Page 19 - WM Manual Guide and Monitor 2024 - 2025

eyes and is then able to cause us to see. He does not create; he confers the power of
vision.
IV
It is in the sense thus explained that we may describe Freemasonry as standing
among men to reveal to them the real brotherhood lived in the bonds of eternal life.
It has created neither brotherhood nor eternal life, for these have always been facts;
it reveals them to its adepts and thus enables them to avail themselves of the
powers and privileges thereof. Brotherhood is a reality; it is a law of the race; but
there are many, alas too many, who have not discovered that fact. They are like

those who lived in the days before Watt learned to harness steam; steam was about
them but they made no use of it. So with the uninitiated (using that word in a very
deep sense); brotherhood is at their side but they do not see it and therefore can
make no use of it. When Masonry comes into them, it is not that brotherhood has
for the first time been created, but that for the first time the man is made to see it
and to avail himself of it.

The kingdom of heaven may be defined as, "Mankind living happily together." The
one way in which mankind can live happily together is through the use of
brotherhood. This was true when the first savages ran naked about the forest, some
of them, perhaps, eating each other. It was true then, but the primitive folk could
not discover or see it, just as electricity was about them without their knowing of it.
But know it or not, brotherhood was the fixed law of human association, and they
progressed toward harmony with each other only in so far as they learned to
discover and to practice brotherhood. And so is it to-day. It is not brotherhood that
is in question, but ourselves; brotherhood is a law, a reality, like gravitation; it is in
proportion as we recognize and make use of it that we progress. Until we learn and
practice it we shall be unhappy in our living one with another, for happiness is
impossible where brotherhood is not.

Freemasonry does not exist in a world where brotherhood is a mere dream flying
along the sky; it exists in a world of which brotherhood is the law of human life. Its
function is not to bring brotherhood into existence just as a hot-house gardener
may at last coax into bloom a frail flower, though the climate is most unfriendly,
but to lead men to understand that brotherhood is already a reality, a law, and that
it is not until we come to know it as such, and practice it, that we can ever find
happiness, together. Freemasonry does not create something too fine and good for
this rough world; it "reveals" something that is as much a part of the world as
roughness itself. In other words, it removes the hoodwink of jealousy, hatred,
unkindness, and all the other myriad forms of unbrotherliness in order that a man
may see and thus come to know how good and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to
dwell together in unity. The hoodwink of cloth or leather that is bound over a
man's eyes is not the real hoodwink at all, but only the symbol thereof; the real
hoodwink, and it is that which Freemasonry undertakes to remove from a man's