To be able to measure and to understand the great men of the Middle Ages and even in the Modern Age to as late as the end of the Eighteenth Century and to be able to comprehend that in which their greatness consisted, a Twentieth Century American must find a way to get outside his own mind - when Sydney Smith exclaimed of the weather that it was so hot he wished he "could get outside his skin and sit in his bones" he gave an inelegant but vivid picture of the thing to do. This American is something more remarkable than an Aladdin; he has no lamp to rub but he can nevertheless summon genii from every direction. If he is ill he can command to his aid whole medical staffs at a hospital. If he takes the whim to read a book, the tax-payers have thousands of volumes at the nearest public library, ready for him to take without fee. Tens of thousands of factories, some of them a mile square, produce automobiles, houses, implements, clothing, and more than a million other commodities, large and small; keeping time with them are numberless public utilities which supply light, gas, water, telephones, telegraphs, and what not; the cardinal fact about these factories and utilities is not their number or size but the effortless ease with which any man, woman or child can make use of them. If this American needs schooling the tax-payers have erected grade schools and consolidated schools in every hamlet and village, if he needs an education they open up 500 colleges to him, if he wishes to train himself for an art or a profession a hundred universities open their doors to him. One man weighing one hundred and fifty pounds can draw a hundred freight cars of goods through space at a mile a minute because he has a locomotive to do it with; even Casper Milquetoast, who has no faith in himself or in anything else, can move mountains because of the mountainous machinery around him which he can start with a button and steer with a lever. We have great men and famous men, but in taking their measure we must always allow for a world of instrumentalities which has stood at their elbows ready for them to use-in the old debate as to which was the greater man, Lincoln or Washington, we are not permitted to forget that Lincoln had railways, ironclad battleships, and the telegraph to use whereas Washington did not.
We therefore find it difficult to understand how men before the ages of science and of mechanical industry were able to be so much, and accomplish so much; rich, but without factories; conquerors, but at the head of troops armed with bows and arrows; scholars, but with neither books nor universities; saints, but surrounded by barbarians; free, and yet in lands filled with slavery! The rank and file of ordinary men always find it difficult to believe that great men are possible, because they cannot conceive of a man having in himself so much power and so much knowledge; how much more difficult was it in the Dark Ages and in the Middle Ages, when a great man, or a famous man, had nothing but himself to use, and no resources except in his own genius! Roger Bacon had nothing behind him but Oxford, then a third-rate theological academy; he had to learn his science from the Arabs, and his geometry from the Freemasons, yet he gave Fourteenth Century England a new form and a new direction. At about the time Columbus was discovering America, Leonardo was at work in Florence mastering mathematics, the two sciences (including aviation), and the five arts, to say nothing of engineering, surveying, navigation, and invention but had no assistance from anything or from anybody except from one negro slave. Why do we keep the fame of such men alive! It is not to flatter them because they almost all are gone to Valhalla by the time our applause begins - as old Fabre says "the fiddles arrive too late." If a man could dig a hole a mile deep and as large as a continent and could fill it with water, that liquid mass would begin a ceaseless heaving from side to side; the moon, a tiny cosmic body as cosmic bodies go, would barely touch it with its gravitative pull, but that pull would be sufficient to draw those vast heavings into a tidal regularity; the great man does not make the ocean of mankind, nor even the sea of any one people, nor can he stir either man or people to their depths, but like the moon he can with his touch give a rhythm to life it could not have without him. Great men are in actual fact creators of civilizations, fathers of peoples, makers of nations, lords of culture, and they are among the profoundest of inspirations, for they show to what great heights and to what almost measureless largeness a man can grow.
