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
Habit is a great force; it is second nature, even in trees. It is as
strong in nations as in men. So also are Prejudices, which are given to
men and nations as the passions are,--as forces, valuable, if properly
and skillfully availed of; destructive, if unskillfully handled.
Above all, the Love of Country, State Pride, the Love of Home, forces of
immense power. Encourage them all. Insist upon them in your public men.
Permanency of home is necessary to patriotism. A migratory race will
have little love of country. State pride is a mere theory and chimera,
where men remove from State to State with indifference, like the Arabs,
who camp here to-day and there to-morrow.
If you have Eloquence, it is a mighty force. See that you use it for
good purposes--to teach, exhort, ennoble the people, and not to mislead
and corrupt them. Corrupt and venal orators are the assassins of the
public liberties and of public morals.
The Will is a force; its limits as yet unknown. It is in the power of
the will that we chiefly see the spiritual and divine in man. There is a
seeming identity between his will that moves other men, and the Creative
Will whose action seems so incomprehensible. It is the men of _will_ and
_action_, not the men of pure intellect, that govern the world.
Finally, the three greatest moral forces are FAITH, which is the only
true WISDOM, and the very foundation of all government; HOPE, which is
STRENGTH, and insures success; and CHARITY, which is BEAUTY, and alone
makes animated, united effort possible. These forces are within the
reach of all men; and an association of men, actuated by them, ought to
exercise an immense power in the world. If Masonry does not, it is
because she has ceased to possess them.
Wisdom in the man or statesman, in king or priest, largely consists in
the due appreciation of these forces; and upon the general
_non_-appreciation of some of them the fate of nations often depends.
What hecatombs of lives often hang upon the not weighing or not
sufficiently weighing the force of an idea, such as, for example, the
reverence for a flag, or the blind attachment to a form or constitution
of government!
What errors in political economy and statesmanship are committed in
consequence of the over-estimation or under-estimation of particular
values, or the non-estimation of some among them! Everything, it is
asserted, is the product of human labor; but the gold or the diamond
which one accidentally finds without labor is not so. What is the value
of the labor bestowed by the husbandman upon his crops, compared with
the value of the sunshine and rain, without which his labor avails
nothing? Commerce carried on by the labor of man, adds to the value of
the products of the field, the mine, or the workshop, by their
transportation to different markets; but how much of this increase is
due to the rivers down which these products float, to the winds that
urge the keels of commerce over the ocean!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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