XIX. GRAND PONTIFF.
The true Mason labors for the benefit of those who are to come
after him, and for the advancement and improvement of his race.
That is a poor ambition which contents itself within the limits of
a single life. All men who deserve to live, desire to survive their
funerals, and to live afterward in the good that they have done
mankind, rather than in the fading characters written in men's
memories. Most men desire to leave some work behind them that
may outlast their own day and brief generation. That is an in-
stinctive impulse, given by God, and often found in the rudest
human heart; the surest proof of the soul's immortality, and of
the fundamental difference between man and the wisest brutes.
To plant the trees that, after we are dead, shall shelter our chil-
dren, is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers planted.
The rudest unlettered husbandman, painfully conscious of his own
inferiority, the poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to
those who pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint
themselves to educate their child, that he may take a higher sta-
tion in the world than they;--and of such are the world's greatest
benefactors.
In his influences that survive him, man becomes immortal, be-
fore the general resurrection. The Spartan mother, who, giving
her son his shield, said, "WITH IT, OR UPON IT!" afterward shared
the government of Lacedaemon with the legislation of Lycurgus;
for she too made a law, that lived after her; and she inspired the
Spartan soldiery that afterward demolished the walls of Athens,
and aided Alexander to conquer the Orient. The widow who gave
Marion the fiery arrows to burn her own house, that it might no
longer shelter the enemies of her infant country, the house where
she had lain upon her husband's bosom, and where her children
had been born, legislated more effectually for her State than Locke
or Shaftesbury, or than many a Legislature has done, since that
State won its freedom.
It was of slight importance to the Kings of Egypt and the
Monarchs of Assyria and Phcenicia, that the son of a Jewish
woman, a foundling, adopted by the daughter of Sesostris Ramses,
slew an Egyptian that oppressed a Hebrew slave, and fled into the
desert, to remain there forty years. But Moses, who might other-
wise have become Regent of Lower Egypt, known to us only by a
tablet on a tomb or monument, became the deliverer of the Jews,
and led them forth from Egypt to the frontiers of Palestine, and
made for them a law, out of which grew the Christian faith; and
so has shaped the destinies of the world. He and the old Roman
lawyers, with Alfred of England, the Saxon Thanes and Norman
Barons, the old judges and chancellors, and the makers of the
canons, lost in the mists and shadows of the Past,--these are our
legislators; and we obey the laws that they enacted.
Napoleon died upon the barren rock of his exile. His bones,
borne to France by the son of a King, rest in the Hopital des In-
valides, 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 Napo-
leon; 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 in-
fluences 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 pyr-
amid 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 hurri-
cane, 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 con-
querors from Nimrod to Napoleon.
Long ages ago, the Temple built by Solomon and our Ancient
Brethren sank into ruin, when the Assyrian Armies sacked Jeru-
salem. 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 Solo-
mon, 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 Phcenician 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 founda-
tions, nor shattered its columns, nor marred the beauty of its har-
monious proportions. Where rude barbarians, in the time of Solo-
mon, 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 confi-
dence 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 Phoenician Worshipper of Bel sat with the hum-
ble 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 happi-
ness 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 influ-
ences 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.
We would make or annul a particular contract; but the
Thoughts of the dead Judges of England, living when their ashes
have been cold for centuries, stand between us and that which we
would do, and utterly forbid it. We would settle our estate in a
particular way; but the prohibition of the English Parliament,
its uttered Thought when the first or second Edward reigned,
comes echoing down the long avenues of time, and tells us we
shall not exercise the power of disposition as we wish. We would
gain a particular advantage of another; and the thought of the
old Roman lawyer who died before Justinian, or that of Rome's
great orator Cicero, annihilates the act, or makes the intention in-
effectual. This act, Moses forbids;that, Alfred. We would sell
our land; but certain marks on a perishable paper tell us that our
father or remote ancestor ordered otherwise; and the arm of the
dead, emerging from the grave, with peremptory gesture prohibits
the alienation. About to sin or err, the thought or wish of our
dead mother, told us when we were children, by words that died
upon the air in the utterance, and many a long year were forgot-
ten, flashes on our memory, and holds us back with a power that
is resistless.
