"26th Degree - Prince of Mercy or Scottish Trinitarian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

What force draws the needle round to the north? What force moves the muscle that raises the arm, when the will determines it shall rise? Whence comes the will itself? Is it spontaneous a first cause, or an effect? These too are miracles; inexplicable as the creation, or the existence and self-existence of God.

Who will explain to us the passion, the peevishness, the anger, the memory, and affections of the small canary-wren? the consciousness of identity and the dreams of the dog? the reasoning powers of the elephant? the wondrous instincts, passions, government, and civil policy, and modes of communication of ideas of the ant and bee?

Who has yet made us to understand, with all his learned words, how heat comes to us from the Sun, and light from the remote Stars, setting out upon its journey earth-ward from some, at the time the Chaldeans commenced to build the Tower of Babel? Or how the image of an external object comes to and fixes itself upon the retina of the eye; and when there, how that mere empty, unsubstantial image becomes transmuted into the wondrous thing that we call SIGHT? Or how the waves of the atmosphere striking upon the tympanum of the ear those thin, invisible waves produce the equally wondrous phenomenon of HEARING, and become the roar of the tornado, the crash of the thunder, the mighty voice of the ocean, the chirping of the cricket, the delicate sweet notes and exquisite trills and variations of the wren and mocking-bird, or the magic melody of the instrument of Paganini?

Our senses are mysteries to us, and we are mysteries to ourselves. Philosophy has taught us nothing as to the nature of our sensations, our perceptions, our cognizances, the origin of our thoughts and ideas, but words. By no effort or degree of reflection, never so long continued, can man become conscious of a personal identity in himself, separate and distinct from his body and his brain.

We torture ourselves in the effort to gain an idea of ourselves, and weary with the exertion. Who has yet made us understand how, from the contact with a foreign body, the image in the eye, the wave of air impinging on the ear, particular particles entering the nostrils, and coming in contact with the palate, come sensations in the nerves, and from that, perception in the mind, of the animal or the man?

What do we know of Substance? Men even doubt yet whether it exists. Philosophers tell us that our senses make known to us only the attributes of substance, extension, hardness, color, and the like; but not the thing itself that is extended, solid, black or white; as we know the attributes of the Soul, its thoughts and its perceptions, and not the Soul itself which perceives and thinks.

What a wondrous mystery is there in heat and light, existing, we know not how, within certain limits, narrow in comparison with infinity, beyond which on every side stretch out infinite space and the blackness of unimaginable darkness, and the intensity of inconceivable cold! Think only of the mighty Power required to maintain warmth and light in the central point of such an infinity, to whose darkness that of Midnight, to whose cold that of the last Arctic Island is nothing. And yet GOD is everywhere.

And what a mystery are the effects of heat and cold upon the wondrous fluid that we call water! What a mystery lies hidden in every flake of snow and in every crystal of ice, and in their final transformation into the invisible vapor that rises from the ocean or the land, and floats above the summits of the mountains! What a multitude of wonders, indeed, has chemistry unveiled to our eyes! Think only that if some single law enacted by God were at once repealed, that of
attraction or affinity or cohesion, for example, the whole material world, with its solid granite and adamant, its veins of gold and silver, its trap and porphyry, its huge beds of coal, our own frames and the very ribs and bones of this apparently indestructible earth, would instantaneously dissolve, with all Suns and Stars and Worlds throughout all the Universe of God, into a thin invisible vapor of infinitely minute particles or atoms, diffused throughout infinite space; and with them light and heat would disappear; unless the Deity Himself be, as the Ancient Persians thought, the Eternal Light and the Immortal Fire.

The mysteries of the Great Universe of God! How can we with our limited mental vision expect to grasp and comprehend them! Infinite SPACE, stretching out from us every way, without limit: infinite TIME, without beginning or end; and WE, HERE, and NOW, in the centre of each! An infinity of suns, the nearest of which only diminish in size, viewed with the most powerful telescope each with its retinue of worlds; infinite numbers of such suns, so remote from us that their light would not reach us, journeying during an infinity of time, while the light that has reached us, from some that we seem to see, has been upon its journey for fifty centuries; our world spinning upon its axis, and rushing ever in its circuit round the sun; and it, the sun, and all our system revolving round some great central point; and that, and suns, stars, and worlds evermore flashing onward with incredible rapidity through illimitable space and then, in every drop of water that we drink, in every morsel of much of our food, in the air, in the earth, in the sea, incredible multitudes of living creatures, invisible to the naked eye, of a minuteness beyond belief, yet organized, living, feeding, perhaps with consciousness of identity, and memory and instinct.

Such are some of the mysteries of the great Universe of God. And yet we, whose life and that of the world on which we live form but a point in the centre of infinite Time: we, who nourish animalculж within, and on whom vegetables grow without, would fain learn how God created this Universe, would understand His Powers, His Attributes, His Emanations, His Mode of Existence and of Action; would fain know the plan according to which all events proceed, that plan profound as God Himself; would know the laws by which He controls His Universe; would fain see and talk to Him face to face, as man talks to man: and we try not to believe, because we do not understand.

