LESSON OF THE MASTER'S DEGREE
by Charles A. Merz
The American Freemason - 1914
Part 1 of 2

THAT matchless lesson of the Master's Degree! When one
contemplates its sublimity, its beauty, its majesty, well may
he exclaim with the illustrious Fichte -"I raise my head to the
threatening rock, the raging flood and the fiery tempest, and
cry, 'I am eternal, and defy your might; break all upon me;
and thou Earth, and thou Heaven, mingle in the wild tumult;
and all ye elements, foam and fret yourselves, and crush in
your conflict the last atom of the body I call mine; my WILL,
secure in its own firm purpose, shall soar unwavering and
bold over the wreck of the universe; for I have entered on my
vocation and it is more enduring than ye are - it is eternal,
and I am eternal like it!"' In that hour of darkness and dread,
when pride is humbled, when fear of unknown and untried
depths lays bare all of human frailty, its lesson comes to the
ever hungry soul of man with the promise of eternal life and
advancement. It is here that immortality is presented, not as
a general truth, but as one individualised.

God sits serene and unchangeable beyond that awful and
mysterious veil; and man, in humble faith and submission,
must yield up the germ of immortality within him, to Him in
whom the dead live and to whom all flesh shall come.

When his courage and fortitude must need be tried by
Miolner's murderous representative, with its impartial,
resistless, crushing force, and the chamber of longest
tarrying yawns for his reception; in the hour of death, of
judgment, of retribution, he must tread the wine-press alone!
In its own strength or weakness, clothed or unclothed, in its
own robe of submission and penitence, must the soul wage
this dreadful conflict. Alone in the Judgment of Amenti, must
the soul, unveiled and self-knowing; its depths of memory
and consciousness broken up; the secrets of the heart laid
open, advance toward the Goddess Thumme, while Anubis
and Horus weigh the actions and mete out the sentence
which consigns it to unknown woe or to joy unspeakable.
This latter we read on an inscription: "Found favor before the
great God; they dwell in glory, where they live a heavenly
life; the bodies they have quitted will forever repose in their
tombs, whilst they rejoice in the life of the supreme God." On
the one side, the ostrich feather; on the other the human
heart.

The lesson of the Master's Degree is burdened with symbolic
meanings of the most sublime and exalted character, It
teaches "the hope of a blessed abode, where the sun grows
not dim, where the shadows gather not; where there is a sea
of glass, a great white throne, the marriage supper of the
Lamb, white robes and golden harps-all imagery that brings
over the soul multitudinous and transporting thoughts of
splendor, glory, joy and praise.

"In this definite outline does the hope of Heaven end? Nay -
it does not here begin. Not in the hope of a blessed abode -
not in the hope of eternal rest by houris fanned - but in the
hope of the glory of God-in the hope of eternal advancement
- yea, even in the knowledge that there is no home, nor stay,
nor station on the wild bright way we know not whither, we
shall spurn these heavens of the dull imagination. From the
colonnades and temples, in gardens Elysian, where fancy
hears the footfalls of the loftiest of time, past thrones,
principalities and constellations, past crowns whose jewels
win the lifted eyes of Gabriel and Michael, up through laws
and harmonies which it hath not entered into the heart of
man or angel to conceive-which are to music as is music to
the grating of a dungeon hinge, shall rise the flying soul-and
the blessed air shall echo in her shouting, far o'er the lost
ideals of this world, Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving to the Lord
God Almighty, who calls and calls us through the Universe of
Glory."

Save for the avowal of his belief in a Supreme Being,
Masonry asks nothing, demands nothing. She seeks to
enforce no dogma, no theology. Each has his conscience,
his reason, will and understanding, to make diligent search
for himself; to choose, to reject, to believe, to consider, to act
- each must answer for himself alone.

God made man perfect, but not immutable. His heritage is to
persevere. His will is ordained, by Nature, free and
untrammelled by inextricable fate or any necessity
whatsoever.

The future life, clearly revealed as a reward, not alone to the
philosopher, but to every humble, pious and enquiring soul,
means far more than the mere prolongation of conscious
existence in the form of human life. Deep down in the heart it
is written, "If a man die, he shall live again." A voice within us
whispers the words, "Man shall never die." All around is
change, revolution and dissolution, but no death.

Day follows night, stars set and rise; the Summer fades into
Autumn; Winter with his icy blasts, blows golden Autumn
away and melts into Spring. Can it be that man alone, for
whom all else revives, shall know no evolution?

Immortality banishes all pain, all fear, all time, all tears and
hymns into our souls the enchanting words, "Thou livest
forever."

Wondrous and alluring to man is this question of immortality,
with its correlative speculation upon his inability to pass
beyond the region of matter and space.

With all his reason and logic, man has never been able to
demonstrate that physical phenomena can be explained by
the mere external elements presented. Furthermore, there
must always be acknowledged the existence of a force or
power outside of the physical or material. Matter cannot
spring spontaneously into being - for no matter how
fundamental or microscopic the ultimate subdivision from
which it springs - there remains unexplained the mystery of
its existence. Man is compelled to fall back upon the Creator
of Matter and the Giver of those laws, in obedience to which
it assumes its manifold forms. Without this Creative force, he
is in the open sea of Logic and Geometry - very remote from
the world of realities. Every Religion and Philosophy has
shown a constant tendency to soar away into realms of
absolute idealism or to grovel in the grossest of materialism,

What, after all, is human life - knocking every hour at death's
door - closing at last in darkness and despair?

