THE CORNER-STONE of Masonry, at once its first and greatest Landmark, the basis of its plan and purpose and prophecy, is the old and simple Faith in God which finds its purest revelation and clearest interpretation iii the Holy Bible - God the Great Architect and Master-Builder of the Universe; God the Father of Humanity, its solidarity and salvation; God the Maker of heaven and earth and all that in them is, before whom silence is eloquence and wonder is worship. Other foundation there is none; upon God Masonry builds its Temple of Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth. In nothing is our gentle Craft wiser than in laying its foundation; it begins at the beginning and puts first things first. God is the first Fact and the final Reality - the Truth that makes all other truths true; the corner-stone of faith, the key-stone of thought, the cap- stone of hope. Nay, more; God is the meaning of the universe, its rhythm and its reason, the secret of its integrity, the source of its goodness, the sign of its sanity; its author and its end. Thought about God is thought in its longest reach; trust in God is the highest wisdom and the deepest joy. Beyond Him human faith cannot go; short of Him it cannot rest. Everything in Masonry has reference to God, implies God, speaks of God, points to God. Not a degree, not a symbol, not an obligation, not a lecture, not a charge but finds its meaning and derives its beauty from God, the Great Architect, in whose Temple all Masons are workmen. Every lodge is erected to God and labors in His name, seeking to make His will the design upon its Trestle- board. No initiate enters a lodge without first kneeling and confessing his faith and trust in God, whose love is the fountain of fraternity. The greatest symbol of Masonry, the Triangle, is the oldest emblem of God in the history and faith of man. Under His arching sky, upon his friendly earth where man goes forth to his labor, Masonry toils for the glory of God. Upon the Altar of every Lodge, at which every Mason takes vows of chastity and charity, lies the open Bible, the Book of the Will of God, revealing the sanities and sanctities of life. Its writers were seers who beheld God in the ongoing of nature, in the unfolding of history, and in the yearning heart of man. In a sense unique and overwhelming, it is a book, not about God, but a book of God. Even in its driest chronicles one is aware of the presence of God, as David heard Him moving in the rustle of the mulberry tree. In the "forest of the Psalms," along the dreamy ways of prophecy, in Gospel, Epistle and Apocalypse, God is the one living and blessed reality, the companion of the journeying generations, the atmosphere of the life of man and his everlasting hope. Truly God is in Masonry - in its faith, its ideals, its labor - and without Him it has no meaning, no mission, no ministry among men. For, when faith in God fades, then falls that "house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Then, too, is stultified the prayer of a true Mason, "by patient continuance in well-doing" to be "built up as living stones into a spiritual house," meet for the praise of God. As a great Craftsman said, "I bear my last witness, God willing, and it testifies that of God moveth the great Rite of Masonry." II. THERE IS no need that any one argue to prove that God exists. No proof is possible; no proof is needed. No vital faith is ever secured, still less maintained, by debate. There is no proof in reason for anything which we fundamentally believe, if only because reason is not fundamental. Men do not believe in God because they have proved Him; they are always trying to prove Him because they cannot help believing in Him. Faith in God is not the fruit of logic, but of experience of life. It is the function of reason to clarify, justify and interpret the truth learned by living. The Bible does not argue; it opens the windows and lets in the light. Each age has its arguments for God, but the arguments of one age often seem empty and inadequate to the next-frail ghosts of a time far gone. The arguments pass away but the faith remains. The four historic arguments may still be stated with power, but they do not prove that God exists. They only prove that He ought to exist. As Voltaire said, "If there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him," because He is necessary to the healthful working of the human mind. Ever the quest of man goes on, trying to answer the questions, Who am I? Why am I? Whence did I come? Whither do I go? The only answer is God, and as the mind of man enlarges, as his thought fits more truly into the interstices of reality, his vision is clearer and his faith firmer. Yet, evermore, the horizon lengthens, the vista deepens, and the wonder of God gathers and grows. Often truth is made vivid by its opposite, as night brings out the stars hidden by day. Emerson was wont to say, "If there ever was one good man, there will be another and there will be many"; but without God the life of a good man is a mystery, if not a tragedy. It is an exotic flower growing in the air, without seed or root. There is nothing to suggest it, nothing to sustain it, nothing to fulfill its promise. By the same token, it is not the base man but the good man who is most profoundly bereaved when the vision of God grows dim. There is no keener pain known to man than a loss of the sense of the reality of God, doubly so for