A man can never hurt or help natural forces. He can spread his sail, but that does not affect the wind. He can overturn the sod with his plough, but the sod does not scream back at him with pain. He can send his wireless messages through space, but that does not change the structure of the atmosphere. A man does not have much choice in his dealings with nature. If he steps from a roof he immediately falls to the
earth, whatever be his opinions of gravity. The sun shines, night darkens, seasons change, rain falls, the ocean moves through its tides, but the will of man has nothing to do with all this  A man’s relationship with his fellow men is very different. He can hurt or help them, bless or curse. What he says may change the course of another’s fortunes: what he does may be a matter of life and death to another. And all that he does to and with his fellows is largely under the control of his own will, for he can choose to act or not to act, to think or not to think, to speak or not to speak, and he can so choose when he knows that his thoughts, words, or deeds will influence them greatly one way or another. This is also true of a man’s own self, and his relationship with himself: he can make his own person the object of his thoughts and acts for good or ill, and, as these thoughts and acts are of his own choosing, he is responsible, and they become a part of his conduct. All the ways in which a man affects himself, and in which men affect each other, for which  men are responsible, comprise the materials of morality, of which ethics is the science.

Freemasonry has its own interpretation of the principles of morality. It has its own ideals of human conduct. For reasons of its own it emphasises certain duties, and encourages certain ideals. In order to persuade men to act in a certain way it brings to bear upon them certain influences and strives to neutralise other influences which may oppose its purposes. It knows what it wants a man to be, and human society in general to be, and it bends its efforts towards that end. Masonic Ethics is ethics studied from this particular point of view, in the light of Masonic principles and ideals, and in behalf of Masonic purposes. It is the study of ethics as it bears on Masonry and of Masonry as it bears on ethics. Such a study bulks large in the literature of the Craft, in its philosophy, in its teachings, its ritual, and its traditions, because Masonry is above all other things a moralistic institution, which strives to realise on earth a definite ideal of conduct, both private and public. It is unfortunate that no modern Masonic scholar has yet attempted to make a careful study of Masonic history and literature in order to build a System of Masonic Ethics, in the same way that numberless other students have built up systems of Christian ethics, or Chinese ethics, or Jewish, etc.

The majority of men know as little of moral science as of any other science, and their conceptions of “right” and “wrong” are, accordingly, often as valueless as their conceptions of astronomy, or physics. From tradition, from the church, or from hearsay, without ever having submitted it to careful scrutiny of sound thinking, they have accepted into their minds a rough code of morals. This code consists, for the
most part, of two contrasted lists of actions: one, of actions permitted; the other, of actions forbidden. Whenever the question arises, Is such and such a proposed action good or bad? they refer the matter to their “lists” and act accordingly. A man says to himself, Shall I gamble? Shall I send money to the missionaries? Shall I tell this untruth to my neighbour? Shall I use tobacco? If he finds gambling to be listed with his mental category of things forbidden he will look upon it as a sin. If missionary gifts are in the list of things permitted, such gifts are right, etc.

This procedure works satisfactorily until the man comes into conflict with an entirely different code. One example of this will suffice. A Frenchman, let it be supposed a Christian also, finds that drinking wine is permitted by his own moral code. An American Methodist, on the other hand, finds wine among the things most violently forbidden by his own code. Who, or what, is to decide between them? The Frenchman may appeal to the authority of the New Testament: so may the Methodist. The Frenchman may say, My church has long ago decided this matter: the Methodist may reply, Mine also has decided the matter. If the Frenchman appeals to the tradition of this group, the Methodist can retort in the same way, and to an opposite conclusion. It is plain that this simple-minded “list” or code system of morality is one that breaks down the moment a man seeks the ground that lies beneath it.