Thus we obey the dead; and thus shall the living, when we are
dead, for weal or woe, obey us. The Thoughts of the Past are the
Laws of the Present and the Future. That which we say and do,
if its effects last not beyond our lives, is unimportant. That
which shall live when we are dead, as part of the great body of
law enacted by the dead, is the only act worth doing, the only
Thought worth speaking. The desire to do something that shall
benefit the world, when neither praise nor obloquy will reach us
where we sleep soundly in the grave, is the noblest ambition en-
tertained by man.
It is the ambition of a true and genuine Mason. Knowing the
slow processes by which the Deity brings about great results, he
does not expect to reap as well as sow, in a single lifetime. It is
the inflexible fate and noblest destiny, with rare exceptions, of the
great and good, to work, and let others reap the harvest of their
labors. He who does good, only to be repaid in kind, or in thanks
and gratitude, or in reputation and the world's praise, is like him
who loans his money, that he may, after certain months, receive it
back with interest. To be repaid for eminent services with slan-
der, obloquy, or ridicule, or at best with stupid indifference or cold
ingratitude, as it is common, so it is no misfortune, except to those
who lack the wit to see or sense to appreciate the service, or the
nobility of soul to thank and reward with eulogy, the benefactor
of his kind. His influences live, and the great Future will obey;
whether it recognize or disown the lawgiver.
Miltiades was fortunate that he was exiled; and Aristides that
he was ostracized, because men wearied of hearing him called
"The Just." Not the Redeemer was unfortunate; but those only
who repaid Him for the inestimable gift He offered them, and for
a life passed in toiling for their good, by nailing Him upon the
cross, as though He had been a slave or malefactor. The perse-
cutor dies and rots, and Posterity utters his name with execration:
but his victim's memory he has unintentionally made glorious and
immortal.
If not for slander and persecution, the Mason who would bene-
benefit his race must look for apathy and cold indifference in those
whose good he seeks, in those who ought to seek the good of
others. Except when the sluggish depths of the Human Mind
are broken up and tossed as with a storm, when at the appointed
time a great Reformer comes, and a new Faith springs up and
grows with supernatural energy, the progress of Truth is slower
than the growth of oaks; and he who plants need not expect to
gather. The Redeemer, at His death, had twelve disciples, and
one betrayed and one deserted and denied Him. It is enough for
us to know that the fruit will come in its due season. When, or
who shall gather it, it does not in the least concern us to know.
It is our business to plant the seed. It is God's right to give the
fruit to whom He pleases; and if not to us, then is our action by
so much the more noble.
To sow, that others may reap; to work and plant for those who
are to occupy the earth when we are dead; to project our influ-
ences far into the future, and live beyond our time; to rule as the
Kings of Thought, over men who are yet unborn; to bless with
the glorious gifts of Truth and Light and Liberty those who will
neither know the name of the giver, nor care in what grave his
unregarded ashes repose, is the true office of a Mason and the
proudest destiny of a man.
All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced
by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction
and devastation only is violent and rapid. The Volcano and the
Earthquake, the Tornado and the Avalanche, leap suddenly into
full life and fearful energy, and smite with an unexpected blow.
Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum in a night; and Lis-
bon fell prostrate before God in a breath, when the earth rocked
and shuddered; the Alpine village vanishes and is erased at one
bound of the avalanche;and the ancient forests fall like grass be-
fore the mower, when the tornado leaps upon them. Pestilence
slays its thousands in a day; and the storm in a night strews the
sand with shattered navies.
The Gourd of the Prophet Jonah grew up, and was withered, in
a night. But many years ago, before the Norman Conqueror
stamped his mailed foot on the neck of prostrate Saxon England,
some wandering barbarian, of the continent then unknown to the
world, in mere idleness, with hand or foot, covered an acorn with
a little earth, and passed on regardless, on his journey to the dim
Past. He died and was forgotten; but the acorn lay there still,
the mighty force within it acting in the darkness. A tender shoot
stole gently up; and fed by the light and air and frequent dews,
put forth its little leaves, and lived, because the elk or buffalo
chanced not to place his foot upon and crush it.