For some two centuries Freemasons were the greatest men in Europe. We must not be uncertain about that fact! we must not permit ourselves out of false modesty or from timidity to ignore it, or to gloss it over! than the geniuses who discovered the great Gothic Style, and designed and erected the 1500 cathedrals, and built the cities, and altered the aspect of the world, there have never been more towering men! It was because they were so great that their Craft and their Fraternity has projected itself over a thousand years. They did not scheme and intrigue to work as little as possible or to use their minds as seldom as possible but to accomplish as much as possible, and nobody now can guess what towers of ignorance they battered down in order to erect their towers of stone, or what hells and purgatories of superstition they had to destroy in order to build the beautiful cities. They were civilization-makers, and as Wren said long afterwards they gave the world its face. They did not become jealous among themselves if one of their own members grew tall above his fellows, but gloried in it; "Let Freemasonry be the biggest thing in the world," was their motto, "and let Freemasons be the biggest men in it." So is it still, if a Mason has eyes to see and ears to hear. The Candidate is stripped down to the bare bones of destitution to begin with, but no Lodge sets out to keep him in that condition; he is told to get onto his feet and to make something of himself. The Apron is not made of cloth of gold but if a man knows how to wear it he is more proud than the wearers of the Roman Eagle or the Golden Fleece. "O thou lump of stone make something of thyself!"
The first building in which the complete formula of the Gothic Style was used, according to A. K. Porter, was the Abbey Church of St. Denis near Paris, which was begun about 1140 A. D. The Abbot Suger who had it built, and who supervised it, and who probably designed it, was the greatest man in Europe of his generation, an assistant to the Pope in his early years, acting King of France during the Crusades, a man of very massive learning, the national financier, organizer of armies, and manager of estates stretching to the Channel Coast.
Gothic Architecture did not call Freemasonry into existence but in the history of the Fraternity its influence was like that of the moon over the tides, the gravitative touch which gave it the direction it was afterwards to follow. That style was so new, so different, so unexpected, so undreamed of before, and so marvelous as a work of art that it summoned a new kind of man into the world who was craftsman, artist, scholar, and fraternalist all in one.
If Suger was the first great Operative Freemason then Christopher Wren was the last, so that from one to the other the history of the Craft is like a suspension bridge hung between two great towers. Next, only after Shakespeare, Wren was the supreme individual genius which England produced. The King asked him to build anew the ancient St. Paul's cathedral. After London was well-nigh destroyed in the fire of 1666 A. D., he was appointed to administer the rebuilding of the city. In doing so he, Wren, not only supervised many Lodges of Masons, but also perfected that architectural style which is called by his name. This is only a small part of the total of his achievements, which is like a miniature illustration of an epic. He was also a superb mathematician; he could draw like an artist and model like a sculptor. He was a doctor and a physiologist, and was the first to develop the technique for blood transfusion. He was an inventor; he helped to manage international business enterprises; he was an astronomer; he could write better than Samuel Johnson, and could speak almost as well as Edmund Burke and better than Pitt; as a Latinist he was so gifted that his orations were used as a text book at Cambridge.
In the Middle Ages the small number of men and women who owned and ruled Britain were also supreme over the arts; as they permitted no man to own land but themselves, even though he farmed it, so they permitted an artist no credit for his own masterpieces; they went by the name of the man who owned them, and not by the name of the man who had made them. A cathedral, or minster, or priory therefore was said to have been built by Bishop Wells, or Abbe Fulda, or some cardinal, or other high lord even though the high lord could not read or write and had no more knowledge of architecture than a child; and in consequence the great architecture of six hundred years ago was so anonymous that a hundred years ago writers believed that the Freemasons had made anonymousness a rule among themselves. We now know that this was not true, and that the masters had been robbed of the credit of their masterpieces because chroniclers and annalists had been kept servants of the high lords of church and state and dared give no credit except to those high lords themselves; and in consequence of the discovery and study of thousands of Borough Records and Fabric Rolls we have found the names of hundreds of those masters of masons who supervised the designing and building of those structures which are the only actual and visible things still surviving from the Middle Ages. Set in a row, one after another, their navies can mean little to a Twentieth Century man, but if he could find the time for a study of their biographies and their history he would learn that each was as salient a personality as either Suger or Wren; and this would be especially true of such names as William of Sens, Arnold of Croyland, Elias de Durham, Henry Yevele, Walter of Colchester, Inigo Jones, Baldwin of St. Albans, Palladio - even Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English poetry, was royal administrator of buildings for two years. It is a misfortune beyond measure that our Lodge rooms, and our Grand Lodge halls, and our memorial buildings have bare walls and empty corridors; they should be crowded with tablets, and portraits, and statues of these famous Masons; if they were, the young Mason who enters them would have a different feeling for the antiquity and greatness of the Fraternity.