This is nothing other than the age-old search for the seat of authority in morals. When a man is in moral predicament, and does not know whether or not a given course of action is right or wrong, to what final authority can he refer his problem? In the writer’s opinion there can be but one answer. Human experience, both individual and racial, is the one final authority in morals. If a man does something that injures his own body; or needlessly destroys something of human value; or hurts another in any way; or deliberately makes himself or others unhappy, that man does wrong. Wrong is whatever hurts human life, or destroys human happiness; right is whatever helps human life, and tends to sustain or increase human happiness. There is but one way to learn what it is that hurts or helps and that is by experience, and whenever one is not sure what experience has to say he is obliged to make a moral experiment. Acts are not right or wrong intrinsically, but according as their effects are hurtful or helpful. The purpose of right living is not in order to render obedience to some code, or to some supposed authority, but to enable a man to live richly, healthfully, happily. A wise man may therefore often do something that may not be approved by others, but the man who does something which his own experience shows to be hurtful is a fool.

This does not mean that a man can safely trust to his own experience alone: far otherwise, for often a man’s own experience is too meagre to be of any value. Others have lived longer or more richly than he, or more wisely, and he can heed their counsels. Others, by virtue of some special training, may better understand the effects of a given course of action, and consequently have a right to direct conduct, as a
physician has a right to prescribe remedies. Nor can a man dare to set his own private experience against the experience of a nation, or of the race, as may be proved by a reference to slavery days, when many planters found in their own experience that slavery seemed to be a good for themselves and their slaves, whereas the experience of the United States as a whole proved slavery to be a curse to all concerned. But, whether the individual can trust to his own private experience, or must defer to the larger and wiser experience of the race, it is human experience which, in the last analysis, approves or condemns any given course of conduct.

Certain courses of action have always and everywhere been found to be hurtful or harmful. Wilfully to deceive another will be found hurtful in China as in America, in the first century as well as in the twentieth: so also with habits of gluttony or intemperance that destroy health; with extravagance, laziness, cruelty, etc. One can’t conceive of any social condition under which men would not find these things to make for unhappiness. These permanent verdicts of human experience become at last crystallised into principles which nobody questions, and these principles, taken together, comprise a system of morality. But, even so, all such principles are found to root in human experience and its verdicts. Should the constitution of man come under some mysterious change so that men would be made happier by gluttony, and life made richer and stronger, then would gluttony become a good and not a bad.

The vast majority of moral problems, however, have not been, and never can be, permanently settled: always the individual, so far as these things are concerned, must decide for himself. Is the use of tobacco injurious? Some physicians say it is, others say not: some men seem to smoke with impunity as well as pleasure: others get headaches and nights of sleeplessness after a few cigars: in such a case the individual must decide for himself, and, so long as the question remains strictly a matter of private experience, he has no right to decide for another. It is not the submission to a traditional code of action that sets one apart as a man of principle and character; the strong man, from the moral point of view, is he who, when experience decides, abides the verdict, though it may oppose many selfish interests and interfere with many cherished pleasures.

The test of experience is equally valid when applied to the more religious and idealistic questions of human conduct: self-sacrifices, heroisms, martyrdoms, these, like the more commonplace matters of daily life, are approved or condemned according as they make for or against human life. The monks who went off to live cenobite lives in the Thebaid considered themselves very holy men, but the verdict of the subsequent centuries has been against them, for such a life proved itself to be harmful to the healthfulness and happiness of the world. The thousands who went away to the Crusades considered themselves divinely commissioned, but to-day a saner judgment, though it admires the element of heroism in the Crusaders, condemns the enterprise as a whole as having been a useless piece of costly fanaticism. Emerson and Thoreau, inflamed by the enthusiasms of the hour, hailed John Brown as the hero of the nation after his wild attempt on Harper’s Ferry: James Ford Rhodes, in the light of the full consequences of the old Puritan’s campaign, shows that John Brown let loose a train of bloody and unfortunate consequences, from which the slaves themselves were the chief sufferers. All this is to say that ideals, aspirations, heroisms, self-sacrifices, and all other similar acts and aims are not in themselves any more “righteous” than are other more familiar matters of conduct, and that they are to be adjudged “right” or “wrong” only in light of the conditions under which they are done and the consequences that flow from them.

