XXII. KNIGHT OF THE ROYAL AXE OR
PRINCE OF LIBANUS.
SYMPATHY with the great laboring classes, respect for labor itself, and
resolution to do some good work in our day and generation, these are the
lessons of this Degree, and they are purely Masonic. Masonry has made a
working-man and his associates the Heroes of her principal legend, and himself
the companion of Kings. The idea is as simple and true as it is sublime. From
first to last, Masonry is work. It venerates the Grand Arckitrct of the
Universe. It commemorates the building of a Temple. Its principal emblems are
the working fools of Masons and Artisans. It preserves the name of the first
worker in brass and iron as one of its pass-words. When the Brethren meet
together, they are at labor. The Master is the overseer who sets the craft to
work and gives them proper instruction. Masonry is the apotheosis of Work.
It is the hands of brave, forgotten men that have made this great, populous,
cultivated world a world for us. It is all work, and forgotten work. The real
conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors of every great and civilized land
are all the heroic souls that ever were in it, each in his degree: all the men
that ever felled a forest-tree or drained a marsh, or contrived a wise scheme,
or did or said a true or valiant thing therein. Genuine work alone, done
faithfully, is eternal, even as the Almighty Founder and World-builder Himself.
All work is noble: a life of ease is not for any man, nor for any God. The
Almighty Maker is not like one who, in old immemorial ages, having made his
machine of a Universe, sits ever since, and sees it go. Out of that belief
comes Atheism. The faith in an Invisible, unnamable, Directing Deity, present
everywhere in all that we see, and work, and suffer, is the essence of all
faith whatsoever.
The life of all Gods figures itself to us as a Sublime Earnest
ness,-of Infinite battle against Infinite labor Our highest religion is named
the Worship of Sorrow. For the Son of Man there is no noble crown, well-worn,
or even ill-worn, but is a crown of thorns. Man's highest destiny is not to be
happy, to love pleasant things and find them. His only true unhappiness should
be that he cannot work, and get his destiny as a man fulfilled. The day passes
swiftly over, our life passes swiftly over, and the night cometh, wherein no
man can work. That nights once come, our happiness and unhappiness are
vanished, and become as things that never were. But our work is not abolished,
and has not vanished. It remains, or the want of it remains, for endless Times
and Eternities.
Whatsoever of morality and intelligence ; what of patience, perseverance,
faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of
STRENGTH a man has in him, will lie written in the WORK he does. To work is to
try himself against Nature and her unerring, everlasting laws : and they will
return true verdict as to him. The noblest Epic is a mighty Empire slowly built
together, a mighty series of heroic deeds, a mighty conquest over chaos. Deeds
are greater than words. They have a life, mute, but undeniably ; and grow. They
people the vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy.
Labor is the truest emblem of God, the Architect and Eternal Maker; noble
Labor, which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest
Throne. Men without duties to do, are like trees planted on precipices ; from
the roots of which all the earth has crumbled. Nature owns no man who is not
also a Martyr. She scorns the man who sits screened from all work, from want,
danger, hardship, the victory over which is work ; and has all his work and
battling done by other men; and yet there are men who pride themselves that
they and theirs have done no work time out of mind. So neither have the swine.
The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men, fronting the peril which
frightens back all others, and if not vanquished would devour them. Hercules
was worshipped for twelve labors. The Czar of Russia became a toiling
shipwright, and worked with his axe in the docks of Saardam ; and something
came of that. Cromwell worked, and Napoleon; and effected somewhat.
There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work. Be he never so
benighted and forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a
man who actually and earnestly works : in Idleness alone is there perpetual
Despair. Man perfects himself by working. Jungles are cleared away. Fair
seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities ; and withal, the man himself
first ceases to be a foul unwholesome jungle and desert thereby. Even in the
meanest sort of labor, the whole soul of man is composed into a kind of real
harmony, the moment he begins to work. Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse,
Indignation, and even Despair shrink murmuring far off into their caves,
whenever the man bends himself resolutely against his task. Labor is life. From
the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given Force, the Sacred Celestial
life essence, breathed into him by Almighty God ; and awakens him to all
nobleness, as soon as work fitly begins. By it man learns Patience, Courage,
Perseverance, Openness to light, readiness to own himself mistaken, resolution
to do better and improve. Only by labor will man continually learn the virtues.
There is no Religion in stagnation and inaction; but only in activity and
exertion. There was the deepest truth in that saying of the old monks,
"laborare est orare." "He prayeth best who liveth best all things both great
and small;" and can man love except by working earnestly to benefit that being
whom he loves?