If to these men of renown of the long Operative Period were added the great names belonging to the Speculative Period of the past two centuries then indeed would the young Mason find himself surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses; the rooms and the corridors would be filled with living voices, for these latter men also are worthy of any hall of fame. To any Mason who knows the tale of their achievements in the Fraternity and for the Fraternity the mere calling of their names is like a roll of music: J. T. Desaguliers, founder of the Grand Lodge system, Dr. James Anderson, who gave his name to the first Book o f Constitutions, William Hutchinson, the first Masonic philosopher, William Preston, writer of the Monitor, Thomas Dunckerley, a builder of the High Grades, Thomas Smith Webb, father of the American System, and the Dukes of Kent and of Sussex, statesmen of Masonic unity. The names continue on and on, diversified as the stars, on both sides of the ocean: Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Wesley, Baron von Hind, Goethe, Martin Clare, Gottfried Leasing, William Hogarth, Dr. Francis Drake, Rudyard Kipling, Sir William Ramsay, Gaedicke, Wolfstieg, Krause, Kloss, Begemann, Lenoir, Voltaire, Lafayette, Chesterfield, Montesquieu, Josiah Barney, Jeremy Cross, Albert G. Mackey, Albert Pike, J. H. Drummond, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Price, Paul Revere, John Marshall, Sir William Johnson, Joseph Warren, W. J. Hughan, G. W. Speth, R. F. Gould, Sir Joseph Warren, Sir Stamford Raffles, A. E. Waite, D. M. Lyon, Chetwode Crawley, E. L. Hawkins, Henry Stillson, George F. Fort, Presidents Washington, Monroe, Jackson, Polk, Buchanan, Johnson, Garfield, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt and Truman, Vice-Presidents Colfax, Burr, Tompkins, Breckenridge, Dallas, Fairbanks, Hobart, Johnson, King, Marshall, and Stevenson.
Walt Whitman pled with us in his Leaves of Grass to encourage here in America "richness and variety"; if there were a Masonic Hall of Fame (as there ought to be) its thousands of busts, and portraits, and tablets would satisfy even Whitman's demands for "richness"; and it would also astound even Whitman himself for its "variety." Has any fraternity or society ever had in it the room and the catholicity for men so alike in their love of Masonry and yet so unlike among themselves as these, and of hundreds equally individualistic: L. T. Tschoudy, Sam Houston, Mazzini, Kit Carson, The Earl of Moira, Edward VII, George Oliver, H. P. H. Bromwell, Roscoe Pound, Edwin Booth, Rob Morris, The Duke of Connaught, Edwin Markham, Irving Berlin, The Sultan of Johore, Luther Burbank, Edmund Burke, Elisha Kane, Louis Kossuth, James Boswell, Jean Sibelius, Daniel O'Connell and Parkes Cadman.
Desaguliers was a Masonic statesman, as also were Kent, Sussex, Lewis and Moses Hayes. Albert Pike re-built the Scottish Rite and wrote Morals and Dogma. Kipling wrote Masonic stories and poems. Lenoir was a scholar in the grand style of erudition. Krause was a philosopher. Drummond was a jurisconsult, an authority on Masonic law, as were also Greenleaf, Lawrence and Pound. Mackey was an authority on law, an encyclopedist, historian, essayist and editor. Mozart, Wesley and Sibelius were Masonic composers. Burns was a poet of Masonry, as also were Markham and Nesbitt. Wolfstieg was a bibliographer. Hughan was a researcher. Parvin was a librarian. Webb and Barney were great ritualists. Lyon became famous as a Lodge Historian, Speth as a Lodge Secretary. Tschoudy was an author of rituals. Waite was learned on the subject of Masonry and occultism. John Jacob Astor was a Grand Treasurer. Washington was a Worshipful Master at the time of his first Inauguration. Andrew Jackson was a Grand Master. Henry Clay was a Masonic orator, as also were O'Connell, Bryan, T. R. Marshall, and Cadman. Franklin published the first Masonic book in America. Sir Walter Besant first conceived the idea of Lodges for Research. Dunsmore was a Masonic painter. Pope was a great Masonic architect. There is a "richness and variety" among those who stand in our Hall of Fame because there is so much richness and variety in Freemasonry itself; it is a world, it also fills the world, and at innumerable points and places challenges any Mason to accomplish as much as he is able.
