The Principles of Freemasonry

ITS PRINCIPLES ARE ETERNAL

Masonry is a great civilizing agency. Its influence reaches beyond the instructions of the ritual: it builds conspicuous moral landmarks as our guide through life: it elevates and ennobles our aspirations, and in the larger sense, it is a progressive Institution; in another it is not: it lives in perpetual youth and yet it is founded on principles as old as human history, and as wise and beneficent as human wisdom can invent: in all the years of its existence nothing new has been added to it: nothing old has been taken from it.

Its principles are eternal, because they are just. Neither the mutations of time, the progress of civilization, the change of march of empire has dimmed the luster or cast a shadow over the light of Masonic truth. It has stood the test of time, the criticism of unthinking men, social upheavals, the shocks of war, and the allurement which wealth and station have cast about it. And under the influence of a wisdom coming from an ever living God, Masonry has lived on, the single and solitary example of a society organized by man for man, that did not die.