon the barren rock of his exile. His bones, borne to
France by the son of a King, rest in the Hôpital 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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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