a refined and sensitive nature, as witness the words of Nietzsche lamenting the loss of his right, as he felt, to pray - words which move like the overture of a great symphony of despair: Never more wilt thou pray, never more worship, never more repose in boundless trust - thou renouncest the privilege of standing before an ultimate wisdom, an ultimate mercy, and unharnessing thy thoughts - thou hast no constant watcher and friend for thy seven solitudes - there is now no redeemer for thee, no one to promise a better life - no more reason in what happens, no love in that which shall happen to thee - thy heart hast now no resting place, where it needeth only to find, not to seek - man, of thy self- denial, wilt thou deny thyself all this? Whence wilt thou gain the strength? THERE IS the lonely horror which settles like a pall over man when faith in God fades, and it is no wonder that it drove him mad. Such is the fatality of thought. Men seem to be - often seek to be - atheists, yet the wildest flight of thought is haunted by the presence of God. Of a truth it has been said, God has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless, weary and alone until they rest in Him. jean Paul Richter was right; no one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God. With an orphaned heart, which has lost the greatest of Fathers, he stands mourning by the immeasurable corpse of nature, no longer moved or sustained by the Spirit of the universe, but growing in its grave; and he mourns, until he himself crumbles away from the dead body. It may be difficult to keep our faith in God at times, but the alternative is far more difficult - aye, it is desperate, and the very denial of God is proof of the sanity of faith. Ill. NO TALE ever told in fairyland is more fascinating than the story of the thought of God in the mind of man. Life is the basis of faith in God - life with its pain and peril, its joy and woe, its pitiful broken beauty, its fleeting fellowships and its long partings; life so brief at its longest, so broken at its best. Older than all arguments, it is a faith deeper than all dogma, as old as the home and the family, as deep as infancy and old age, as deep as love and death. Men lived and died by faith in God ages before philosophy was born, long before logic had learned its letters. If we have ears we may hear Vedic poets and penitential Psalmists praising God on yonder side of the Pyramids. In Egypt, five thousand years ago, a great king wrote of the unity and purity of God, celebrating the beauty of the world. Let me trace, as vividly as possible, the long slow climb of faith in the heart of man: First, it was an advance from Nothing to Something, from a vague, bewildered awareness in man of himself and the world to the sense of a Presence. How little can we realize the earliest musings of man when thought first found a throne in his brain-the dawning of faith out of fear, of polytheism out of animism, his sense of kinship with the world, his worship of spirits in stones, in trees, in flowing waters. Such a book as The Golden Bough, by Frazier, shows us man feeling after God, if haply he might find Him, groping his way through a jungle of shadows, following a flickering light. It is an encyclopedia of superstitions, but it does portray the birth and childhood of faith, its growth from magic into mysticism, from polytheism to pantheism. It is a far cry from the early poetic myths to the poetry of Wordsworth - a sweet voice singing among the English lakes - but both were aware, in different degree - Of Something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. SECOND, it was a long step forward when faith passed, slowly, from Something to Some One, from gods many to one God, over all, in all, through all; from personification to Personality. In the Abbey painting in the Boston Public Library we are shown the dawning of a nobler vision of God out of the dark night of animal worship; it is like a sunrise in Nature - truth rises and the shadows flee away. For ages the old gods lingered - as lower, lesser deities - haunting places and things; but more and more there grew a sense of one God above all others - an unknown, awful God, whether good or evil man did not know. In none of the early religions - except in Persia - do we find any Devil, because some lesser god fulfilled that function. In our own day a man like Wells sees above our troubled mortal life "a Veiled Being," whose character and purpose are hidden, and he thinks it a new discovery; it is in fact a primitive idea long since left behind. As the Samoan chief said to the missionary, "We know that at night Some One goes by among the trees, but we never speak of it." Third, it was a day to divide time into before and after when faith advanced from Some One to the Holy One, from a unifying Power to a consecrating Moral Empire. This revolutionary insight we owe to Hebrew genius which dared, once for all, to identify the stupendous Power above with the Moral Law within, giving a new date and depth to the history of faith. The vision made the fame of the Hebrew race immortal, and set apart their ancient shrine on Mount Moriah as the loftiest temple ever uplifted by man - because dedicated to the Unity, Righteousness and Spirituality of God. With the single exception of Indian theism, all the theisms of the world today depend on the Hebrew faith. It made the old polytheisms and pantheisms obsolete; it