Page:Oration Delivered on the Centennial Day of Washington's Initiation into Masonry (1852).djvu/11

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Centennial Oration.
11

and whose names the distant future will emblazon with the effulgence of truth.

But to throw light upon our subject—the subject of truth, the glory of God and the glory of man—we remark here, that while truth is one, a vast and infinite unity, its departments are many, a multiplicity of branches, each bearing fruits of life, but all from the same root and stem, each branch adapted to some specific and peculiar condition, circumstance want and interest of man; to meet those conditions, supply those wants, and secure those interests, and all resulting in the full and perfect happiness of man. Is man a physical being? surrounded and oppressed with a thousand physical wants and evils; there is a department of truth that has a remedy for all these evils, and a supply for all these wants. Is man an intellectual being? suffering a thousand intellectual wants and disabilities, and with aspirations wide as the infinite? there is a department of truth, as infinite as his desires and aspirations—a department, where science and philosophy sit on their gorgeous thrones, and whose invitation to all is, “come eat of our food and drink of our cup and be filled to overflowing—your every want will be supplied, and your every intellectual infirmity cured and disability removed.” Is man a moral being, surrounded by a thousand moral evils, and suffering a thousand moral wants? there is a department of truth for such, in which there is a remedy and a supply for each and all of these. And is man an immortal being—with immortal necessities pressing upon him? immortal evils, to be banished away from the endless path of his immortal career, and with ten thousand immortal interests to be secured? there is just such a department of truth for this condition and circumstance of his nature, whence he may draw a supply for all his necessities—have every impediment removed, and his every interest secured. And hence it is every man’s right, his liberty, his duty, and his interest to visit and explore, and make himself master of each and all these departments of truth, to gather the flowers, eat the fruits, and drink the waters, that blossom, ripen and flow in these many gardens of God. There are no dragons here to guard these more than Hisperian fruits—no guards with flaming swords to bar the entrance to any inquirers after truth, except those which man, by neglecting his own duty and privilege; permits his fellow mortal to station there. And he who forbids what God has created for all, and bestowed upon all—he who shuts up any of these avenues to truth, and thereby starves the immortal mind, and deprives man of some or of all the benefits, which these several departments of truth would confer upon him, on his head will fall the hotest and fiercest of Jehovah’s thunderbolts; his shame and confusion of face hereafter will be the greatest; and his punisment the heaviest, and next to his will be the shame and loss of those who have bowed to such prohibitions, and submitted to such de-