"Work; and therein have well-being," is the oldest of Gospels; unpreached,
inarticulate, but ineradicable, and enduring forever. To make Disorder,
wherever found, an eternal enemy; to attack and subdue him, and make order of
him, the subject not of Chaos, but of Intelligence and Divinity, and of
ourselves ; to attack ignorance, stupidity and brute-mindedness, wherever
found, to smite it wisely and unweariedly, to rest not while we live and it
lives in the name of God, this is our duty as Masons; commanded us by the
Highest God. Even He, with his unspoken voice, more awful than the thunders of
Sinai, or the syllabled speech of the Hurricane, speaks to us. The Unborn Ages
; the old Graves, with their long-moldering dust speak to us. The deep
Death-Kingdoms, the Stars in their never-resting course, all Space and all
Time, silently and continually admonish us that we too must work whore it is
called to-day. Labor, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. To toil,
whether with the sweat of the brow, or of the brain or heart, is worship,-the
noblest thing yet discovered beneath the Stars. Let the weary cease to think
that labor is a curse and doom pronounced by Deity. Without it there could be
no true excellence in human nature. Without it, and pain, and sorrow,
where would be the human virtues? Where Patience, Perseverance, Submission,
Energy, Endurance, Fortitude, Bravery, Disinterestedness, Self-Sacrifice, the
noblest excellencies of the Soul?
Let him who toils complain not, nor feel humiliated ! Let him. look up, and
see his fellow-workmen there, in God's Eternity, they alone surviving there.
Even in the weak human memory they long survive, as Saints, as Heroes, and as
Gods : they alone survive, and people the unmeasured solitudes of Time.
To the primeval man, whatsoever good came, descended on him (as in mere fact,
it ever does) direct from God; whatsoever duty lay visible for him, this a
Supreme God had prescribed. For the primeval man, in whom dwelt Thought, this
Universe was all a Temple, life everywhere a Worship.
Duty is with us ever; and evermore forbids us to be idle. To work with the
hands or brain, according to our requirements and our capacities, to do that
which lies before us to do, is more honorable than rank and title. Ploughers,
spinners and builders, inventors, and men of science, poets, advocates, and
writers, all stand upon one common level, and form on grand, innumerable host,
marching ever onward since the beginning of the world : each entitled to our
sympathy and respect, each a man and our brother.
It was well to give the earth to man as a dark mass, whereon to labor. It was
well to provide rude and uprightly materials in the ore-bed and the forest, for
him to fashion into splendor and beauty. It was well, not because of that
splendor and beauty ; but because the act creating them is better than the
things themselves; because exertion is nobler than enjoyment; because the
laborer is greater and more worthy of honor than the idler. Masonry stands up
for the nobility of labor. It is Heaven's great ordinance for human
improvement.. It has been broken down for ages ; and Masonry desires to build
it up again. It has bean broken down, because men toil only because ihey must,
submitting to it as, in some sort, a degrading necessity; and desiring nothing
so much on earth as to escape from it. They fulfill the great law of labor in
the letter, but break it in the spirit: they fulfill it with the muscles, but
break it with the mind.
Masonry teaches that every idler ought to hasten to some field of labor,
manual or mental, as a chosen and coveted theatre of improvement ; but he is
not impelled to do so, under the teachings of an imperfect civilization.
On the contrary, he sits down, folds his hands, and blesses and glorifies
himself in his idleness. It is time that this opprobrium of toil were done
away. To be ashamed of toil; of the dingy workshop and dusty labor-field; of
the hard hand, stained with service more honorable than that of war; of the
soiled and weather-stained garments, on which Mother Nature has stamped, midst
sun and rain, midst fire and steam, her own heraldic honors; to be ashamed of
these tokens and titles, and envious of the flaunting robes of imbecile
idleness and vanity, is treason to Nature, impiety to Heaven, a breach of
Heaven's great Ordinance. Toil,) of brain, heart, or hand, is the only true
manhood and genuine nobility.
Labor is a more beneficent ministration than man's ignorance comprehends, or
his complaining will admit. Even when its end is hidden from him, it is not
mere blind drudgery, It is all a training, a discipline, a development of
energies, a nurse of virtues, a school bf improvement. From the poor boy who
gathers a few sticks for his mother's hearth, to the strong man who fells the
oak or guides the ship or the steam-car, every human toiler, with every weary
step and every urgent task, is obeying a wisdom far above his own wisdom, and
fulfilling a design far beyond his own design.
