yalty to the highest, and 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 our divinity and immortality--the sublime,
death-defying moral heroism of the human soul! Surely the eternal
paradox holds true at the gates of the grave: he who loses his life
for the sake of truth, shall find it anew! And here Masonry rests the
matter, assured that since there is that in man which makes him hold
to the moral ideal, and the integrity of his own soul, against all
the brute forces of the world, the God who made man in His own image
will not let him die 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.

Working with hands soon to be folded, we build up the structure of our
lives from what our fingers can feel, our eyes can see, and our ears
can hear. Till, in a moment--marvelous whether it come in storm and
tears, or softly as twilight breath beneath unshadowed skies--we are
called upon to yield our grasp of these solid things, and trust
ourselves to the invisible Soul within us, which betakes itself along
an invisible path into the Unknown. It is strange: a door opens into a
new world; and man, child of the dust that he is, follows his
adventurous Soul, as the Soul follows an inscrutable Power which is
more elusive than the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Suddenly,
with fixed eyes and blanched lips, we lie down and wait; and life,
well-fought or wasted, bright or somber, lies behind us--a dream that
is dreamt, a thing that is no more. O Death,

/P
Thou hast destroyed it,
The beautiful world,
With powerful fist:
In ruin 'tis hurled,
By the blow of a demigod shattered!
The scattered
Fragments into the void we carry,
Deploring
The beauty perished beyond restoring.
Mightier
For the children of men,
Brightlier
Build it again,
In thine own bosom build it anew!
P/

O Youth, for whom these lines are written, fear not; fear not to
believe that the soul is as eternal as the moral order that obtains in
it, wherefore you shall forever pursue that divine beauty which has
here so touched and transfigured you; for that is the faith of
humanity, your race, and those who are fairest in its records. Let us
lay it to heart, love it, and act upon it, that we may learn its deep
meaning as regards others--our dear de