THE BUILDER January 1917

BUILDING THE TEMPLE NOT MADE WITH HANDS
BY BRO. H. L. HAYWOOD, IOWA

IT is the mission of our fraternity to make sweet reason and
brotherhood prevail. But Brotherhood! It is a world in itself as
wide as it is ancient which breaks through our definitions and
overflows our best ideals. Never was it more talked about than now
when it seems like an angel troubling our Bethesda pools to a new
sense of its inevitability and never has it haunted us so much as
in this hour, though war seems to make a red mockery of it.

Until two years ago the signs of the time seemed to indicate that
at last after all the weary ages of waiting the Kingdom of
Brotherhood was at hand. Industry was busy plaiting a web about the
earth: throwing out its thrumming wires, sending its ships like
bobbins to and fro, catching up trains and caravans as shuttles to
its hands, weaving the whole world of men into a web of mutual
interest and trust. Science toiled quietly at the same task and
enticed the hidden forces in ray and wave to serve the wants of
men, the while its sister, literature, carefully built its republic
of letters in which was neither free nor bond, Jew nor Gentile;
Democracy went about to cast its leaven under the throne of kings,
and Socialists dreamed their dream of a United States of the World.
Meanwhile the church's missionary enterprise went out to bind up
the ends of the world into the kingdoms of our God in which the
race's littlest people might find a place in the everlasting sun.

Then, on a fateful day, a young Servian high school student fired
a shot the echoes of which are still heard round the world.

It was as if some shaggy creature from Dante's pit had crawled out
and swept all this fine work away with one sweep of its paw. The
instruments of fraternity underwent a change like the
transformation in some horrible dream phantasm when the most
familiar objects suddenly loom in terrifying aspect. Clouds of
battle smoke drifted over the lands like hell's mirages making our
nearest neighbors to look like demons. Industry was impressed into
the service of shot and shell. Science went over to the side of
Satan. Socialists shot each other down from opposing trenches.
Philosophers and poets mobilized for the warfare of hate. Rival
churches prayed from the one God the boons of victory. The whole
fair web of amity was rent in twain from top to bottom and our
hearts turned sick within us to the realization that John Ball
spoke the sober truth when he said, "Brotherhood is heaven; the
lack of brotherhood is hell."

But, after all, is not the lack of brotherhood an old, old thing?
The war has not created a new problem but has only served to cast
an ancient problem into bolder relief. Human charity under the sun
was as rare when Abraham tended his flocks as now, and rarer. Who
cannot testify to the shock of disillusionment when he discovered
the gray character of men to be so different from the generous
estimates of early enthusiasm? When the appearances of fraternity
were so much more favorable it was still true that deep weariness
and sated lust made human life something like a hell, and that men
were too much given to retaliation and distrust.

Has not this always been the problem of the lodge room? What the
war has brought us a white focus has always existed there, though
not always clamant. In that sacred rectangle with the light from
the East across it men have been subjected to influences constantly
appealing to the better angels of their nature. Ancient ritualisms
have played upon them with the soft insistence of a prayer and
appealed to them as only the truth can when throbbing with the
submerged rhythms of a divine poetry. The very atmosphere, as we
have all felt, has been drained of all save these fine appeals and
silence, which is finer than all; and a vigilant watchman has been
at the gate guarding us against the enemies of love.

But one thing has ever slipped past the tyler,-- our scarred and
twisted human nature. The heart of man is desperately wicked and
full of deceit, and never more unmasked in its wickedness than in
the circle of which the Great Light of Masonry is the center.
Slander, envy, pride, vanity, self ambition, cunning, gossip and
silent, vicious innuendos have crept in and always will creep in
while man is man. The lair of anti-brotherhood lies not in outward
things but in the heart; it is the shadow cast by our unredeemed
nature. Armaments do not create it, they merely give it vent. We
have learned war for so many ages, national war and personal war,
it has become a part of our very substance, so that our minds are
warped permanently into the ways of strife.

All this is but to say that brotherhood itself is a problem. If we
hold our hopes in check and do not let our wishes create illusions,
we shall all see that fraternity cannot come by any easy
incantation. We want that men shall deal with each other as if the
whole race were one family, as indeed it is, albeit so many of us
have not yet made the discovery. This is the temple we would build.
But what imperfect ashlars we men are! To use William Hawley
Smith's vivid phrase, each of us is in some vital direction "born
short." We are twisted and gnarled, selfish and vain, conceited and
stubborn, determined to have our own way and jealous of our
comfort, ready on slight provocation to say or do the thing that
will wound a brother's heart.

Is this an overstatement of the case? While this war thunders about
the world one could hardly exaggerate this matter. I have stated
the matter as vigorously as possible in order that we may all the
more be led to realize the divine potency of that power which, in
spite of wars and rumors and wars and the opposition of human
perversity, will yet prove itself able to send up the shining
spires of the temple not made with hands.

Whence can come an illumination able to dispel such darkness? I
believe it can come from no other place than from that Great Light
which lies unfolded on the altar at the center of the lodge. Two
brief sentences, like twin suns, lie close upon its pages. Let me
recall them and then let me endeavor to show how in them lies the
principle which alone is capable of coping with the enemies of
brotherhood.