The years
marched onward, and the shoot became a sapling, and its green
leaves went and came with Spring and Autumn. And still the
years came and passed away again, and William, the Norman Bas-
tard, parcelled England out among his Barons, and still the sapling
grew, and the dews fed its leaves, and the birds builded their nests
among its small limbs for many generations. And still the years
came and went, and the Indian hunter slept in the shade of the
sapling, and Richard Lion-Heart fought at Acre and Ascalon, and
John's bold Barons wrested from him the Great Charter; and
the sapling had become a tree; and still it grew, and thrust its
great arms wider abroad, and lifted its head still higher toward
the Heavens; strong-rooted, and defiant of the storms that roared
and eddied through its branches; and when Columbus ploughed
with his keels the unknown Western Atlantic, and Cortez and
Pizarro bathed the cross in blood; and the Puritan, the Huguenot,
the Cavalier, and the follower of Penn sought a refuge and a rest-
ing-place beyond the ocean, the Great Oak still stood, firm-rooted,
vigorous, stately, haughtily domineering over all the forest, heed-
less of all the centuries that had hurried past since the wild Indian
planted the little acorn in the forest ;--a stout and hale old tree,
with wide circumference shading many a rood of ground; and fit
to furnish timbers for a ship, to carry the thunders of the Great
Republic's guns around the world.
And yet, if one had sat and
watched it every instant, from the moment when the feeble shoot
first pushed its way to the light until the eagles built among its
branches, he would never have seen the tree or sapling grow.
Many long centuries ago, before the Chaldaean Shepherds
watched the Stars, or Shufu built the Pyramids, one could have
sailed in a seventy-four where now a thousand islands gem the sur-
face of the Indian Ocean; and the deep-sea lead would nowhere
have found any bottom. But below these waves were myriads
upon myriads, beyond the power of Arithmetic to number, of
minute existences, each a perfect living creature, made by the Al-
mighty Creator, and fashioned by Him for the work it had to do
There they toiled beneath the waters, each doing its allotted work,
and wholly ignorant of the result which God intended. They
lived and died, incalculable in numbers and almost infinite in the
succession of their generations, each adding his mite to the gigan-
tic work that went on there under God's direction. Thus hath He
chosen to create great Continents and Islands; and still the coral-
insects live and work, as when they made the rocks that underlie
the valley of the Ohio.
Thus God hath chosen to create. Where now is firm land, once
chafed and thundered the great primeval ocean. For ages upon
ages the minute shields of infinite myriads of infusoria, and the
stony stems of encrinites sunk into its depths, and there, under
the vast pressure of its waters, hardened into limestone. Raised
slowly from the Profound by His hand, its quarries underlie the
soil of all the continents, hundreds of feet in thickness; and we,
of these remains of the countless dead, build tombs and palaces,
as the Egyptians, whom we call ancient, built their pyramids.
On all the broad lakes and oceans the Great Sun looks earnestly
and lovingly, and the invisible vapors rise ever up to meet him.
No eye but God's beholds them as they rise. There, in the upper
atmospere, they are condensed to mist, and gather into clouds,
and float and swim around in the ambient air. They sail with its
currents, and hover over the ocean, and roll in huge masses round
the stony shoulders of great mountains. Condensed still more by
change of temperature, they drop upon the thirsty earth in gentle
showers, or pour upon it in heavy rains, or storm against its bosom
at the angry Equinoctial. The shower, the rain, and the storm
pass away, the clouds vanish, and the bright stars again shine
clearly upon the glad earth. The rain-drops sink into the ground,
and gather in subterranean reservoirs, and run in subterranean
channels, and bubble up in springs and fountains; and from the
mountain-sides and heads of valleys the silver threads of water
begin their long journey to the ocean.
Uniting, they widen into
brooks and rivulets, then into streams and rivers; and, at last, a
Nile, Ganges, a Danube, an Amazon, or a Mississippi rolls be-
tween its banks, mighty, majestic, and resistless, creating vast allu-
vial valleys to be the granaries of the world, ploughed by the
thousand keels of commerce and serving as great highways, and
as the impassable boundaries of rival nations; ever returning to
the ocean the drops that rose from it in vapor, and descended in
rain and snow and hail upon the level plains and lofty moun-
tains; and causing him to recoil for many a mile before the
long rush of their great tide.
So it is with the aggregate of Human endeavor. As the invis-
ible particles of vapor combine and coalesce to form the mists and
clouds that fall in rain on thirsty continents, and bless the great
green forests and wide grassy prairies, the waving meadows and
the fields by which men live; as the infinite myriads of drops that
the glad earth drinks are gathered into springs and rivulets and
rivers, to aid in levelling the mountains and elevating the plains,
and to feed the large lakes and restless oceans; so all Human
Thought, and Speech and Action, all that is done and said and
thought and suffered upon the Earth combine together, and flow
onward in one broad resistless current toward those great results
to which they are determined by the will of God.