This philosophising about moral conduct is of great value to us in our periods of leisure and reflection, but a man can’t stop to philosophise, often he cannot even stop to weigh probabilities, and to balance motives, while he is in the midst of his daily living, for usually decisions must be made on the spot, and often they are made unconsciously, like an instinctive action. The thing that determines a man in all
such decisions is his moral “nature,” and that nature is the man’s fixed system of habits, reactions, judgments, emotions, etc., that has been built out of all his past experience. A good man is one who has in the past so lived that he habitually acts so as to be happy himself and make others happy (the word “happy” here is used in its widest possible meaning). He may now and then do something that he knows to be wrong, but his “nature,” the constant bias of his will, is toward those things that make for the welfare of human life. A bad man is one whose very nature is such that he instinctively does things that hurt others or himself, though he may often be capable of tenderness, self-sacrifices, or some momentary nobility.

A man acts from his nature. This fact is recognised in the account of the conversation Jesus had with Nicodemus whom the Master told that he had first to be “born again.” This phrase has passed into theology as the doctrine of “regeneration,” or “new birth,” and it is a sound doctrine, for many men are so ingrained with badness that their whole nature must be radically changed before they can be trusted to live in harmony and happiness with their fellows.

This doctrine of a “new birth” seems to lie at the heart of Masonry’s great drama of Hiram Abiff. Masonic interpreters have differed greatly among themselves as to the meaning of that acted parable, but they nearly all hold in common the belief that it somehow means that, in order to be a just and true brother a man must be “born again” so that his nature is changed to act in unison with a new world. How can this
be brought about? It is one of the points where morality melts into religion, for nearly all the religions have applied themselves to creating a new nature in man, and they all seek to do it by bringing Divine Power to bear upon the individual. Freemasonry is here at one with religion, for it also resorts to prayer, to the seeking of the will of God. It also makes use of the powers of brotherhood, of reasoning, of ritual, and all the offices of fraternity. The whole ceremony is in itself an attempt to create a new nature in the candidate, and it is also, from another point of view, a symbol of those influences in this world which have such regenerative powers; these influences, of course, are numberless, and many of them have no direct connection with religion, as, for example, the affection for a parent, education, misfortune, etc., any one of which may, under certain circumstances, bring about a profound change in some individual’s moral nature.

What has been said of the individual’s moral life may be said, in some degree or other, of society at large. How is a great social institution judged? By social experience: by its influence on the life of the community. If some institution, however long established, or however venerated, begins to cause unhappiness among men, dissension, unrest, poverty, or what not, that institution, though it may be sanctioned
by the law of the land, becomes evil, and all right thinking men must become its enemies. Whatever social force makes against the welfare of men and women, that social force is evil, though it wear the name of morality itself; whatever social force makes for the welfare of society, that is good, though it be as new as the morning. That an institution is old, or religious, or legal, is a fact to be taken into careful
consideration, but such a fact has no weight as against the plain influences of that institution as it works among men. For this reason there is such a thing as a social morality. It is the study of social forces in the light of their results and effects in the community; it is the moral appraisal of social institutions. It is the fostering of the forces that make for common welfare, and the opposition of those that make against

Always, morality is for the sake of men and women: it is here in order that they may have life and have it more abundantly. Each man lives in a community where he acts and is acted upon, where he is influenced by others and himself influences others. His own nature is a bundle of energies and influences upon which happiness depends. To so adjust one’s self to others, to so learn to govern one’s self, and to so adjust one’s life to the forces of nature, in Order that one’s life may be full, rich, happy, that is the aim of morality. It is also the aim of Masonry, for that great institution exists in order that men may live happily together and in order that human life, individual or social, may evermore rise to high and higher issues.