THE BUILDER MARCH 1916

THE PATRIARCHS
BY JOSEPH FORT NEWTON

MR. TOASTMASTER: Surely the idea of such an evening as this was
most happy. There is a day set apart in honor of our mothers --God
bless them !--and no one would detract one iota from its sanctity
and beauty. But it has remained for this lodge to dedicate a day to
our fathers, and especially to the fathers of Masonry into whose
labors we have entered, and of whose prophetic sowing we are
reaping the harvest. Of truth, we honor ourselves when we meet and
pay tribute to men who did so much to make Masonry what it is.

Some do not well know that there was a time, and not so long ago,
when it was a courageous thing for a man to be a Mason. Prejudice
against the order was intense, often fanatical, and our gentle
craft was held by many to be a dangerous fraternity, as if its
innocent secrets harbored dark designs. How different it is now.
Today our order is everywhere honored, and our gates are thronged
with young men eager to enter its ancient fellowship. What has
brought about this change of feeling and attitude toward Masonry ?
More than all else it is due to the quiet dignity of the men of the
order, and the noble way in which they have shown what Masonry is
in their lives. Nearly every man here, if asked directly, would
admit that he was drawn to Masonry by the quality of its men. After
all, the greatest influence of Masonry in the world, is the silent,
eloquent influence of character.

"A FEW OLD BRETHREN"

It may be interesting to some to know that such an evening as this
recalls one of the oldest traditions of the order. If you will look
into the "Old Charges"-- the title deeds of Masonry, and a part of
its earliest ritual--you will see that among the duties required of
a young man entering the order, was that he respect the aged. When,
after a period of decline, the Grand Lodge of England was organized
in 1717, who presided over the assembly? In the scanty records of
that scene it is set down as significant that the Grand Lodge came
to order with "the oldest Master Mason in the chair." Indeed, it
seems clear that the impulse by which the scattered Masons of the
time were drawn together into closer union, came, as Anderson
suggests, from "a few old brethren"; and during the critical period
of transition, it was the old men who guided the craft. For the
first Grand Lodge, so far from being an innovation, was in fact a
revival of the old quarterly Assembly, and was intended to preserve
the ancient usages of the order. So that, our meeting this night in
honor of the veterans of the craft, has the sanction, not only of
our own finer feeling for the fitness of things, but of the long
tradition and custom of the order.

When is a man old? Age is said to be a matter of feeling, not of
years, but old age seemed to come upon men earlier in former times
than it does now. At the age of 49 Shakespeare sold his holdings in
the London theatres, retired from active life, and went back to
Stratford. Dr. Johnson felt himself old at 40, and Lincoln at the
age of 48 spoke of himself as old and withered. The Roman senate
was an assembly of old men, but there was a law that no senator
over 60 should be called to his duties, lest his failing mind bring
harm to the republic. But it is different with us today. With us a
man is intellectually in his prime at 60, and many do their best
work much later. Gladstone, at 70, was just entering the second
volume of his biography.

YOUNG OLD MEN

When is a man a patriarch ? Let me tell you. Old age is that period
when one sees the limit of life, whether it be at 20, 50, or 80;
when he sees clearly, what once was covered by mists, a grave full
of songs unsung, hopes unrealized, and ambitions unachieved. There
are men, not yet 30, who are asking that ultimate question: "What
is the use?" These are the old men--old of heart, world-weary,
smitten with palsy of soul, and gray with a sense of futility;
these are the unburied dead. Think of a man asking such a question
in a world where sunsets are like sacraments, and the hush and
solemnity of the dawn is like the smile of God! Think of finding
life flat, stale and unprofitable in a world where the incredible
is an everyday fact, and the impossible is always coming true--a
world where there is truth to seek, love to consecrate, and hope
forever building its great Arch of Promise! Such a man has come too
early to the sear and yellow leaf.

Also, there are men far along in years--walking down the western
slope where the shadows lengthen towards evening--who are eager and
alert of spirit, happy and forward-looking, their faith undimmed,
their zest of life unabated. These are not old men. There is in
them a foregleam of the immortal life. Years have piled up betimes,
but they have kept their faith firm, their feelings buoyant, their
sympathies active, and their interest in life fresh and vivid. How
fine it is to see a man grow old reverently and beautifully, his
heart aglow with the soft light of eventide and the glory of the
star-crowned night ! It is not strange that such men enjoy the
authority of influence and counsel, wisdom and prophecy, which
Cicero held to be the trophies of age.

THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN

Each of the seven ages of men, as Shakespeare marked them, has its
uses, its joys, its disadvantages, and its compensations. He is a
wise man who takes life as it is, each degree as God confers it,
each experience in its season--youth with its flaming visions, age
with its serenity. For age is opportunity not less than youth,
albeit in another form. Old age, to be sure, has its disadvantages
and perils. Failing strength, stiff joints, "the lean and slippered
pantaloons, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste"--these are familiar
enough. Often it weakens the tenacity of memory, but if we can
manage to forget what is not worth remembering, that might be
enviable. With few exceptions--like Sophocles and Tennyson--age
clips the wings of imagination; but it also cools our passion which
befogs and perverts reason. Age is clarifying and may attain, as
Milton said, to "something of prophetic strain."

At least, it belongs to age, in a life well spent, to look upon the
world with calm and wise vision. As Plato said in his Republic, old
age "certainly has a great sense of freedom and serenity"; but he
added, "the cause is to be sought, not in the ages of men, but in
their tempers and characters." That is to say, it is quality and
not the quantity of life that counts for most. The fact that a man
has lived on this earth three score years and ten does not mean,
necessarily, that he is either good or wise. Some men are as
foolish in age as they were in youth. Doubly foolish is he who,
living to grow old, has not learned the priceless value of virtue,
and the wisdom of love. Time alone brings neither honor nor wisdom.

THE SADDEST THING ON EARTH

An eastern king offered a reward to the one who would tell him the
saddest thing on earth. There were three competitors in the
contest. One said it is unrequited love; another that it is the
death of the young; and the third, who won the prize, that it is
old age and poverty. I do not believe it, unless by poverty you
mean that pitiful penury of soul which makes the gloaming of life
so desolate. No; the saddest thing on this earth is old age and
sin--an old man crass, crafty, hard, cynical, and impure! Great
God! rather than come to such an end, let me die tonight, in the
morning of life, my work hardly begun !

When we are young we draw checks on the Bank of the Future. Some
men go on doing this, unable, it seems, to live year in and year
out upon their current income. Not many of those checks are cashed
at full value. There is nearly always a heavy discount, and more
often they come back to us for lack of funds. When we are old we
draw our checks on the Bank of the Past. Whether they are cashed or
not depends on how thrifty we have been in laying up that treasure
which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves break through
and steal. More precious than rubies is a wise faith purified by
trial, a conscience void of offense, and the memory of years spent
in purity, honor and service. When a man comes to the end the only
things he does not regret, and would not recall if he could, are
the kind words spoken and the deeds done in love of God and his
fellow men. At that hour an empty alabaster box, with which he has
anointed some friend in need, counts for more than all the gold in
all the hills !

YOUTH AND AGE

Other things being equal, the advantages of age, though less
obvious, far outweigh its handicaps. For one thing, age sees life
in a long perspective and in a clearer, if drier, light. It has a
vision of the beauty and grace--and folly--of youth, which youth
does not have. It is the young who despise youth and try to get
away from it--the urchin longing to be a school boy, the freshman
to be a senior. No man, when a boy, ever had half the joy running
across the meadow that he gets from seeing his boy--not to say his
grandson--on that very spot. It is the old who see the loveliness
of youth, and love it. Youth is the drama, in which the actors are
absorbed in their parts; age is the audience. By virtue of its
detachment, age has a truer insight into life, and if it knows
little of ecstasy it knows less of despair.

With the mellowing of life there comes also a deeper sense of the
kinship of things. Youth loves cliques, the more exclusive the
better; it rarely gives love unless it is returned. Not so age,
whose affections, if less turbulent, are less touched by selfish
motives. Age makes little of human differences, and sets much store
by the great common fellowship of humanity, seeing many ties of
union where youth sees only discord. Work, too, takes on a new
aspect with lengthening years. Old men do not feel, as young men
often do, that the universe rests upon their shoulders. Nor do they
imagine, as Hamlet did, that they were born to set the world right.
They see that each must be content to do his little human part, and
trust the fate of the world to a Power greater than man. If age
limits a man, it the better sets his bounds within which he can
work quietly, and get something done before he dies.

HAMLET AND PROSPERO

Youth seeks very high for what age finds nearby. It is when we grow
older that the simple things of life begin to unfold their wonder,
and open long vistas of meditation. Nogi fought great battles on
the plains of Manchuria, but towards the end he was wont to muse
over an iris, finding in its beauty a mystery beyond his fathoming.
Youth knows more than old age, because it knows so many things that
are not so. After 50 our bottle of knowledge is so shaken that it
is all of one color. When we are young we love Hamlet, with his
obscure, haunting melancholy, but when age comes on we like best
the wisdom of Prospero who, by the aid of Ariel, won victory over
Caliban. Age may not be more religious than youth, but it is
religious in a different and deeper way. It thinks of God, not as
a flaming fire, but as an abiding presence, made real by the
revealings of the years--serene, infinitely patient, unutterably
great and kind. Youth is for faith; old age for trust.

