E. H. ADDINGTON

ON FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE. 73
'' The Masonic obligation is followed not only by the gift of light,
by counsels of wisdom and admonitions to virtue, but by words of
welcome. A certain friendly and brotherly grip raises a man into a
larger fellowship than any in which he has previously participated,
a vaster fraternity than any he has hitherto known. The cable-tow
of his life is lengthened. A wider compass and circumference radiates
behind and before. In every direction there is extension and enlargement.
Back each no'vice is carried in imagination into the storied
past, with its venerable traditions of Israel's king and temple, her noble
and illustrious craft; and then he is projected forward in thought to
the ever-swelling company of Brethren recruited from every nation and
people and kindred and tongue, which, like the heavenly host, will yet
comprise a multitude that no man can number. All points of the compass
meet. All times, past, present, and future, unite. He must forthwith
be a larger man who has experienced the emancipation of the
initiation. His family pride and genealogy, his local prejudices, his
provincial tastes, his little system, his pet scheme, this 'ism, that bias,
all that divides and differentiates gives way to that which amalgamates
and unites. He has stepped out of his class into a larger class where
there is no class, but only men with hearts and hands and brains.
"In Lodge assembled we are free, for the time being at any rate,
from the daily grind for the daily bread; we are delivered from the
drudgery of unremitting toil; we are emancipated from the servitude
to physical need. We steal away from an insistent self-imposed tyranny.
We make good our escape, poor galley slaves from the press-gangs of
trade and commerce, chained by fetters of our own forging to the
wheels of industry. As a ' deliverance from this most modern captivity,
the. enslavement of business, all Brother Masons have a city
of refuge, the Lodge room, where in the freedom of fraternal intercourse
we may enjoy that liberty of unrestricted interchange of thought, of
choice fellowship of heart, of rare communion of spirit that is the
Mason's peerless prerogative, his privilege and delight.
"Masonry has the unspeakably important function of espousing
in an age of doubt the cause of the invisible and eternal. We of the
church count on the support of you of the Craft. Let us stand or
fall together, waging unceasing battle against the assaults of unbelief
and denial. We must stem this mad tide of materialism that would
submerge our day, obscuring God, obliterating the soul of man. In the
dim and distant centuries, the founders of our Craft taught, and their
successors have transmitted, a faith in the great eternal verities; God,
duty, and the imperishable soul. It has always been the glory of our
Institution to have and to hold, to profess and to practice, to embody
and to exemplify humanity's crowning achievement, the belief in these
everlasting realities. This is our grand work of emancipation in comparison
with which all other forms of release fall into relative insignificance.
For what more degrading and debasing servitude could subjugate
the spirit of man tTian the materialistic view of the universe?
What worse spiritual bondage than to live in a world where the idea of
God was replaced by some inscrutalbe force or blind laws; where virtue
lay slain by the ridicule of all moral distinctions; where conscience
was stifled, duty banished and aspiration smothered by the denial of the
soul? Away from this worst of bondages, this most hateful and abject
of servitudes, the bondage of the flesh, the servitude to the material,
may Masonry steadfastly point the heart and mind of man, and continue
to invite his soul to come into its own."