The early Greeks had in continual use the word hubris, now obsolete, and forgotten except among men who love ancient languages. In a general way - for it is untranslatable - it meant a certain insolent, insulting, arrogant anger, such as a king might feel when angered at a subject who was also a lowly subject, a scorching, and blasting, and inescapable, and destroying anger. The Greeks used it of their gods. If a man did any work which was perfect, which obviously was a masterpiece, and which both attracted and excited the public, there was danger that the gods, happening to look down on it from Olympus, in the lulls between their own brawls and quarrels, might become terribly jealous of it, and search out the maker of it to destroy him out of jealousy; therefore artists and skilled craftsmen always left some slight defect in their work as an insurance against hubris. Our own Pueblo and Navajo are acting according to the same doctrine when they never quite complete a pattern in a rug or a bowl; and out of it came the doctrine (not a true one) that perfection is impossible, is a high flown ideal, a Holy Grail forever moving just out of reach, and men must go according to the Pragmatist's motto of "ever, not quite."
It is a child-like doctrine and yet it reflects a certain indubitable fact which any man may encounter in any walk of life, for it is notorious that a king cannot bear to have another too close to the throne, and not kings only but lords of business, and holders of public office, and actors, and beautiful ladies, and darlings of the public and many others. A Newly-Made Mason, as he pushes ahead into the, to him, unknown countries of the Craft need never have fear lest he fall a victim to rubris. It is too much to say that Lodge Offices were expressly designed to guard the Lodge against that evil, but it is as if they were; Lodge leaders are not "elected persons," victorious candidates of a political party, but are Installed Officers; they cannot tailor their offices to fit themselves, nor use them to reward their friends, or to belabor their foes; their prerogatives are defined and fixed by law; moreover they hold office usually for one year only. If a Worshipful Master were to hold office as a reward for intrigue and could hold onto it ad vitam, then he would become a god jealous of other men more talented than himself, and would crop off the top of a tree for no other reason then that it has grown taller than himself.
No Mason needs be afraid to climb high for fear lest somebody pull the ladder from under him. If a Josiah Drummond brings into his Lodge such a knowledge of Masonic law as no man there can rival the Master will not scowl him away from the East. If Henry Clay sits on the sideline no "Boss" will make sure to stifle that golden voice. Ecclesiasticus' call "Let us now celebrate famous men" has been quoted in Masonic Lodges and in Masonic books times without number; but Lodges have not stopped short with quoting it, they have worked to have it come true. It is said that a metaphor must not be pushed too far, or be expected to "go on all fours"; so is it also with a symbol; a Mason is to glance at it with a quick and perceptive eye but is not to ride on it. It will not be a violation of these two reflections if we note that while a Lodge has a floor and four walls, its ceiling is nothing other than the starry-decked canopy, which is the sky, the heavens. A Lodge member is in a place of his own or is in a station, and cannot go about where he wishes; he is not foot-loose; but he can grow as tall as lie has it in him of either will or ability to grow.
Why does the Lodge pitch its ceiling so
high? Because it has to. It needs a world of room. It is not a
little club into which men creep to get away from their wives.
It is not a benefit society. It is a world power with its own
place and function among other world powers; the world is its
stage, its purposes are as wide as man, its work is so great that
the greatest men can never exhaust it, and Confucius, Moses, Zoraster,
Pythagoras, Aristotle would not be crowded by its confines. There
would be no long Honor Roll of Famous Masons on one side of the
medal, were the greatness of Freemasonry itself not inscribed
on the other. If any critic is tempted to charge these words to
an enthusiasm for the Fraternity, he can ignore what Masons say
and turn to read what history says; if he does, he will discover
that history says the same thing. Let no Newly-Made Mason enter
upon his Masonic labors with the misgiving that it will after
all prove a small matter, and he may soon wear it out. He is not
in a small and innocuous social club. If it had been either innocuous,
or a club, Mussolini would never have felt the need to clear it
from in front of him before setting up his Fascist tyrannies;
Franco would not have condemned each Mason in Spain to ten years
in prison before loosing the plague of his Phalangist rebellion;
Hitler would not have placed its obliteration first on his agenda
of Nazi destruction; Petain would not have stopped to sweep it
out of France before setting up his Vichyism; it would not have
been one of the main issues of World War II.
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