Long ages ago, the Temple built by Solomon and our Ancient Brethren sank into ruin, when the Assyrian Armies sacked Jerusalem. The Holy City is a mass of hovels cowering under the dominion of the Crescent; and the Holy Land is a desert. The Kings of Egypt and Assyria, who were contemporaries of Solomon, are forgotten, and their histories mere fables. The Ancient Orient is a shattered wreck, bleaching on the shores of Time. The Wolf and the Jackal howl among the ruins of Thebes and of Tyre, and the sculptured images of the Temples and Palaces of Babylon and Nineveh are dug from their ruins and carried into strange lands. But the quiet and peaceful Order, of which the Son of a poor Phœnician Widow was one of the Grand Masters, with the Kings of Israel and Tyre, has continued to increase in stature and influence, defying the angry waves of time and the storms of persecution. Age has not weakened its wide foundations nor shattered its columns, nor marred the beauty of its harmonious proportions. Where rude barbarians, in the time of Solomon, peopled inhospitable howling wildernesses, in France and Britain, and in that New World, not known to Jew or Gentile, until the glories of the Orient had faded, that Order has builded new Temples, and teaches to its millions of Initiates those lessons of peace, good-will, and toleration, of reliance on God and confidence in man, which it learned when Hebrew and Giblemite worked side by side on the slopes of Lebanon, and the Servant of Jehovah and the Phœnician Worshipper of Bel sat with the humble artisan in Council at Jerusalem. It is the Dead that govern. The Living only obey. And if the Soul sees, after death, what passes on this earth, and watches over the welfare of those it loves, then must its greatest happiness consist in seeing the current of its beneficent influences widening out from age to age, as rivulets widen into rivers, and aiding to shape the destinies of individuals, families, States, the World; and its bitterest punishment, in seeing its evil influences causing mischief and misery, and cursing and afflicting men, long after the frame it dwelt in has become dust, and when both name and memory are forgotten. We know not who among the Dead control our destinies. The universal human race is linked and bound together by those influences and sympathies, which in the truest sense do make men's fates. Humanity is the unit, of which the man is but a fraction. What other men in the Past have done, said, thought, makes the great iron network of circumstance that environs and controls us all. We take our faith on trust. We think and believe as the Old Lords of Thought command us; and Reason is powerless before Authority.