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
There is the same and a still more wonderful interpenetration between
the things of the intellect and the things of matter. Elements and
principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another,
to such a degree as to bring the material world and the moral world into
the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back upon themselves.
In the vast cosmical changes the universal life comes and goes in
unknown quantities, enveloping all in the invisible mystery of the
emanations, losing no dream from no single sleep, sowing an animalcule
here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding in curves; making
a force of Light, and an element of Thought; disseminated and
indivisible, dissolving all save that point without length, breadth, or
thickness. The MYSELF; reducing everything to the Soul-atom; making
everything blossom into God; entangling all activities, from the highest
to the lowest, in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism; hanging the
flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth; subordinating,
perhaps, if only by the identity of the law, the eccentric evolutions of
the comet in the firmament, to the whirlings of the infusoria in the
drop of water. A mechanism made of mind, the first motor of which is the
gnat, and its last wheel the zodiac.
A peasant-boy, guiding Blücher by the right one of two roads, the other
being impassable for artillery, enables him to reach Waterloo in time to
save Wellington from a defeat that would have been a rout; and so
enables the kings to imprison Napoleon on a barren rock in mid-ocean. An
unfaithful smith, by the slovenly shoeing of a horse, causes his
lameness, and, he stumbling, the career of his world-conquering rider
ends, and the destinies of empires are changed. A generous officer
permits an imprisoned monarch to end his game of chess before leading
him to the block; and meanwhile the usurper dies, and the prisoner
reascends the throne. An unskillful workman repairs the compass, or
malice or stupidity disarranges it, the ship mistakes her course, the
waves swallow a Caesar, and a new chapter is written in the history of a
world. What we call accident is but the adamantine chain of indissoluble
connection between all created things. The locust, hatched in the
Arabian sands, the small worm that destroys the cotton-boll, one making
famine in the Orient, the other closing the mills and starving the
workmen and their children in the Occident, with riots and massacres,
are as much the ministers of God as the earthquake; and the fate of
nations depends more on them than on the intellect of its kings and
legislators. A civil war in America will end in shaking the world; and
that war may be caused by the vote of some ignorant prize-fighter or
crazed fanatic in a city or in a Congress, or of some stupid boor in an
obscure country parish. The electricity of universal sympathy, of
action and reaction, pervades everything, the planets and the motes in
the sunbeam.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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