Following the entrustment with the secrets, the Candidate is, as in the former Degree, bidden to resume his "pilgrim's march". He is sent round to the Wardens to be examined about them and to demonstrate whether he retains and continues to observe the precepts which have been disclosed to him. As was intimated in our study of the First Degree, every accession of Light from above is followed by a subsequent personal test of our worthiness to receive it, and there arc higher spiritual principles within ourselves-principles represented by the two Wardens - which during one's personal soul-growth subject us to "repeated trials and approbations" or perhaps disapprobations of our fortitude, our fidelity, and our perseverance.
This small episode of scrutiny by the Wardens is, therefore, big with meaning. To discern its true value we must magnify it imaginatively till we see it referring to an actual period of trial certain to be experienced by everyone who tries to live out in personal experience the transitional stage to which the "passing" Ceremony alludes. Being a transitional stage it is notoriously one usually involving considerable mental and emotional upheaval, since the mind is gradually detaching and weaning itself from its former interests and has not yet become re-established upon a new and higher basis. The process of "passing" is like a sea-voyage from one land to another; one may have and generally does have a rough passage. Indeed this is the actual imagery used in the V.S.L. to describe the psychological unrest and emotional instability of those who journey into the "more hidden paths of nature" and the as yet unplumbed depths of their own being. They are likened to those who "have their business in great waters", where they come to see "the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep". But, during the voyage, it is said that they "reel to and fro, and stagger as a drunken man and are at their wits' end", though finally they are brought to "their desired haven" (Ps. 107; 30). To this scriptural metaphor we probably owe the reference in our Ritual to "steering the soul by the helm of rectitude over the rough seas of passion, that we enter not the harbor of vice."
Another allusion to the personal troubles encountered in the "passing" stage is the reference to "wages" and to their payment in the porchway or entrance to the Temple, i.e., in the initial stage of one's spiritual progress. (This mention of "wages" in the present Degree is a remnant from the Mark Degree, where it is dealt with much more fully).
Now every Craftsman may rest assured of receiving good wages for his work and for all effort he expends in promoting the spiritual development of himself or his Brethren; the Great Overseer and Paymaster will see to that. But as soon as he wholeheartedly sets about to do such work he may, and probably will find wages of a disagreeable and unexpected kind coming to him, in the form of obstacles, illness, losses, estrangements; as though, at the very moment he had begun to reconstruct his life and outlook, all the powers of darkness were crowding in upon him to prevent his advance. Well, so they are; but they are powers proceeding from within himself; he is encountering opposition from his own self and experiencing the reactions of the Moral Law to his own past, and perhaps forgotten, breaches of it. The soul of each of us contains its own judgment-book with a debit and credit account of what is due from or to us by the Law underlying our being, an account which is often overdrawn and which sooner or later has to be balanced; and there are "wages of sin" as well as wages of righteousness. The "wages of sin" is always "death," i.e., a deadening and dulling of spiritual faculty, and it is the peculiar trial of every real Initiate that, after his first glad glimpse of Light and after most earnest resolves to be faithful to his vision, he loses it and finds himself suddenly confronted with unexpected inexplicable difficulties in recapturing it.
Hence, then, our Craft's reference to receiving our mystical "wages" without scruple or diffidence, well recognizing ourselves to be justly entitled to them and in complete confidence in the Employer into whose service we have entered. We leave to learn what darkness is, as well as what light is; and in the inner life of man, as in the outer life of Nature, it is always darkest just before dawn.
By those who see and wish to see in Masonic "science" nothing but ceremonial and social pleasantries tempered with elementary ethics, these interpretations will be discredited as fanciful. For such, however, they are not written. They are meant for the happily increasing number of Brethren who realize the Craft to be a custodian of the "knowledge of oneself" and to enshrine profound truths of spiritual science beneath its veil of allegory. Even among ourselves there are many who already have personally verified the truth of what is here being affirmed; who have found themselves subjected to those "repeated trials" so sudden and unforeseen, so distressing and disturbing which visit those who are earnestly turning from shadows and pressing towards the Light; who have experienced that divided and unstable state which arises when the soul is as two kingdoms, "one (lead, the other powerless to be born". It is a state when a man may well doubt his own sanity and is, as the Psalmist says, "at his wits' end"; when he asks himself whether he is not being fooled by fantasy, whether the newly glimpsed ideal be not a dream or at least a goal unattainable by himself, and whether it is not better to abandon it and return to the old forsaken fleshpots.
Let all such be of good cheer, accepting
what comes "without scruple or diffidence", and persistently
holding aloft the Sign of Perseverance until their troubles pass,
until their "enemies" are discomfited, and the sun of
clear spiritual consciousness stands still and permanently established
in their personal heaven. Let them count themselves privileged
that they are experiencing; that painful transitional state prefigured
in our Ceremony of "passing" from a low to an advanced
order of life; assuredly it is they who, best of all, will be
qualified to understand the significance of the symbolic testing
by the Wardens which decide whether, as they tread their path,
their steps are true and the signs of their progress sure.
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