THE BUILDER MAY 1917

TOWARDS BROTHERHOOD
BY BRO. L. A. POOLER, ENGLAND

I SHALL commence my address by endeavouring to paint for you in
words two oldworld pictures. I want you to visualise them for
yourselves.

The first is so old a picture that no man can put a date to it. If
a man attempted to do it, he would find himself dealing with
hundreds of thousands of years. Yet the day of the picture was the
most wonderful since the earth began to be created and star-mist
began to shape itself into a star. For millions of years the earth
had been cooling and preparing itself for that day. All the great
ages were only leading up to it--Pleiocene, Eocene, Devonian, and
all the rest. It was the day when the first man and the first woman
stood upon the earth. Some think there were more than two ! There
may have been, but at any rate there were two--a man and a woman !

It is bewildering to think of it. The whole future of the race
depends on them, but they do not know what that means. Surrounded
by savage animals--many of which have long ceased to exist, such as
the sabre toothed tiger and the mammoth--they seem among the
weakest of created things. But, on the other hand, they are
destined to gain the mastery, because they are endowed with a
superior brain. In the struggles of man against man, physical
strength has sometimes made good. But in man's struggles with the
animal world, and, in later centuries, with the powers of Nature,
it has always been brain that has told. Morally, these first two
are children. They are innocent as the wild animals are innocent.
They do not yet know that there is a difference between right and
wrong.

That is the first picture. It might be entitled "The Dawn of Human
Life." It is astounding, bewildering to try to realize that
beginning, and then to take a survey of the organized political,
social, intellectual, and religious life of today.

I come now to my second picture. Thousands of years have passed.
The Ice Age, which for 200,000 years had been holding Northern
Europe and Asia in its grip, was beginning to pass away. Man was
pushing northward after the retreating ice. This second picture is
a cave picture of perhaps 100,000 years ago. Again there is a man
and a woman; but there are also young men and girls and children.
They wear skins. They have learned the mystery of fire. They cook
their food. Fierce and wild, there are yet the beginnings of art.
Rough tools, made of stone, lie on the floor of the cave. With a
small flint tool a young man is doing something to a white
shoulder-bone. Let us go forward and look. He is tracing the
outline of a reindeer. There are other pictures on bones or mammoth
ivory--the outlines of an auroch or bison, of a mammoth, of deer
and goats. They are like the pictures which children draw. It is a
far cry to Raphael. But the possibility of Raphael is there.

I have tried to give you a picture of the cave life of what are
known as "Drift Men." Finally, the old people died, and the younger
people moved away. Then an earthquake or some other cause closed
the entrance to the cave, and for 70,000 years or more the place
was sealed. In our own day it was opened. The bones of a man and a
woman were found. The picture of the reindeer was found, and all
the other pictures; and they were placed in a museum. And you can
see them, for it is a true story that I have been telling you--the
story of a cave in France.

THE FAMILY LIFE

These, then, are the two pictures. Wherein lies the great contrast?
It is in the development of family life. There is no family life on
earth except the human. With mankind everything starts from the
family. It is the original unit of value--the father, the mother,
the children. Sometimes--for purposes of protection--the family
kept together in the second generation. Thus began the clan or
tribe. Then the time came when the tribe ceased to live a wandering
life. They settled in a district and took possession of it. The old
nomad life ceased. Agriculture took its place. Other clans did the
same thing. The quarrels between them were unceasing, but they led
to alliances, and finally to the union of certain clans under a
headman, or chief, or king. So, slowly and laboriously were little
kingdoms built up, which in time were absorbed in greater.

There is but one tale through all the centuries-- constant and
deliberate war--family wars, tribal wars, national wars. Bonds of
brotherhood were sometimes formed, but such unions were for
purposes of war or defense. We speak easily of the Brotherhood of
Man. We do not realize how modern it is, or how impossible it
seemed. In later days Hebrew prophet, and Greek philosopher, and
Roman satirist alike derided its absurdity.

Yet it came ! All the while God was leading up to it. The rest of
the animal world was stationary, but man was progressive. Bees,
wasps, birds, insects were doing wonderful things when man was
created. They are doing the same things still. They are not a bit
further on. The achievements of one age are not the starting-point
for the next. At the start man could not have made a honey-comb;
but today he has invented the airship and controls wireless
telegraphy.

So in the moral world, all through the savagery and brutalities of
human history we get glimpses of the growth of better things--the
virtue of self-sacrifice, and the plant of peace. At length came
the great revelation. All the greatest truths come by Divine
revelation. It was born into the world with Jesus of Nazareth. It
was revealed in the Life of the Incarnate Christ. Thirty years
after Christ, St. Paul could write: "There cannot be Greek and Jew,
circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman,
freeman-- but Christ is all, and in all."

Granted the Incarnation, Paul's conclusion is irresistible. But it
is hard for us to realize how long it takes a new idea to germinate
and grow, and fulfill itself. You plant an acorn today, but you
will not have an oak tree tomorrow.

Even in the Christian Church the idea of the Brotherhood of Man had
little influence until the Reformation. In the first ages the
clergy did endeavour to induce men to free their slaves. If
Onesimus is "a brother beloved," he cannot be the slave of
Philemon. But the Church itself became monarchical. Its bishops
ranked as princes, and emphasized class distinctions more than the
Brotherhood of Man. But since the Reformation men have dreamed
unceasingly of human brotherhood--of human life lived under happier
conditions, of the filling in of the gulf that still exists between
the rich and poor, and also of the realization by humanity that "a
man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he
possesses."

DREAMS OF BROTHERHOOD

About 400 years ago no little stir was caused in England by a
little book--a published dream of the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas
More. It contains two pictures--England as she was, and England as
he dreamed she might be ! England, where 1,500 years of so-called
Christian teaching had produced social injustice, religious
intolerance, and political tyranny ! And, on the other hand, the
England of his dream, where men lived as brothers in a Christian
commonwealth ! But More was a student of human nature, and so he
dreamed of no sudden revolution in men's thoughts. Permanent things
are always of slow growth. So he writes: "It is not possible for
all things to be well, unless all men were good--which I think will
not be yet for these many years !"

But the idea bore fruit. A hundred years later Lord Bacon in
England, and Campanella in Italy, dreamed fuller dreams of human
brotherhood. Then in Paris the courtly nobleman St. Simon, and
Fourier, son of a woollen-draper at Bessancon, kept the idea before
men's minds. In England, during the first half of the last century,
Robert Owen taught men the value of co-operation and the necessity
for universal education. When he was more than eighty years of age
he expressed his conviction that "the time will surely come when
the population of the world will be governed solely under the
influence of love and charity, and that, Divine as these principles
are, they are yet principles of common-sense for governing mankind,
and forming the character from birth to death."

But, you may ask: What of the present war? What of this
unparalleled outburst of human hate and of insatiable ambition?
What of the present war and our dreams of the Brotherhood of Man ?
Ah, brethren ! Democracies do not want war, but war is less
intolerable than slavery. Wars are caused mainly by the mad pride
of kings and the arrogance of a governing class. In all that
relates to human liberty, human brotherhood, and human culture, we
are two hundred years ahead of Germany. So the Empire had to choose
between war or submission to the pagan rule of a military
despotism. Our victory will be the victory of the principles that
underlie the true progress of humanity and the safety of all free
peoples.

And now, what shall I say of our own society--our Masonic
Brotherhood ? So far back as the time of the Roman Empire there
were unions of craftsmen for the protection of their trade against
interlopers. Later on medieval building associations were widely
spread throughout Europe. In the tenth century Masonic Lodges
existed in England. All the great cathedrals were built by these
men. The last Grand Master of the Operative Masons of England was
Sir Christopher Wren. The last great work of the Order was the
building of St. Paul's Cathedral. In 1723 Wren was buried in his
great church, and on his tomb we read:--

"Si monumentum quceris, circumspice."

But Masonry had done its work. The Creative Age of Gothic
architecture was over. With the Renaissance classical styles had
been introduced. St. Paul's Cathedral itself marks the change. But
Masonry did not die. Transformed, it started on a new career of
world-wide brotherhood. In 1703 the privileges of Masonry had been
extended to men of various professions, provided they had been
regularly approved and initiated into the Order. Twelve years later
the final change came. Operative Freemasonry ceased as an Order,
but it was re-born into speculative Freemasonry, and new rituals
were drawn up by Dr. Anderson, a Presbyterian minister, and Dr.
Desaguliers, a well known man of science.

What, then, does it all mean?

It means, firstly, the recognition of the Brotherhood of Man. There
is no doubt about that. The objection is sometimes made: "The
Christian religion teaches the Brotherhood of Man, but you Masons
limit it to a Society." No, assuredly ! But the Brotherhood of Man
is a big thing. You may theorize about it all your life, and never
do a brotherly deed. So Masons say: "The world is large. There are
millions of people on it. Practically, we cannot be brothers to
them all. So we take a certain number, and try to act a brother's
part to them. By doing so we are helped to understand the meaning
of the Brotherhood of Man. We are better fitted to act a brother's
part to those outside the Order." As a matter of fact, Masons not
only support their own institutions, but they are in the front rank
in all questions of general philanthropy.

BUILDERS OF CHARACTER

Secondly, it means the recognition that all men are builders. At
any rate, we build our own character. This is each man's
contribution to the unseen, the spiritual temple, which God and
humanity have been building throughout the ages--a temple founded
on wisdom, supported by strength, and adorned with beauty ! And
some men build in marble, and some in brick, and some in "wood,
hay, stubble." Hereafter each man's work shall be made manifest,
for "the day shall declare it." But these will abide always:
brotherly love, and charity, and truth.

Yes, we are all builders! We build as best we may. Do not be
disappointed, if you seem to fail. It is greater to fall short of
a high ideal than to realize a lower. "High failure overleaps the
bounds of low success." God says to you as He said to David: "It
was well that it was in thine heart to do great things, to build a
house unto the name of the Lord." But here no man finishes his
work, yet the building goes on eternally. That is the meaning of
Kipling's splendid parable:

When I was a King and a Mason--a Master proved and skilled-- 
I cleared me ground for a palace such as a King should build, 
I decreed and dug down to my levels. Presently, under the silt, 
I came on the wreck of a palace such as a King had built.

It was all in ruin-- 

Masonry, brute, mishandled, but carven on every stone: 
After me cometh a Builder. Tell Him I too have known.

Then gradually he learned the meaning of the older Builder's work--
"the form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he
had planned." Finally his own summons came. His building too must
be left. There is only time to do one thing, for a word has come
from the darkness:

Only I cut on the timber, only I carved on the stone:
After me cometh a Builder. Tell Him, I too have known. 
No man need ask a grander epitaph than that!
After me cometh a Builder. Tell Him, I too have known.