The great law of human industry is this : that industry, working either with
the hand or the mind, the application of our powers to some task, to the
achievement of some result, lies at the foundation of all human improvement. We
are not sent into the world like animals, to crop the spontaneous herbage of
the field, and then to lie down in indolent repose: but we are sent to dig the
soil and plough the sea; to do the business of cities and the world of
manufactories. The world is the great and appointed school of industry. In an
artificial state of society, mankind is divided into the idle and the laboring
classes; but such was not the design of Providence.
Labor is man's great function, his peculiar distinction and his privilege.
From being an animal, that eats and drinks and sleeps only, to become a
worker,
and with the hand of ingenuity to pour his own thoughts into the moulds of
Nature, fashioning ttorn into forms of grace and fabrics of convenience, and
converting them to purposes of improvement and happiness, is the greatest
possible step in privilege.
The Earth and the Atmosphere are man's laboratory. With spade and
plough, with mining-shafts and furnaces and forges, with fire and steam ; midst
the noise and whirl of swift and bright machinery, and abroad in the silent
fields, man was made to be ever working, ever experimenting. And while he and
all his dwellings of care and toil are borne onward with the circling skies,
and the splendour of Heaven are around him, and their infinite depths image and
invite his thought, still in all the worlds of philosophy, in the universe of
intellect, man must be a worker. He is nothing, he can be nothing, can achieve
nothing, fulfill nothing, without working. Without it, he can gain neither
lofty improvement nor tolerable happiness. The idle must hunt down the hours as
their prey. To them Time is an enemy, clothed with armor; and they must kill
him, or :themselves die. It never yet did answer, and it never will answer for
any man to do nothing, to be exempt from all care and effort to lounge, to
walk, to ride, and to feast alone. No man can live in that way. God made a law
against it : which no human power can annul, no human ingenuity evade.
The idea that a property is to be acquired in the course of ten or twenty
years, which shall suffice for the rest of life; that by some prosperous
traffic or grand speculation, all the labor of a whole life is to be
accomplished in a brief portion of it; that by dexterous management, a large
part of the term of human existence is to be exonerated from the cares of
industry and self- denial, is founded upon a grave mistake, upon a
misconception of the true nature and design of business, and of the conditions
of human well being. The desire of accumulation for the sake of securing a life
of ease and gratification, of escaping from exertion and self-denial, is wholly
wrong, though very common.
It is better for the Mason to live while he lives, and enjoy life as it passes
to live richer and die poorer. It is best of all for him to banish from the
mind that empty dream of future indolence and indulgent ; to address himself to
the business of life, as the school of his earthly education; to settle it with
himself now that independence, if he gains it, is not to give him exemption
from employment It is best for him to know, that, in order to be a happy man,
he must always be a laborer, with the mind or the body, or with both: and that
the reasonable exertion of his powers, bodily and mental, is not to be regarded
as mere drudgery, but as a good discipline, a wise ordination, a training in
this primary school of our being, for nobler endeavors, and spheres of higher
activity hereafter
There are reasons why a Mason may lawfully and even earnestly desire a
fortune. If he can fill some fine palace, itself a work of art, with the
productions of lofty genius; if he can be the friend and helper of humble
worth; if he can seek it out, where failing health or adverse fortune presses
it hard, and soften or stay the bitter hours that are hastening it to madness
or to the grave; if he can stand between the oppressor and his prey, and bid
the fetter and the dungeon give up their victim ; if he can build up great
institutions of learning, and academies of art ; if he can open fountains of
knowledge for the people, and conduct its streams in the right channels; if he
can do better for the poor thzn to bestow alms upon them-even to think of them,
and devise plans for their elevation in knowledge and virtue, instead of
forever opening the , old reservoirs and resources for their improvidence; if
he has sufficient heart and soul to do all this, or part of it; if wealth would
be ta him the handmaid of exertion; facilitating effort, and giving success to
endeavor; then may he lawfully, and yet warily and modestly, desire it. But if
it is to do nothing for him, but (o minister ease and indulgence, and to place
his children in the same bad school, then there is no reason why he should
desire it.
What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of labor, either
of the body or of the mind? What is history, but its record? What are the
treasures of genius and art, but its work? What are cultivated fields, but its
toil? The busy marts, the rising cities, the enriched empires of the world are
but the great treasure-houses of labor. The pyramids of Egypt, the' castles and
towers and temples of Europe, the buried cities of Italy and Mexico, the canals
and railroads of Christendom, are but tracks, all round the world, of the
mighty footsteps of labor. Without it antiquity would not have been. Without
it, there would be no memory of the past, and no hope for the future.
