Immediately following the climax of the Ceremony, the Candidate's attention is drawn to the altered position and relationship of the "Three Great Lights. The alteration of the physical symbols is extremely slight, but the spiritual change in the Candidate signified by it is enormous. He is "now midway in Freemasonry," superior to an E.A., but still far inferior to the rank he is hoped eventually to attain. The altered relationship of the S. and C. implies that his hitherto latent spiritual principle is at last beginning to emerge from dormancy and concealment into activity and personal consciousness, whilst his subordinate personality or form recedes correspondingly into the background. Tide one increases, the other decreases, in importance and function.
How has this great change in him come about? Partly as the result of his own labors in the apprentice stage, which have purified his personality, disciplined him in virtue and made him a more lucid vessel for the transmission of Light; but partly also by the help of God, the assistance of the square (in the sense previously explained, and the help of those who are initiating him and we see now the justification for the pause just described is "the silent climax of the Ceremony"; it marks the moment at which the change was effected (so far as it can be ceremonially represented). From that moment he is an Initiate of the Second Degree and able to perceive truths of which he was previously unconscious.
Apart from the personal application of all this to the individual Mason, let us view it in a wider, a cosmic sense. We may apply it to mankind at large, for humanity as a whole, as it were, passes unconsciously through its initiations into the mysteries of life. In a broad general sense our race has emerged from its primitive darkness and taken its First Degree in the life-process and is now 'mid-way" in - not the more highly refined and specialized development of it signified by Freemasonry, but mid-way in its moral and spiritual progress as a social organism. As a corporate ,whole it is socialized, ethicised, and, in some small measure, even spiritualized, having worn off at least some of its grosser defects, though its present condition is "far inferior to that which it is destined ultimately to attain" as the ages pass. Slowly yet gradually its darkness is being dissolved by light; slowly but surely one point of the Great Architect's Compasses is coming into sight and overlaying the Square of human activities. There are signs everywhere and in every department of life and thought that materialism is a decreasing, and idealism an increasing, tendency. Physical science has revealed the seeming solid earth to be as immaterial as moonshine, and is leading men's thoughts up winding stairways of research to explore middle chambers of space and being, the very existence of which it but recently denied. Human consciousness is expanding as these new vistas open; new and enlarged mental perceptions are manifesting in new expressions of art, literature, music; new conceptions of social life and duty are being put to practical test. It is all very crude, imperfect, grotesque even, at the moment. But it signifies real growth, and the pains attending the readjustment of the Square and Compasses are the growing pains incident to all rebirth and reconstruction upon a higher level.
The Mason, personally initiated as lie is
into the mystic and cosmic principles of the Square and Compasses,
and knowing them to rest as in the Lodge their symbols do upon
the unshakeable basis of Divine Law, is thus peculiarly privileged
and favorably placed for interpreting these world changes. They
are the enlarged reflection of himself; he in turn is a miniature
of them. In his "mid-way" position in the Craft he will
discern, in both himself and them, the fluctuating conflict of
darkness and light, with the light always conquering in the end;
and he will expect to experience pains and difficulties similar
to those society at large is suffering in endeavoring to focus
its sight to new perceptions of truth and to adjust its life to
the new claims made upon it.
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