THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

IV
Bede the Venerable, in giving an account of the deliberations of the
King of Northumberland and his counsellors, as to whether they should
allow the Christian missionaries to teach a new faith to the people,
recites this incident. After much debate, a gray-haired chief recalled
the feeling which came over him on seeing a little bird pass through,
on fluttering wing, the warm bright hall of feasting, while winter
winds raged without. The moment of its flight was full of sweetness
and light for the bird, but it was brief. Out of the darkness it flew,
looked upon the bright scene, and vanished into the darkness again,
none knowing whence it came nor whither it went.
"Like this," said the veteran chief, "is human life. We come, our wise
men cannot tell whence. We go, and they cannot tell whither. Our
flight is brief. Therefore, if there be anyone that can teach us more
about it--in God's name let us hear him!"
Even so, let us hear what Masonry has to say in the great argument for
the immortality of the soul. But, instead of making an argument linked
and strong, it presents a picture--the oldest, if not the greatest
drama in the world--the better to make men feel those truths which no
mortal words can utter. It shows us the black tragedy of life in its
darkest hour; the forces of evil, so cunning yet so stupid, which come
up against the soul, tempting it to treachery, and even to the
degredation of saving life by giving up all that makes life worth
living; a tragedy which, in its simplicity and power, makes the heart
ache and stand still. Then, out of the thick darkness there rises,
like a beautiful white star, that in man which is most akin to God,
his love of truth, his loyalty to the highest, and his willingness to
go down into the night of death, if only virtue may live and shine
like a pulse of fire in the evening sky. Here is the ultimate and
final witness of our divinity and immortality--the sublime,
death-defying moral heroism of the human soul! Surely the eternal
paradox holds true at the gates of the grave: he who loses his life
for the sake of truth, shall find it anew! And here Masonry rests the
matter, assured that since there is that in man which makes him hold
to the moral ideal, and the integrity of his own soul, against all
the brute forces of the world, the God who made man in His own image
will not let him die in the dust! Higher vision it is not given us to
see in the dim country of this world; deeper truth we do not need to
know.
Working with hands soon to be folded, we build up the structure of our
lives from what our fingers can feel, our eyes can see, and our ears
can hear. Till, in a moment--marvelous whether it come in storm and
tears, or softly as twilight breath beneath unshadowed skies--we are
called upon to yield our grasp of these solid things, and trust
ourselves to the invisible Soul within us, which betakes itself along
an invisible path into the Unknown. It is strange: a door opens into a
new world; and man, child of the dust that he is, follows his
adventurous Soul, as the Soul follows an inscrutable Power which is
more elusive than the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Suddenly,
with fixed eyes and blanched lips, we lie down and wait; and life,
well-fought or wasted, bright or somber, lies behind us--a dream that
is dreamt, a thing that is no more. O Death,