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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.
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