We build slowly and destroy swiftly. Our Ancient Brethren
who built the Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows
felled, hewed, and squared the cedars, and quarried the stones, and
carved the intricate ornaments, which were to be the Temples.
Stone after stone, by the combined effort and long toil of Appren-
tice, Fellow-Craft, and Master, the walls arose; slowly the roof
was framed and fashioned; and many years elapsed before, at
length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and ready for the Worship
of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere of
Palestine. So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a
rude, barbarous Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic
Legionary of Titus, moved by a senseless impulse of the brutal
will, flung in the blazing brand; and, with no further human
agency, a few short hours sufficed to consume and melt each Tem-
ple to a smoking mass of black unsightly ruin.
Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!
The issues are with God: To do,
Of right belongs to us.
Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not dis-
couraged at men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies, nor
tired of their indifference! Care not for returns and results;but
see only what there is to do, and do it, leaving the results to God!
Soldier of the Cross! Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Tol-
eration! Good Knight and True!be patient and work!
The Apocalypse, that sublime Kabalistic and prophetic Sum-
mary of all the occult figures, divides its images into three Sep-
tenaries, after each of which there is silence in Heaven. There
are Seven Seals to be opened, that is to say, Seven mysteries to
know, and Seven difficulties to overcome, Seven trumpets to
sound, and Seven cups to empty.
The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree,
the Apothesis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone,
and despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. LUCIFER, the
Light-bearer! Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit
of Darknesss! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it he who
bears the Light, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble,
sensual or selfish Souls ? Doubt it not! for traditions are full of
Divine Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspiration is not of
one Age nor of one Creed. Plato and Philo, also, were inspired.
The Apocalypse, indeed, is a book as obscure as the Sohar.
It is written hieroglyphically with numbers and images; and
the Apostle often appeals to the intelligence of the Initiated.
"Let him who hath knowledge, understand! let him who under-
stands, calculate !" he often says, after an allegory or the mention
of a number. Saint John, the favorite Apostle, and the Depositary
of all the Secrets of the Saviour, therefore did not write to be
undertood by the multitude.
The Sephar Yezirah, the Sohar, and the Apocalypse are the
completest embodiments of Occultism. They contain more mean-
ings than words; their expressions are figurative as poetry and
exact as numbers. The Apocalypse sums up, completes, and sur-
passes all the Science of Abraham and of Solomon. The visions
of Ezekiel, by the river Chebar, and of the new Symbolic Temple,
are equally mysterious expressions, veiled by figures of the enig-
matic dogmas of the Kabalah, and their symbols are as little un-
derstood by the Commentators, as those of Free Masonry.
The Septenary is the Crown of the Numbers, because it unites
the Triangle of the Idea to the Square of the Form.
The more the great Hierophants were at pains to conceal their
absolute Science, the more they sought to add grandeur to and
multiply its symbols. The huge pyramids, with their triangular
sides of elevation and square bases, represented their Metaphysics,
founded upon the knowledge of Nature. That knowledge of Na-
ture had for its symbolic key the gigantic form of that huge
Sphinx, which has hollowed its deep bed in the sand, while keep-
ing watch at the feet of the Pyramids. The Seven grand monu-
ments called the Wonders of the World, were the magnificent
Commentaries on the Seven lines that composed the Pyramids,
and on the Seven mystic gates of Thebes.
The Septenary philosophy of Initiation among the Ancients
may be summed up thus:
Three Absolute Principles which are but One Principle: four
elementary forms which are but one; all forming a Single Whole,
compounded of the Idea and the Form.
The three Principles were these:
1ø. BEING IS BEING.
In Philosophy, identity of the Idea and of Being or Verity;in
Religion, the first Principle, THE FATHER.
2ø. BEING IS REAL.
In Philosophy, identity of Knowing and of Being or Reality;
in Religion, the LOGOS of Plato, the Demiourgos, the WORD.
3ø. BEING IS LOGIC.
In Philosophy, identity of the Reason and Reality; in Religion,
Providence, the Divine Action that makes real the Good, that
which in Christianity we call THE HoLY SPIRIT.
