Monday, January 14, 2013

Closing Instruction

It has been a long night, and I haven't posted for quite some time.

In Morals and Dogma*, the chapter for the 28ยบ - The Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept - still remains one of my favorite chapters in that austere and stirring masterpiece of Bro:. Albert Pike.  I will leave you with his closing instruction for that degree as my final thoughts for the evening:

There is no pretence to infallibility in Masonry. It is not for us to dictate to any man what he shall believe. We have hitherto, in the instruction of the several Degrees, confined ourselves to laying before you the great thoughts that have found expression in the different ages of the world, leaving you to decide for yourself as to the orthodoxy or heterodoxy of each, and what proportion of truth, if any, each contained. We shall pursue no other course in this closing Philosophical instruction; in which we propose to deal with the highest questions that have ever exercised the human mind, --with the existence and the nature of a God, with the existence and the nature of the human soul, and with the relations of the divine and human spirit with the merely material Universe. 



*Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry , prepared for the
Supreme Council of the Thirty Third Degree for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States:
Charleston, 1871.