textfiles/magazines/STB/stb-1927-03.txt

SHORT TALK BULLETIN - Vol.V   March, 1927   No.3

THE THINGS I KNOW

by: Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D.

Synopsis of an address delivered before the Masonic Service 
Association Annual Meeting, assembled in Chicago, Il, November 17, 
1926.

Three times in my life I have had a very wonderful dream; each time 
it has come back with an amazing vividness, born, on each occasion, 
of an hour of inner struggle and crisis.  Always it is a vision of a 
great cathedral, built in the ancient form of a cross, stately, 
imposing, piteous; an old great home of the human soul, the shrine of 
faith, fellowship and hope.  It is Gothic in its architecture, that 
form of architecture created and glorified by the genius and history 
of Freemasonry, its achievement and its monument; the most eloquent 
of all forms as embodying our own spirit and attempting to make God 
eloquent among men.  I can see in my dream, or my vision, the lift of 
its pillars, and the leap of its arches, and its great, glorious 
dome, and in that framework always this vision has come.  I have 
never been able to see the Altar or the Chancel distinctly, because 
of a very blinding light.  No face, but only the sweep of a garment, 
vast, white, but I know who is there at the Altar, and the Chancel.  
I do not hear a voice, but somehow know what is being said.  Once 
again, in that framework of Gothic glory, He is speaking the words 
that He spoke of old, on the mountain and by the sea.  Somehow, I 
don't know how, I know who it is and what he is saying.

Next to the Temple and the speaker is the audience gathered there, 
the most extraordinary of which any man ever dreamed.  All the great 
minds and prophets of the older world are there.  Moses, the mighty 
law giver, the great legislator of the human race is there.  

Confucius, with his slant eyes and his queue, who dreamed of the 
superior man, the ideal, to which all good men labor!  Buddha, all 
pitiful, whose religion is the most majestic symphony of melancholy 
in the whole compass of human history!  They are there.  Plato, a man 
of angel mind, idealist, father of philosophy and of the theology, 
with the greatest, sweetest and most luminous spirit that have ever 
crossed our human pathway; by his side Aristotle, father if science, 
patient, exact investigator, who anticipated, in flashes of insight, 
so many things that have been verified both in science and 
philosophy.  The company of prophets, from the days of Isaiah, with 
his golden voice, on down; they are all there; 

I know them and see them, on into our own time, and they are very 
vivid to me.  Very distinct is the face of Emerson.  I see it only in 
profile, a finely chiseled face, in which the genius of New England 
took form.  What a company it is!  I could not name all of them, but 
Voltaire, who built a little Temple over which he inscribes, "To the 
Glory of God," is there.  And while the speaker utters once more, 
with that voiceless voice, the truths which are the Magna Carta of 
the spiritual life of mankind, I see all those in that Temple nodding 
assent and saying, each in his own heart, Amen, Amen, Amen.

Such is my dream, my brethren.  It came, by the mercy of God, when I 
was only a lad in Texas, and again, in an hour of crisis in Iowa, 
blessed to me and never-to-be-forgotten, for the friendships of a 
lifetime formed there, and for the confidence of the Grand Lodge of 
Iowa; and once in London, in the wild, dark, confused and terrifying 
days of World War.  Always with increasing vividness that dream has 
blessed my life.  It is a vision of unity, as you will discover.  It 
leads to the ends of the earth and the limits of human history.  It 
includes all religions and all races in its embrace.  Out of that 
vision have grown certain  great convictions which, like the rock 
ribs that hold the earth together, hold my life.  

First, that all just men, all devout men, all spiritually minded men, 
are everywhere of one religion.  They are trying to say the same 
thing, each in his own tongue, with his own accent and emphasis, 
speech that each has colored by his own environment, the degree of 
his own spiritual development.  All are fundamental participators in 
one common spiritual life, which they seek to interpret.

That conviction is so fundamental in my life that it makes me utterly 
indifferent to small things that seem to divide men into different 
religions of different sects.  Some of my brethren in the lodge and 
in the church, not knowing what I am telling you, misunderstand many 
things.  They call me an "Ecclesiastical polygamist," for example, 
meaning one who belongs to many churches.  Yes, exactly; because, in 
the light of this vision, to me there is only one church, universal 
and eternal.  All good men belong to it.  The different religious 
communions to me are like the different rooms in one house, and the 
doors are all open.  I walk from room to room in my Father's House.  
I hold fellowship with all alike.  Perhaps I may live long enough to 
belong officially to every church, on principle, even long enough to 
have my vision understood.

My second great conviction is that all just men, all devout men, are 
not only trying to say the same thing, but they are trying to do the 
same things, to define faith, to refine and purify the mind of 
humanity and build it up into righteousness and moral intelligence, 
and honest good will.  They have the same ideals.  If Confucius 
speaks of the Superior man, he means what we mean by the Christian 
man, Christ.  It is the one ideal that God has planted in the dream 
and hope of mankind; the one great moral and spiritual enterprise 
going in the world.  It is a great consolation, it is a great 
reinforcement, to realize that fact.  It falls over one like a 
consecration, and gives strength.

The third conviction is, since men are trying to say the same thing, 
and trying to do the same thing, the greatest things they must 
finally learn to do together.  You can see, then, the philosophy of 
my interest in The Masonic Service association and the Federal 
Council of Churches.  I have the honor to be a member of the 
committee on direction of the Federal Council on Churches of America, 
and also to be Educational Director of The Masonic Service 
association.  It is extremely interesting to see the same thing going 
on among the religious communions and the Grand Lodges.  They are 
trying to learn how to do the same things together., things which can 
only be done together.  The same objection, the same criticism, the 
same fears and misgivings are expressed in the Federal Council as in 
this Association.  Some of the great religious communions will not 
belong at all to the Federal Council of Churches. A Distinguished, 
brilliant member of a great church said in an address a few weeks 
ago; "The Federal Council will either collapse or become a Super 
Church."  It sounded very familiar to me!  Somewhere I have heard a 
rumor of that kind said about this Association - that it would either 
collapse or become a Super Grand Lodge!  Well, there is no more idea 
of a Super Grand Lodge in our minds than there is in the Federal 
Council of Churches to make a Super-Church.  One is as undesirable as 
the other.

It is interesting that some of our churches are in it with one foot.  
My Church, for example, with one foot, tentatively, experimentally.  
The Episcopal Communion will cooperate on International Affairs and 
with the Committee of International Good Will, but no further than 
that.  So there are some lodges in America who will cooperate with 
us, and use all out literature, and all our material and all our 
machinery, but they won't use them in a common undertaking.  It is 
amusing.  To watch this practice and procedure going on adds to the 
joy of life.  "But it is going on!"  It is just as inevitable as 
anything can be.  The very necessities of the situation demand a 
united religious communion, in fellowship, at least, and in work, for 
the things that need to be done can be done in no other way. War 
cannot be abolished by stupid sectarianism.

Pestilence, famine, war!  These three are the greatest evils, and the 
worst of these is war.  Science has killed one pestilence after 
another.  They lie like dead snakes by the side of the road.  

Commerce and intercommunication make it possible to send relief from 
one part of the world to the other very quickly.  Only a renewed 
spiritual life can kill the spirit of strife in the hearts of men and 
so purify them as to make war impossible.  It will take the whole 
religion, united, purified and renewed to do that.

But, this afternoon I am thinking of that Gothic Cathedral which 
Freemasonry built, as the framework, the shrine, the home of the 
religious life.  For we are builders.  This is what we are here to 
build, a Temple, a House not made with human hands.  It will tower 
into the heavens, but it is a Temple.  It is the great landmark of 
Freemasonry, that Temple.  What are the foundations of it?
There are three things that I know about Freemasonry, not much else.  
I studied upon it many years, starting my study in the great library 
of the Grand Lodge of Iowa.  But there are three fundamental things 
that I do positively know.

The first is that man was made for righteousness.  He can never be a 
man, he can never be happy until he is a righteous man.  The mystery 
of moral life comes back again and again as the profoundest mystery 
of al life.  I find it here written in my own heart; what the dear 
Quakers call "A Stop In The Mind," something that arrests men and 
compels them to pass a moral judgment upon my acts and my thoughts.  
Where it came from I do not know.

I have my beliefs.  It is upon what I know that I build my beliefs.  
But I do know I have this mystery of the moral sense in my own being.  
It is here.  I did not create it.  I commands me.  The profoundest 
mystery to me is not that I do wrong, as all of us do wrong, but that 
there is something that brings me to judgment for doing wrong, 
something within myself, that awful whisper of moral law.  I 
understand what the Great thinker meant when he said that there were 
two things that overwhelmed him, the still depth of a starlit night, 
and the awful moral law within.

When I try to think, when I try to interpret the meaning of that 
great fact in the life of my fellow man, then I have the cornerstone 
of all theology, of all understanding of life.  You can push it back 
just as far as you please.  You can say, as some will want to say, 
that this whisper within me is the echo of an old racial memory and 
experience.  No doubt!.  But whence came the first bias of man 
towards righteousness, the first sense and command within himself 
that he must be a righteous man?  Whence did the voice of that 
command come?

What is true of humanity is true of myself.  It can never be happy 
until it attains righteousness.  He has a choice and an ability to 
choose the right and refuse the wrong; or to choose the wrong and 
refuse the right.  One involves the other.

I am aware that there prevails in our time the fatalistic philosophy 
which tells us that we are no more responsible for our thoughts and 
acts than we are for the shape of our heads and the color of our 
eyes.  That philosophy is plausible, but in my heart I know it to be 
false.  I am not a machine.  I am no organism.

That is the first fundamental thing that I know about Freemasonry.  
And the second thing, that not only is man made for righteousness, 
but man is made for man.  He cannot attain the richest character, the 
moral personality apart from his fellow man.  Talent may develop in 
solitude.  Character is the creation of fellowship and of fraternity.  
This ancient and honorable fraternity is built upon this fact, that 
we are made one for the other; that our lives fit one into another 
and are woven together to make a Divine fabric, a cloth of gold.
  
This fact unites us in a temple of vision.  We are made one for 
another.  Muhammad was right when he said if man would not help man 
the end of the world had come.  The end of the human world has 
certainly arrived when man refuses to aid and assist his fellow man.  
Here is the basis of our beautiful doctrine of brotherly love, relief 
and truth because we can never know the truth until we know it 
together.  There are some things we may know in isolation, but we 
cannot know the highest truth alone.  We can only learn it together.  
It is by practicing brotherhood that we learn to know God.

Finally, the third thing.  Not only is man made for righteousness and 
man made for man, but man is made for God.  His spirit is formless 
and alone, even in the warmest fellowship, until at last together we 
find the source from whence we come, the light from whence flashes 
that spark of moral law and spiritual vision within us, the veiled 
kindness of the Father of all men.  One of the greatest minds of any 
time put it in an unforgettable way when he said; "Lord, Thou Hast 
Made Us For Thyself, And Our Hearts Are Restless Until They Rest In 
Thee."  I am speaking about God, in a Fraternity, the first great 
universal landmark of which is God!

Three things which appeal to me in Masonry are, first, its 
simplicity.  All supremely great things, like all supremely great 
men, are simple.  Turn the pages of history and call the names of 
Martin Van Buren, of Benjamin Disraeli, of Talleyrand!  You feel that 
you are in the presence of great men, but something arrests you and 
prevents you from believing those men are supremely great.  They had 
great characteristics.  They were past masters of the art and wise in 
the manipulations of diplomacy.  But turn another page and read the 
names of Washington and Lincoln, and instantly you feel that those 
two belonged to a different order of men.  They are supremely great, 
in the open and in the sunlight; and sublimely simple.  So it is with 
Masonry.  There are many fraternities in the world.  They have great 
characteristics. But to me the outstanding glory of Masonry is the 
simplicity of its symbolism, of its faith and of its philosophy.  As 
I have tried to state it, man is made for righteousness, man is made 
for man, and man is made for God.  You cannot go beyond that, or 
above it.  It is something to think about through a whole lifetime, 
as a scheme of philosophy and of faith.

Second, in all my Masonic life, as a student or a teacher of Masonry, 
and a worker in its behalf; it has been always in my heart to use 
Masonry as a wand of blessing and never as a weapon of battle.  It is 
intended to make men friends, to bring men of all types of 
temperament, antecedents and training together; to discover their 
brotherhood and make them builders of a purer world.  The temptation 
is very great sometimes, for good men and true, to use Masonry as a 
weapon of battle.  But we must never do it.  I refuse to do it.  It 
is too great.  It is too beautiful.  It is too Holy!

Third, to me Masonry is one of the forms of the Divine life among 
men.  It has come to us from a long, long past; bringing symbolisms 
to understand which is to understand the meaning of life; what it is 
to be a man and how to be a righteous man; how best to serve our 
fellow-man and, therefore, best serve God.  It is not a religion, but 
it is religion in its very essence, genius and spirit.

Its simplicity then, its dignity, and its spirituality; these things, 
with the vision I have told you, sustain me in all that try to do, 
and permit me to forget the incredible pettiness of mind that we 
sometimes encounter, enabling me to join hands with my brethren 
everywhere to do something, if it be only a little, before the end of 
the day, to make a gentler, kinder and wiser world in which to live!