"Return good for evil."
"Love your enemies."

Each of these utterances, on which hang all the law and the
prophets, is a wholesale condemnation of the method of retaliation.
The one great condemnation of retaliation is not that it violates
some abstract theory of morals, but that it will not work. And that
is what amazes me about so many hard headed men who pride
themselves on being "practical," and who have so much undoubted
vigor and good sense! In business these men have submitted every
detail to the acid test of workability, creating thereby the new
science of efficiency, yet in so obvious a transaction as returning
evil for evil their sense of the practical seems to forsake them.
They go on returning evil for evil all the days of their life, as
if in obedience to some hard and fast law of nature entirely
oblivious to the results; indeed seeming never to examine results
at all.

What these results are every child can discover if he will. When
one returns evil for evil, the world is so made that the only
result possible is the increase of evil. If I return a lie for a
lie, I add one more liar to the world. If I return slander for
slander, two serpent's tongues are hissing where only one hissed
before. If I cheat the man who cheated me, the world contains one
more thief. The spirit of evil is as much in the other man as
before; perhaps, as a result of my own opposition, resentment has
been aroused and he grows worse instead of better. The net result
of my retaliation is simply this, the amount of evil in the world
has been increased by it.

Is that success? Does that work? Is such a method, by any
conceivable jugglery of words, to be described as practicable? If
the object in our dealing with evil is to destroy evil, retaliation
manifestly is not practicable, because it defeats its own object.
If one cares to see this visually demonstrated, let him step into
one of the old-fashioned penitentiaries where the prisoner is
exposed to the vengeance of society. Society returns evil for evil,
with the result that the criminal is made more of a criminal than
before, so that retaliation transforms the very means of
reformation into a school of crime.

If the condemnation of the method of retaliation is that it does
not work, the glory of the method of returning good for evil is
that it does work. If a man supposes it a piece of moral moonshine
fit only for an impossible utopia, he simply confesses that he has
not tried it, or at least has not tried it observingly and
thoroughly. Even if it does not wholly succeed, it has as an
advantage over retaliation the fact that evil is not increased, and
that is more than can be said for the opposite method.

But, returning good for evil most certainly does more than merely
refuse to increase the amount of evil; it has a positive and
constructive result, which springs from the fact that usually evil
will wither up in the presence of love. For love is not a mere
matter of reciprocity; it is a constructive force, creating its own
ends and conditions, as Henry Demarest Lloyd taught us in a
glorious book, making something exist where before nothing existed.
Love is like the sunlight which not only chases away the dark, but
brings in the light.

This is the idea, as I can understand it, in the Book. By "love" it
does not mean admiration, affection, or fondness. These things are
instinctive and cannot be commanded. Any teaching which demanded
that we feel fondness for a brute cannot possibly be binding upon
us, because it flys in the face of the very constitution of our
souls. This, however, is not anywhere demanded by the Bible, a fact
that is overlooked by George Bernard Shaw and those others who
condemn the teachings of non-resistance and love, and who
understand "love" in the divine pages as if it were the equivalent
of "admiration." Love is not a matter of the mere sentiments; it
springs from the will and may be described as the habitual
willingness that the object of love shall be permitted and assisted
to live the completest possible life.

This heavenly wisdom of love, this spiritual greatness which is the
ultimate cleverness, was exhibited by Warden Allen of Joliet who,
if ever a man was, was justified in seeking retaliation on the men
who had so fiendishly violated his confidence and betrayed his
confidence. But that great heart did not go back like a fire brand
to wreak vengeance; he went back with redoubled determination to
love his "boys" the more. That is not to say that he can feel
affection for the men who murdered his wife; it is simply to say
that he willed that these men should be encouraged to live a
completer and more human life.

Love as thus defined is a creative, a generative power and
justifies itself by creating its own objects. If a man is too
twisted and bent to fit into the machinery of brotherhood, treating
him in an unbrotherly fashion won't better him any, but treating
him in a brotherly fashion will. By loving him, he will be made
more lovable. Men may be brothered into brotherliness.

Brotherhood is most certainly nowhere an established fact. We must
all agree with the cynic on this charge, but that is not to
surrender the case for it, because the very principle in the Book
on which our lodge is erected is that brotherhood is a task. And it
is the first great task of the Fraternity to organize all men of
good will, "mobilize" them, if you prefer, for the purpose of
making brotherhood prevail. We enter the Craft as rough-hewn stones
drawn from the crude quarries of human nature; in our hands is
placed the sacred trowel; from ritualism, teaching and example is
supplied the mystic cement; by forbearance, tolerance, faith, and
prayer, we are called to engage in that heavenly task of raising
the house not made with hands.


What man soe'er I chance to see--
Amazing thought--is kin to me;
And if a man, my brother. 
What though his hand be hard with toil 
And labor his worn garments soil;
He is a man, my brother. 
What though ashamed, with drooping head 
He beg a morsel of my bread;
He is a man, my brother. 
What though he grovel at my feet, 
Spurned by the rabble of the street;
He is a man, my brother. 
What though his hand with crime be red, 
His heart a stone, his conscience dead;
He is a man, my brother; 
The soul which this frail clay enfolds 
The image of its Maker holds;
That makes this man my brother.