made the world an orderly place, not the playground of dark Fate and wild Chance; it covered the precious possessions of humanity with an infinite security. For that reason the Temple of Hebrew faith became, as in the imagery of our Craft, the symbol of a moral structure sheltering the holy things of the life of man. JUST because we assume a righteous God who requires righteousness of men, we do not - perhaps cannot - realize the horror which haunted the hearts of men until they became aware and assured of the goodness of God. Man has known, from the beginning, that he is every moment dependent upon a Power other and greater than himself, by whatever name he called it - Fate, Force, Destiny, God. The real question - the crux of all questions - is not as to the fact of such a Power, but as to the nature and character of Him "in whose great hand we stand." For, naturally, our thought of God determines what we think about everything else, about ourselves and our fellow men; about life and duty and destiny. No wonder, then, the vision of a Moral God, eternally and unchangeably pure and true and good, brought relief to the noblest natures, released the finest powers of the soul, and inspired the spacious and magnificent poetry of Hebrew psalms and prophecy. By a sure and clear insight, our wise and gentle Masonry, in searching the noisy and confused quarry of human thought and faith, found a precious stone - too often rejected by builders hitherto - and made it the head of the corner; the truth of a righteous God who asks of man that he do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Eternal. By an insight equally clear, our fathers opened upon the Altar the Holy Bible, tile moral manual of mankind, making it the center of the lodge and "the master light of all our seeing." As we gather about it, each of us has a profound quiet deep down inside, just to live under the spell of such a Book and the things it tells; and when we see it on the Altar of the lodge we know we are not following a dim taper, but the light of God shining through our mortal days. IV. BUT THE great day of the feast arrived when human faith, divinely daring, was led and lifted from the Holy One to Our Father, carrying the sublime adventure forward, keeping all that had been won and lifting it to the highest. If Hebrew monotheism moralized life, Christian faith humanized it. Hints and gleams of this all-transfiguring vision had been seen from the heights of song and prophecy. "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth," said the Psalmist. "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will God comfort you," said the greatest prophet of old. The ancient seers saw that man lives in God, who is "our dwelling place in all generations" - like an old ancestral home in which a family lived, and one by one passed away; but it remained for Another - standing in their tradition and glorifying their vision - to show us that God lives in man. The idea of God was reborn in the life of Jesus, shepherded by love and joy and wonder - revealing the Everlasting Truth by what is true and everlasting in the human heart. Jesus revealed the spirit and nature of God through what is deepest, highest, holiest in man, finding in His Father-heart winter, spring, summer, and autumn glory, as on the hills of home. The teaching of Jesus in parable, in sermon, in conversation, in all His incomparable eloquence - bright with color, warm with sympathy, profound as life and death - is so simple that it is startling. "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more your Father" - how strange that man finds it so hard to believe that God is as good as He is! Yet that is what Jesus asked us to think and believe, and he enshrined his Gospel of the love of God in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which ought to be named the Parable of God the Father. THE HERO of the story is not the boy who went away, wasted his substance in riotous living, and returned ragged, haggard and hungry, nor the boy who stayed at home, faithful, respectable, and selfish - so cold that one could skate all round him. No, the hero of the parable is the foolishly fond old father, bowed with age, broken with grief - all-enduring, all-forgiving - waiting on the house-top, watching for his lost boy - thinking him dead, but still keeping watch, as love watches beside a grave - recognizing his gait afar off, running to meet him, stopping his confession of sin with a kiss; forgetting all else, except to plead with the elder brother to be brotherly and forgive - wild with a heart-breaking joy: "My son was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found!" There is revealed a love that lasts all down the years and beyond; a love that never tires, and has in it the secret of unknown redemptions. Time does not limit it. Death does not end it. Nor height nor depth can defeat it! What this revelation means, in all its sweep and grandeur, we have not begun to imagine, much less to realize. There are three stages in the growth and unfolding of it in the life of man: First, when he awakes from the wonder of infancy and becomes aware of himself as a person, separate from others, with a moral responsibility of his own. Second, when he discovers that God is the One with whom he really has to do in the adventure of life. God may be to him only a Power, or, as with most of us, a Big Man up in the sky, venerable, grave, sometimes