Men are great or small in stature as it pleases God. But their nature is great or small as it pleases themselves.

Pleasing God

This will be the final lesson from Chapter 29; the end of Morals and Dogma is coming closer and closer. In this Pike lesson he confirms that “Men are great or small in stature as it pleases God. But their nature is great or small as it pleases themselves.” Enjoy this short lesson from our Master sage:

Men are great or small in stature as it pleases God. But their nature is great or small as it pleases themselves. Men are not born, some with great souls and some with little souls. One by taking thought cannot add to his stature, but he can enlarge his soul. By an act of the will he can make himself a moral giant, or dwarf himself to a pigmy.

There are two natures in man, the higher and the lower, the great and the mean, the noble and the ignoble; and he can and must, by his own voluntary act, identify himself with the one or with the other. Freemasonry is continual effort to exalt the nobler nature over the ignoble, the spiritual over the material, the divine in man over the human. In this great effort and purpose the chivalric Degrees concur and co-operate with those that teach the magnificent lessons of morality and philosophy. Magnanimity, mercy, clemency, a forgiving temper, are virtues indispensable to the character of a perfect Knight. When the low and evil principle in our nature says, “Do not give; reserve your beneficence for impoverished friends, or at least unobjectionable strangers, Do not bestow it on successful enemies,–friends only in virtue, of our misfortunes,” the diviner principle whose voice spake by the despised Galilean says, “Do good to them that hate you, for if ye love them (only) who love you, what reward have you? Do not publicans and sinners the same“–that is, the tax-gathers and wicked oppressors, armed Romans and renegade Jews, whom ye count your enemies (Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 1871, p. 813)?