Even utter indolence reposes on treasures that labor at some time gained and
gathered. He that does nothing, and yet does not starve, has still his
significance ; for he is a standing proof that somebody has at some time
worked. But not to such does Masonry do honor. It honors the Worker, the
Toiler; him who produces and not alone consumes; him who puts forth his hand to
add to the treasury of human comforts, and not alone to take away. " It honors
him who goes forth amid the struggling elements to fight his battle, and who
shrinks not, with cowardly effeminacy, behind pillows of ease. It honors
the strong muscle, and the manly nerve, and the resolute and brave heart, the
sweating brow, and the toiling brain. It honors the great and beautiful offices
of humanity, manhood's toil and woman's task; paternal industry and maternal
watching and weariness ; wisdom teaching and patience learning; the brow of
care that presides over the State, and many handed labor that toils in
workshop, field, and study, beneath its mild and beneficent sway.
God has not made a world of rich men; but rather a world
of poor men; or of men, at least, who must toil for a subsistence. That is,
then, the best condition for man, and the grand sphere of human improvement.,
If the whole world could acquire wealth (and one man is as much entitled to it
as another, when he is born) ; if the present generation could lay up a
complete provision for the next, as some men desire to do for their children;
the world would be destroyed at a single blow. All industry would cease with
the necessity for it; all improvement would stop with the demand for exertion;
the dissipation of fortunes, the mischief of which are now countervailed by the
healthful tone of society, would breed universal disease, and wreak out into
universal license ; and the. world would sink, rotten as Herod, into the grave
of its own loathsome vices.
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in
the world, have been achieved by poor men ; poor scholars, poor professional
men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius. A
certain solidness and sobriety, a certain moderation and restraint, a certain
pressure of circumstances, are good for man. liis body was not made for
luxuries. It sickens, sinks, and dies under them. His mind was not made for
indulgerice. It grows weak, effeminate, and dwarfish, under that condition. And
he who pampers his body with luxuries and his mind with indulgence, bequeaths
the consequences to the minds and bodies of his descendants, without the wealth
which was their cause. For wealth, without a law of entail to help it, has
always lacked the energy even to keep its own treasures. They drop from its
imbecile hand. The third generation almost inevitably goes down the rolling
wheel of fortune, and there learns the energy necessary to rise again, if it
rises at all ; heir, as it is, to the bodily diseases, and mental weaknesses,
and the soul's vices of its andestors, and not heir to their wealth. And yet we
are, almost all of us, anxious to put our children, or to insure that
our grandchildren shall be put, on this road to indulgence, luxury, vice,
degradation, and ruin ; this headship of hereditary disease, soul malady, and
mental leprosy.
If wealth were employed in promoting mental culture at home and works of
philanthropy abroad ; if it were multiplying studies of art, and building up
institutions of learning around us; if it were in every way raising the
intellectual character of the world, there could scarcely be too much of it.
But if the utmost aim, effort, and ambition of wealth be, to procure rich
furniture, and provide costly entertainments, and build luxurious houses, and
minister to vanity, extravagance, and ostentation, there could scarcely be too
little of it. To a certain extent it may laudably be the minister of elegancies
and luxuries, and the servitor of hospitality and physical enjoyment: but just
in proportion as its tendencies, divested of all higher aims and tastes, are
running that way, they are running to peril and evil.
Nor does that peril attach to individuals and families alone. It stands, a
fearful beacon, in the experience of Cities, Republics, and Empires. The
lessons of past times, on this subject, are emphatic and solemn. The history of
wealth has always been a history of corruption and downfall. the people never
existed that could stand the trial. Boundless profusion is too little likely to
spread for any people the theatre of manly energy, rigid self-denial, and lofty
virtue. You do not look for the bone and sinew and strength of a country, its
loftiest talents and virtues, its martyrs to patriotism or religion, its men to
meet the days of peril and disaster, among the children of ease, indulgence,
and luxury.
In the great march of the races of men over the earth, we have always seen
opulence and luxury sinking before poverty and toil and hardy nurture. That is
the law which has presided over the great professions of empire. Sidon and
Tyre, whose merchants possessed the wealth of princes ; Babylon and Palmyra,
the seats of Asiatic luxury ; Rome, laden with the spoils of a world,
overwhelmed by her own vices more than by the hosts of her enemies ; all these,
and many more, are examples of the destroytive tendencies of immense and
unnatural accumulation : and men must become more generous and benevolent, not
more selfish and effeminate, as they become more rich, or the history of modern
wealth will follow in the sad train of all past examples. All men
desire distinction, and feel the need of some ennobling object in life. Those
persons are usually most happy and satisfied in their pursuits, who have the
loftiest ends in view. Artists, mechanics, and inventors, all who seek to find
principles or develop beauty in their work, seem most to enjoy it. The farmer
who labors for the beautifying and scientific cultivation of his estate, is
more happy in his labors than one who tills his own land for a mere
subsistence. This is one of the signal testimonies which all human employments
give to the high demands of our nature. To gather wealth never gives such
satisfaction as to bring the humblest piece of machinery to perfection : at
least, when wealth is sought for display and ostentation, or mere luxury, and
ease, and pleasure ; and not for ends of philanthropy, the relief of kindred,
or the payment of just debts, or as a means to attain some other great and
noble object.