He commands us to love one another, to love our neighbor as ourself; and we dispute and wrangle, and hate and slay each other, because we cannot be of one opinion as to the Essence of His Nature, as to His Attributes; whether He became man born of a woman, and was crucified; whether the Holy Ghost is of the same substance with the Father, or only of a similar substance; whether a feeble old man is God's Vicegerent; whether some are elected from all eternity to be saved, and others to be condemned and punished; whether punishment of the wicked after death is to be eternal; whether this doctrine or the other be heresy or truth;
drenching the world with blood, depopulating realms, and turning fertile lands into deserts; until, for religious war, persecution, and bloodshed, the Earth for many a century has rolled round the Sun, a charnel-house, steaming and reeking with human gore, the blood of brother slain by
brother for opinion's sake, that has soaked into and polluted all her veins, and made her a horror to her sisters of the Universe.

And if men were all Masons, and obeyed with all their heart her mild and gentle, teachings, that world would be a paradise; while intolerance and persecution make of it a hell. For this is the Masonic Creed: BELIEVE, in God's Infinite Benevolence, Wisdom, and Justice: HOPE, for the final triumph of Good over Evil, and for Perfect Harmony as the final result of all the concords and discords of the Universe: and be CHARITABLE as God is, toward the unfaith, the errors, the follies, and the faults of men: for all make one great brotherhood.

INSTRUCTION.
Sen.·. W.·. Brother Junior Warden, are you a Prince of Mercy?
Jun.·. W.·. I have seen the Delta and the Holy NAMES upon it, and am an

AMETH like yourself, in the TRIPLE COVENANT, Of which we bear the mark.

Qu.·. What is the first Word upon the Delta?
Ans.·. The Ineffable Name of Deity, the true mystery of which is known to the Ameth alone.

Qu.·. What do the three sides of the Delta denote to us?
Ans.·. To us, and to all Masons, the three Great Attributes or Developments of the Essence of the Deity; WISDOM, or the Reflective and Designing Power, in which, when there was naught but God, the Plan and Idea of the Universe was shaped and Formed: FORCE, or the Executing and Creating Power, which instantaneously acting, realized the Type and Idea framed by Wisdom; and the Universe, and all Stars and Worlds, and Light and Life, and Men and Angels and all living creatures WERE; and HARMONY, or the Preserving Power, Order, and Beauty, maintaining the Universe in its State, and constituting the law of Harmony, Motion, Proportion, and Progression: WISDOM, which thought the plan; STRENGTH, which created: HARMONY, which upholds and preserves; the Masonic Trinity, three Powers and one Essence: the three columns which support the Universe, Physical, Intellectual, and Spiritual, of which every Masonic Lodge is a type and symbol: while to the Christian Mason, they represent the Three that bear record in Heaven, the FATHER WORD, and the HOLY SPIRIT, which three are ONE.

Qu.·. What do the three Greek letters upon the Delta, I.·.H.·. .·. [Iota, Eta, and Sigma] represent?
Ans.·. Three of the Names of the Supreme Deity among the Syrians. Phњnicians and Hebrews IHUH [ ] Self-Existence AL the Nature-God, or Soul of the Universe SHADAI Supreme Power. Also three of the Six Chief Attributes of God, among the Kabbalists: WISDOM [IEH], the Intellect, of the Egyptians, the Word of the Platonists, and the Wisdom of the Gnostics; MAGNIFICENCE [AL], the Symbol of which was the Lion's Head; and VICTORY and GLORY [Tsabaoth], which are the two columns JACHIN and BOAZ, that stand in the Portico of the Temple of Masonry.

To the Christian Mason they are the first three letters of the name of the Son of God, Who died upon the cross to redeem mankind.
Qu.·. What is the first of the THREE COVENANTS, of which we bear the mark?
Ans.·. That which God made with Noah; when He said, "I will not again curse the earth any more for man's sake, neither will I smite any more everything living as I have done. While the Earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and Winter and Summer, and day and night shall not cease. I will establish My covenant with you, and with your seed after you, and with every living creature. All mankind shall no more be cut off by the waters of a flood, nor shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. This is the token of My covenant: I do set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth an everlasting covenant between Me and every living creature on the earth."

Qu.·. What is the second of the Three Covenants?
Ans.·. That which God made with Abraham; when He said, "I am the Absolute Uncreated God. I will make My covenant between Me and thee, and thou shalt be the Father of Many Nations, and Kings shall come from thy loins. I will establish My covenant between Me and thee, and thy
descendants after thee, to the remotest generations, for an everlasting covenant; and I will be thy God and their God, and will give thee the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession."