Masonic Light

WHY AM I A CO-MASON?

By Ills.^..^.. Bro.^.. Nathan Hyde 3^o

Greatness clothes itself in simplicity and for this reason the unthinking pass it by for a gilded manner and pretentious environment or, if it be some organized Movement, for a heralding blare of trumpets. The great intellect which was Victor Hugo once said: “The counterfeit of merit deceives man. Prosperity presupposes capacity. Gilt is gold.”

What has this to do with reasons for being a Co-Mason?

It has this to do: The reasons for being a Co-Mason are great with the greatness of antiquity and the mightiness of the human soul, yet like the morning sky revealing their depth in crystalline clearness.

Hence it has not reached wide-flung popularity since a popular move­ment presupposes loud and large display or to be “deep” and mysterious with many words and tangled phrases. But it is only the falling house which needs many props.

The Co-Masonic Movement, on the contrary, is like a giant Sequoia which by every knowledge of tree science was old when Christ was born; whose roots reach down to the far deep strata of the earth; whose branches are themselves giant trees.

Preeminently, then, three clear-cut reasons stand —  a Masonic Triangle of Strength. Thus:

 1. I am a Co-Mason because of the tremendous link with secrets of the Universe and of Life, with great minds and great souls that brought their antiquity to the youth of the Sphinx and the Pyramids. The knowledge of this which comes at Initiation brings a thrill of wonder that few other things in life can give — a thrill like the foliage of the giant tree stirred with a strange trembling, not from cause without but from joy within, but coming from the first, primal root reason of Masonic antiquity deep-rooted in all the power of the Past.

2. I am a Co-Mason — Co-Masonically with man — because it is the inherent right of both — co-equally. The air given us by the good God — Force, Law, Nature — whichever pet name one has for God — is given for both, man and woman, without it either would die. Water from its mountain spring or subterranean depth is given for both, man and woman, without it either would die. Two human beings, man and woman, adrift in a boat on the open sea with a few drops of fresh water between them and death, take share and share alike in the race for life, but the courtesy of the man yields to the woman.

3. Masonically, up to the near present, man has taken all the drink. Food, all the essentials of life, are co-equally divisible. But above and beyond the material essentials, woman is more than a co-equal in the nurturing of the human race. Through pain and travail unspeakable she bears the race; through patience and self-sacrifice she nurtures it to growth. More than half, then, is her divine right to privileges.

 Still more, the feminine supplies in mental power what man lacks. Man brings reason; woman brings higher spiritual quality of intuition. Maurice Maeterlinck says:

With reverence, must we draw near to them. For they know the things we do not know, and have a lamp that we have lost. Their abiding place is at the foot itself of the Inevitable whose well-worn paths are visible to them more clearly than to us. For women are evidently the veiled sisters of all the great things we do not see. They are indeed nearest of kin to the Infinite that is about us. Great is the distance that separates the best of men from the treasures of the second boundary.

Therefore, man alone has no divine usurpation of the secrets of life. In the past few decades, he has given woman a corner in the outer court — the Eastern Star — but now the doors of the Temple have swung wide open and WOMAN may enter.

I am a Co-Mason because in no other department of religious, philosophical, or ethical life can the human character attain such great and speedy growth. Religion, necessary to the soul’s growth, is a slow process, sometimes only a panacea; philosophy soothes and entertains.

But, in Masonry, the soul attains because it needs must. It is under military discipline, and what it shrinks from as hurtful to the personal feelings it is bound by oath to carry through and in the necessity of doing has its girders of steel well riveted. Nowhere is one bound to maintain the rights or Brotherhood as in Masonry philosophized, preached, struggled for as it is outside, a seemingly unattainable goal. One must not, and cannot meet upon the level, act upon the perpendicular, and part on the square, with all this magnificently means without having, stone by stone, built the self - plumb and true to the line.

Therefore, am I a Co-Mason. And tell me now, I pray, why any thoughtful person need to choose some other way.