With the pursuits of multitudes is connected a painful conviction that they
neither supply a sufficient object, nor confer any satisfactory honor. Why
work, if the world is soon not to know that such a being ever existed ; and
when one can perpetuate his name neither on canvas nor on marble, nor in books,
nor by lofty eloquence, nor statesmanship ?
The answer is, that every man has a work to do in himself, greater and
sublimed than any work of genius ; and works upon a nobler material than wood
or marble-upon his own soul and intellect, and may so attain the highest
nobleness and grandeur known on earth or in Heaven; may so be the greatest of
artists, and of authors, and his life, which is far more than speech, may be
eloquent.
The great author or artist only portrays what every man should be. He
conceives, what we should do. He conceives, and represents moral beauty,
magnanimity, fortitude, love, devotion, forgiveness, the soul's greatness. He
portrays virtues, commended to our admiration and imitations. To embody these
portraitures in our lives is fhe practical realization of those great ideals of
art. The magnanimity of Heroes, celebrated on the historic or poetic page; the
constancy and faith of Truth's martyrs ; the beauty of love and piety glowing
on the canvas; the delineations of Truth and Right, that flash from the lips of
the Eloquent, are, in their essence only that which every man may feel and
practice in the daily walks of life. The work of virtue is nobler than any work
of genius ; for it is a nobler thing to be a hero than to describe one
to endure martyrdom than to paint it, to do right than to plead for it. Action
is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a
great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy
of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read; and the greater of
these is the doing.
Every man has to do the noblest thing that any man can do or describe. There is
a wide field for the courage, cheerfulness, energy, and dignity of human
existence. Let therefore no Mason deem his life doomed to mediocrity or
meanness, to vanity or unprofitable toil, or to any ends less than immortal. No
one can truly say that the grand prizes of life are for others, and he can do
nothing. No matter how magnificent and noble an act the author can describe or
the artist paint,' it will be still nobler for you to go and do that which one
describes, or be the model which the other draws.
The loftiest action that ever was described is not more magnatemous than that
which we may find occasion to do, in the daily walks of life; in temptation, in
distress, in bereavement, in the solemn approach to death. In the great
Providence of God, in the great ordinances of our being, there is opened to
every man a sphere for the noblest action. It is not even in extraordinary
situations, where all eyes are upon us, where all our energy is aroused, and
all our vigilance is awake that the highest efforts of virtue are usually
demanded of us ; but rather in silence and seclusion, amidst our occupations
and our homes; in wearing sickness, that makes no complaint; in sorely-tried
honesty, that asks no praise ; in simple disinterestedness, hiding the hand
that resigns its advantage to another.
Masonry seeks to ennoble common life. Its work is to go down into the obscure
and researched records of daily conduct and feeling; and to portray, not the
ordinary virtue of an extraordinary life; but the more extraordinary virtue of
ordinary life. What is done and borne in the shades of privacy, in the hard and
beaten pafh of daily care and toil, full of recelebrated sacrifices; in the
suffering, and sometimes insulted suffering, that wears to the world a cheerful
brow ; in the Iong strife of the spirit, resisting pain, penury, and neglect,
carried on in the inmost depths of the heart;-what is done, and borne, and
wrought, and won there, is a higher glory, and shall inherit a brighter crown.
On the volume of Masonic life one bright word is written from which on
every side blazes an ineffable splendor. That word is DUTY. To aid in securing
to all labor permanent employment and its just reward: to help to hasten the
coming of that time when no one shall suffer from hunger or destitution,
because, though willing and able to work, he can find no employment, or because
he has been overtaken by sickness in the midst of his labor, are part of your
duties as a Knight of the Royal Axe. And if we can succeed in making some small
nook of God's creation a little more fruitful and cheerful, a little better and
more worthy of Him,-or in making some one or two human hearts a little wiser,
and more manful and hopeful and happy, we shall have done work, worthy of
Masons, and acceptable to our Father in Heaven.