Why did Shakespeare all at once drop his task and go back to
Stratford? No doubt many things blended in the making of the
decision, one of which was that he was wise enough to know when to
quit. Another fact may have been the elemental love of man for the
earth, his great mother, in whose bosom he sleeps at last. But
perhaps the chief motive was a desire for quiet amid the scenes of
his boyhood, and time to gather the threads of his thought and
weave them into a fabric of faith. There is a deep instinct which
leads a man back to his native place, as many of you have made long
journeys to Ohio, New York, or Maine just to see the sun come up
over the hill or sea. One finds something homelike in his native
landscape, and in the old haunts a man can fuse his latest thought
with his earliest memory as he can hardly do anywhere else. Some
such feeling must have led Shakespeare to leave London and go back
to the winding Avon. And it was there that he wrote the gentlest of
all his plays, the Tempest--a miracle of art, an allegory of the
victory of man over fate and fortune by self-surrender to the
highest laws of life.

THE HOUSE OF FAITH

Similarly, Albert Pike used to urge upon old men the study of
Masonry, not only because it brings to us from afar the high and
simple wisdom of humanity, but it offers to every man a great hope
and consolation. At its altar a man may gather up his deepest
thoughts which, in the busy mid-years of life, are too often left
scattered in the disarray of a temple yet unbuilt, and fashion them
into a House of Faith--a Home of the Soul. How to live is the one
matter; and the oldest man in his ripe age has never found a wiser
way than to build, year by year, on a foundation of faith in God
and love of man, using the Square to test the rightness of our
lives, the Plumbline to mark the rectitude of our acts, the
Compasses to keep our passions within bounds, and the Rule to
divide our days into labor, rest and service. Love is ever the
Builder, and whoso obeys its sweet law and builds after its pattern
will not be left shelterless and alone.

After old age, what? Ever the evening shadows fall; ever there
comes a time, to whomsoever is a man, when even the wisest knows
not where he is; ever and ever the twilight--and after that the
dark, when all the lights of philosophy go out, and only faith and
hope and love remain. There is nothing for it but to walk calmly
down the western slope, the sun shining in our faces, into the
evening shadows--trusting the great God over all.

"Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be,
The last of life
For which the first was made; 
Our times are in his hands
Who sayeth, 'A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God; 
See all, nor be afraid.' "

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 eloquent incident. After much debate, a
grey-haired chief stood up and spoke, recalling the feeling that
came over him on seeing a little bird pass through, on fluttering
wing, the warm bright hall of feasting, while the 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 gay scene, and vanished into the darkness, none
knowing whence it came nor whither it went.

"Like this," said the veteran chief, "is human life. We come, our
wisest men know not whence. We go, 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 !"

THE GREAT TRAGEDY

What has Masonry to teach us about immortality ? Instead of making
an argument, it presents a picture--the oldest, if not the greatest
drama in the world--the better to make men feel what no words can
ever tell. It shows us the tragedy of life in its most dismal hour;
the forces of evil, so cunning yet so stupid, tempting the soul to
treachery--even to the ultimate degradation of saving life by
giving up all that makes it worth our time to live. It shows us a
noble and true man smitten, as Lincoln was, in the moment of his
loftiest service to man. It is a picture so true to the bitter,
old, and haggard reality of this dark world that it makes the soul
stand still in dismay. Then, out of the shadow there rises, like a
beautiful white star, that in man which is most akin to God--his
love of truth, his loyalty to the ideal, 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 the divinity and
immortality of the soul--the heroic, death defying moral valor of
the human spirit! No being capable of such a sublime sacrifice need
fear death or the grave.

"What has the soul to lose
By worlds on worlds destroyed ?"

It is the old, eternal paradox--he who gives his all for the sake
of the truth shall find it all anew. And there Masonry rests the
case, assured that since there is that in man which makes him hold
to the moral ideal against the brute forces of the world; that
which prompts him to pay the last full measure of devotion for the
sanctity of his soul; the God who made him in His own image will
not let him sleep 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.

"There are more lives yet, there are more worlds waiting,
For the way climbs up to the eldest sun. 
Where the white ones go to their mystic mating, 
And the holy will is done. 
I shall find them there where our low life heightens-- 
Where the door of the Wonder again unbars, 
Where the old love rules and the old fire whitens, 
In the Stars behind the stars." 