The union of all the Seven colors is the White, the analogous
symbol of the GOOD: the absence of all is the Black, the analogous
symbol of the EVIL. There are three primary colors, Red, Yellow,
and Blue; and four secondary, Orange, Green, Indigo, and Vio-
let; and all these God displays to man in the rainbow; and they
have their analogies also in the moral and intellectual world. The
same number, Seven, continually reappears in the Apocalypse,
compounded of three and four; and these numbers relate to the
last Seven of the Sephiroth, three answering to BENIGNITY or
MERCY, SEVERITY or JUSTICE, and BEAUTY or HARMONY; and
four to Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malakoth, VICTORY, GLORY,
STABILITY, and DOMINATION. The same numbers also represent
the first three Sephiroth, KETNER, KHOKMAH, and BAINAH, or
Will, Wisdom, and Understanding, which, with DAATH or Intel-
lection or Thought, are also four, DAATH not being regarded as a
Sephirah, not as the Deity acting, or as a potency, energy, or at-
tribute, but as the Divine Action.
The Sephiroth are commonly figured in the Kabalah as consti-
tuting a human form, the ADAM, KADMON Or MACROCOSM. Thus
arranged, the universal law of Equipoise is three times exernpli-
fied. From that of the Divine Intellectual, Active, Masculine
ENERGY, and the Passive CAPACITY to produce Thought, the
action of THINKING results. From that of BENIGNITY and SE-
VERITY, HARMONY flows; and from that of VICTORY or an Infi-
nite overcoming, and GLORY, which, being Infinite, would seem to
forbid the existence of obstacles or opposition, results STABILITY
or PERMANENCE, which is the perfect DOMINION Of the Infinite
WILL.
The last nine Sephiroth are included in, at the same time that
they have flowed forth from, the first of all, KETHER, or the
CROWN. Each also, in succession flowed from, and yet still re-
mains included in, the one preceding it. The Will of God includes
His Wisdom, and His Wisdom is His Will specially developed and
acting. This Wisdom is the LOGOS that creates, mistaken and
personified by Simon Magus and the succeeding Gnostics. By
means of its utterance, the letter YOD, it creates the worlds, first
in the Divine Intellect as an Idea, which invested with form be-
came the fabricated World, the Universe of material reality. YOD
and HE, two letters of the Ineffable Name of the Manifested
Deity, represent the Male and the Female, the Active and the
Passive in Equilibrium, and the VAV completes the Trinity and
the Triliteral Name, the Divine Triangle, which with the
repetion of the He becomes the Tetragrammaton.
Thus the ten Sephiroth contain all the Sacred Numbers, three,
five, seven, and nine, and the perfect Number Ten, and correspond
with the Tetractys of Pythagoras.
BEING IS BEING, Ahayah Asar Ahayah.
This
is the principle, the "BEGINNING."
In the Beginning was, that is to say, IS, WAS, and WILL BE,
the WORD, that is to say, the REASON that Speaks.
The Word is the reason of belief, and in it also is the expression
of the Faith which makes Science a living thing.
The Word,
is the Source of Logic. Jesus is the Word Incarnate.
The
accord of the Reason with Faith, of Knowledge with Belief, of
Authority with Liberty, has become in modern times the veritable
enigma of the Sphinx.
It is WISDOM that, in the Kabalistic Books of the Proverbs and
Ecclesiasticus, is the Creative Agent of God. Elsewhere in the
Hebrew writings it is Debar Iahavah, the Word of God.
It is by His uttered Word that God reveals Himself to us;
alone in the visible and invisible but intellectual creation, but
in our convictions, consciousness, and instincts. Hence it is that!
certain beliefs are universal. The conviction of all men that God
is good led to a belief in a Devil, the fallen Lucifer or Light-
bearer, Shaitan the Adversary, Ahriman and Tuphon, as an at-
tempt to explain the existence of Evil, and make it consistent with
the Infinite Power, Wisdom, and Benevolence of God.
Nothing surpasses and nothing equals, as a Summary of all the
doctrines of the Old World, those brief words engraven by
HERMES on a Stone, and known under the name of "The Tablet
of Emerald:" the Unity of Being and the Unity of the Harmonies,
ascending and descending, the progressive and proportional
scale of the Word; the immutable law of the Equilibrium, and
the proportioned progress of the universal analogies; the relation
of the Idea to the Word, giving the measure of the relation be-
tween the Creator and the Created, the necessary mathematics of
the Infinite, proved by the measures of a single corner of the
Finite ;--all this is expressed by this single proposition of the
Great Egyptian Hierophant:
"What is Superior is as that which is Inferior, and what is
Below is as that which is Above, to form the Marvels of the
Unity."