And men, seeing the uselessness of these ascetic lives, shrink now from their example, and fall back upon that wiser teaching, that he best does God’s will who best does God’s work.  The world now knows that heaven is not served by man’s idleness—­that the “dolce far niente,” though it might suit an Italian lazzaroni, is not fit for a brave Christian man, and that they who would do rightly, and act well their part, must take this distich for their motto:—­

    “With this hand work, and with the other pray,
    And God will bless them both from day to day.”

Now, this doctrine, that labor is worship, is the very doctrine that has been advanced and maintained, from time immemorial, as a leading dogma of the Order of Freemasonry.  There is no other human institution under the sun which has set forth this great principle in such bold relief.  We hear constantly of Freemasonry as an institution that inculcates morality, that fosters the social feeling, that teaches brotherly love; and all this is well, because it is true; but we must never forget that from its foundation-stone to its pinnacle, all over its vast temple, is inscribed, in symbols of living light, the great truth that labor is worship.

It has been supposed that, because we speak of Freemasonry as a speculative system, it has nothing to do with the practical.  But this is a most grievous error.  Freemasonry is, it is true, a speculative science, but it is a speculative science based upon an operative art.  All its symbols and allegories refer to this connection.  Its very language is borrowed from the art, and it is singularly suggestive that the initiation of a candidate into its mysteries is called, in its peculiar phraseology, work.

I repeat that this expression is singularly suggestive.  When the lodge is engaged in reading petitions, hearing reports, debating financial matters, it is said to be occupied in business; but when it is engaged in the form and ceremony of initiation into any of the degrees, it is said to be at work.  Initiation is masonic labor.  This phraseology at once suggests the connection of our speculative system with an operative art that preceded it, and upon which it has been founded.  This operative art must have given it form and features and organization.  If the speculative system had been founded solely on philosophical or ethical principles, if it had been derived from some ancient or modern sect of philosophers,—­from the Stoics, the Epicureans, or the Platonists of the heathen world, or from any of the many divisions of the scholastics of the middle ages,—­this origin would most certainly have affected its interior organization as well as its external form, and we should have seen our modern masonic reunions assuming the style of academies or schools.  Its technical language—­for, like every institution isolated from the ordinary and general pursuits of mankind, it would have had its own technical dialect—­would