There can be found no more pathetic nor genuine record of
human existence than that which the Book of Ecclesiastes
offers. Its story is wrung from the very heart of one who had
followed the round of worldly pleasures, who had revelled in
the resources of knowledge and fame, power and wealth,
the feast and the dance, in laughter and mirth, but who sums
up the whole as "vanity and vexation of spirit." In his gloomy
retrospect, there was nothing upon which he could gaze with
satisfaction-nothing in all that paegantry of greatness. He
was a slave, in bondage and dependence, and he reviled the
weakness that made him such a slave. He had strayed from
his integrity. There was in his past of sensual dreams noth-
ing upon which his eye could repose with satisfaction,
naught that filled his soul with pleasure or left a fragrance
behind. What tears, what blots when finis comes.

What, after all, is man's life but a series of definite and
successive changes of structure and composition, taking
place within him without destroying his identity-the twofold
internal movement of composition and decomposition, at
once continuous and general?

Our inability to consider Matter as being or becoming
non-existent, is an immediate consequence upon the nature
of thought. Thought itself consists in the establishment of
relations. It is as impossible to think of something becoming
nothing as it is to think of nothing becoming something-for
the reason that "nothing" can never become an object of
consciousness. The annihilation of Matter is unthinkable for
the same reason that the creation of Matter is unthinkable.
Nothing of all that dies, dies forever. Neither has anything
that is born received a fundamentally new existence. Nothing
which is dead can ever begin to live, and nothing which lives
can begin to die. Life cannot die any more than can Matter
be destroyed. What then is death? Nothing! Death can make
an end of life, but not of existence. It has been said that the
man who thinks his existence is limited to his present life is
an animated nothing. We say "I am" but in saying this, we
express only onehalf of the sentence, the other half of which
is "I am not." It is utterly impossible for man to have a
thought of "being" apart from its opposite of "non-being."
Also it is utterly impossible for a man to know that he is
alive-without at the same time distinguishing, in thought, the
opposite of life, and, "knowing the one equally as well as the
other, and, so far as being is in knowing, being one as well
as the other." In our acceptation of the term Life, Death
would be the very opposite of it, but he who has not
perceived that Life and Death are equal, has not rightly
understood his philosophy.

This, the Master's Degree, is then the transcendent Degree
in Ancient Craft Masonry, than which there is and can be no
higher. To live by Faith, looking beyond manifest good and
evil in this life of unceasing change. To live by Hope - the
hope of a future existence which serves to equalize human
conditions as to their capacity for happiness and enables
man to cast aside doubt and fear. To live by Charity - with a
ready heart and hand for the needy, the suffering and the
erring. To be conscious of an inward longing and desire after
things that are true and excellent. Faith, Hope and Charity,
their gifts sealed by a conscience void of offense-it is by
these things that man should live - in these alone is to be
found the consummation of and the highest Degree in
Masonry.

The day must come when Nature's trust will fail. This Earth
and Heaven now in their age-long Spring, will have their
Autumn and Winter; when the stars will fade and fall like
leaves; when the Sun will cut short his circuits; when the
visible monuments of Creative Power will cease to be; when
all things fashioned by man for his comfort and pleasure will
decay as the current of time sweeps on, undermining and
engulfing him and all his plans, but "Geometry, the first and
noblest of sciences, the basis on which the superstructure of
Masonry is erected," will remain unchangeable, eternal. Its
truths are the same yesterday, today and forever, and they
will exist though the earth be removed and the Heavens be
no more. Its truths are immortal and eternal. Geometry does
not concern itself with the essence of natural bodies; it fixes
upon the notion of extension, a notion independent of the
senses and with this perfectly ideal and abstract datum,
developes the vast series of its constructions and theorems.
The object of Geometry is not any being in itself-it is an idea.
This constitutes the peculiar solidity and uncontested
certainty of the science. We learn from the Harleain
Manuscript - "The fifth Science is called Geometry and it
teaches a man to mete and measure of the earth and other
things - which Science is Masonrie."

There are objects which appear to defy the boldest doubt,
supposing that doubt to be sincere. Such are Mathematical
and Geometrical truths, Extension in general, Number, the
Angle, Time and the like. "For whether I wake or sleep, two
and three always make five and the square never has more
than four sides; and it does not scam possible that truths so
clear and apparent can be suspected of any uncertainty or
falsehood."

"The opposite of straightaway is return. But return on the
same line were not so opposite as on a different line, if it be
the least different; the record of this is the acutest angle. But
to effect return, we must make another angle to the point of
departure. Perpendicular departure and return are now
recorded in three angles. We find the result justified - a
triangle contains two right angles. Euclid is for us; who can
be against us?"

POTS

Freemasonry is a science of symbols, in which, by their proper
study, a search is instituted after truth, that truth consisting in the
knowledge of the divine and human nature of God and the human
Soul. - DR. A. G. MACKEY.