The Operative Mason

“The true Mason labours for the benefit of those who come after him, and for the advancement and improvement of his race. That is a poor ambition that contents itself within the limits of a single life. All men, who deserve to live, desire to survive their funerals, and live afterward in the good that they have done mankind, rather than in the fading characters written in men’s memories. Most men desire to leave some work behind them that may outlast their own day and brief generation. That is the instinctive impulse, given by God, and often found in the rudest human heart; the surest proof of the souls immortality, and of the fundamental difference between man and the wisest brutes. To plant the trees that, after we are dead, shall shelter our children, is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers planted. The rudest unlettered husbandman, painfully conscious of his own inferiority, the poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to those who pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint themselves to educate their child, that he may take a higher station on the world than they, -- and of such are the world’s greatest benefactors.”

These words were written by Albert Pike nearly a century ago. They are applicable today as they have been through the years. We of the twentieth century have the plans set out on the trestle-board of our Lodge and it behooves us to study them in detail so that we may indeed raise a superstructure that is worthy of the best that is in us. Let us put a little more of ourselves into the Freemasonry and really belong to the operatives of the Craft.