kindly, often stern, always watchful; but that day marks a step toward manhood. Third, When he passes, suddenly or slowly - taught, it may be, by the love of his own father, or by the fact that he himself is a father - from the idea of God as a Power, a Ruler, to the sense of God as Father; that is his real birthday. Happy is the man who has learned this truth, not as a pretty theory, but as the meaning of life - he is free indeed! (1) Such a faith will determine our reading of the meaning of life and our philosophy of history. As Tolstoy has said, the most terrible thing to man is not the fear of death - no brave man ears death-but a dread of the meaninglessness of life. If God is a Father, our days do not ebb out their hours in futility - no, life has meaning, worth, nobility. In the same way, the long human march through the ages is not a blind groping without leadership. Through the centuries there runs an "increasing purpose" - invisible, it may be, in nearby events, but made clear in the long teaching of Time - which is leading humanity to "the far off Divine event." (2) Faith in God the Father affects our interpretation of the events of life. Sorrow, evil, sin, all the tragedy of life - youth blighted in its bud, manhood shattered in its prime, the cup of death forever pressed to the lips of love - all the woe of mortality, in which each of us has his share, or soon or late, becomes bearable if we are assured that it has a reason, and is not the whim of chance, or the freak of Fate. Man can endure much - anything, perhaps, even if his heart breaks - if he knows that an Eternal Goodness rules things, and we are not at the mercy of blind Force. (3) Trust in God determines our sense of values. Life, character, honor, virtue, truth, service, sacrifice, all the high, heroic qualities have new worth and luster in the light of the master truth of the Fatherhood of God. The discipline of life, no less than its opportunity, finds reinterpretation in this faith. Prayer is as natural as the song of a bird. Love turns prophet and foretells a radiant future; hope is triumphant. Life does not dismay nor death terrify, if we are convinced that in all, above all, underneath all, there is the love of a Father who knows and feels and cares; a love, as Dante said, one with the love that moves the sun and all the stars." SUCH, in dim outline, is the story of faith in God in the life of man, rising from lowly, groping, shadow-haunted thoughts to the loftiest truth man may know on earth; and all he needs to know. To know God as our Father - to realize that, though He holds the worlds in His hand, yet these wistful, quivering, questioning souls within us are made in His image, and are precious in His eyes - this is life indeed. There is much in nature to appall and affright, much in history to stagger and dismay; but once we know that the heart of "the veiled Father of men" is unfathomably kind, all the world is new. Nature then goes forward to music. Nor is it always a battle chant to which she keeps step. In her song are all things - the shout of victory and the sob of defeat, but also the ripple of the brook over the stones, the murmur of the trees, the laughter of little children, and the thunder in the mountains. V. YET, oddly enough at first, if all the teaching of Masonry implies the Fatherhood of God, still its ritual does not actually affirm that truth, much less make it a test of fellowship. It is not an oversight, but a bit of deep and true wisdom for which all men must be grateful, if they know what lies back of it. If Masonry made faith in God the Father a basis of membership, it would debar many a noble man who is unable to attain to that faith, much as he wants to hold it and tries, amid the tragedies of life, to win it. Besides, it is only by the practice of brotherhood that men actually realize the truth of God the Father; and it is the mission of Masonry to lead and lift men to the truth. In nothing is Masonry wiser than in its attitude in regard to the deep and delicate things of the soul, its trust in God, its thought about Him, its fellowship with Him. It lays down no dogma about God, it speaks His name rarely, using, instead, the august phrase "the Great Architect of the Universe" - a phrase which is like a chalice into which each man may pour such truth as his insight and experience may win, such beauty as his vision may behold; at the same time allowing his brethren a like liberty and joy. The life of man with God is a thing so intimate, so inward, so utterly individual, that to violate its privacy, or to invade its sanctity, is a sacrilege, if not a blasphemy. There is, indeed, a truth which no man can learn for another and no one can know alone; and Masonry offers a fellowship in which men may learn together the truth that makes us men. If only the Church had learned this simple wisdom, it would have been spared the ugly agitations which mar its fellowship and endanger its influence. For, surely, to argue angrily about God, to bandy bitter words about the sacred things of the soul, is not religion but irreligion. It is the better way of Masonry to be silent, as we well may do in the presence of a Reality so great that all men are one in their littleness, as they should be in their faith and charity. Our Craft does not drive like a despot; it leads like a lover - trusting a Truth which is to faith what beauty is to art, what melody is to music.