THE TWENTY-FOUR-INCH GAUGE
The Master Mason - January 1926
NO LESSON of Masonry is wiser, or more needed, than its
teaching about the division of time and the right use of each
day, by the twenty- four-inch gauge. Here is a noble rule for
numbering and measuring our days, using part for the
worship of God and the service of man, another equal part
for labor, another for rest and refreshment. Here is real
wisdom, and a Golden Rule for the New Year.
No doubt time is a fiction, as wise men tell us, being only a
measured portion of eternity in which we live now and
always. Yet we do well to number our days, though in youth
we do not know how swift they are, any more than on a day
in June we realize the snowy days of winter. But, later, as
our years both lessen and shorten, we set more store by
them, and would fain lay a finger upon a spoke of the Great
Wheel. We may even be angry at time, as Shakespeare was
in a sonnet, in which he denounced it as a thief and a
robber.
The past we conquer by the power of memory, one of the
noblest gifts of God, at once a traveler revisiting days agone
and an interpreter of the meaning of life. As Jacob met
angels on the road he had journeyed years before, so by the
magic of memory we go back to the days that come not
back. Truth is discerned more clearly; sorrow is seen in
softer light - as they could not be at the moment. Time gives
a truer perspective, as a mountain, too near to be seen at its
base, reveals its majesty in the distance. Memory masters
the past.
The present we conquer by courage and duty, whereby we
defy the despotism of days, investing fleeting hours with
meaning. Lavater was right when he said that the great rule
of moral conduct is, next to God, to respect time. Each of us
has all the time there is - one moment - and it is wicked to
waste it. Time is money, said Franklin; but he had been
wiser had he said that time is life - literally so, since what we
call time is only a putting forth of power, the movement of
life.
Yet how foolishly we spend it, throwing enough into the
rubbish heap - odd hours and fag ends of days - to make us
master of any field of knowledge or service. Truly we must
"number our days," and use them to some purpose and with
some method, if we would attain to wisdom. He who kills
time is killed by it. If duty masters time, love fills it with
wonder and beauty, and hope outruns it, even at its swiftest,
leading the way to the City where a thousand years are as a
day.
AS WE conquer the past by memory, and the present by
duty, love, and labor, so we triumph over the future by faith.
The plays of Shakespeare have a lesson for us here. In the
early plays the action is decided and visibly completed within
the play, all problems solved, all issues settled. In the later
plays it is less so, though the Divinity does appear at the end
to adjust inequalities. But when we reach the great tragedies
the scene has become so involved that it cannot be closed
up and finished - the issue is pushed forward into the
Beyond.
So it is in Hamlet, and especially in Othello; and so it is in the
tragedy of the Third Degree of Masonry. There the play is
not all: it shapes itself for something beyond, and becomes a
prophecy. So it is in life, as year by year more problems are
pushed into the future, and faith becomes a Redeemer.
Those who think it is wise to take "one world at a time," as
Thoreau urged us to do, cannot do so if they would, in face
of issues so great that they must await the outworking of
laws which reach beyond life and time, and the shadow
which men call death. Where reason falters, faith flies -
running forward, as memory runs backward, linking our
fleeting days with the mighty law and will and love of God.
A Mason, if he knows the secret of his Craft, does not simply
believe in immortality; he lives it. Eternity is here, as the sky
begins at the top of the ground. It is not a fiction, but a fact.
Time is a corrector of errors, a tester of truth, a healer of
sorrows - yet time is only eternity measured by a twenty-
four-inch gauge.
The 90th Psalm is a hymn of eternity in which we may learn
the secret of victory over time. Having lived for three
thousand years, it is itself an example of triumph over the
tyranny of days. Ages have come and gone, but this ancient
Psalm still sings, older than philosophies, more enduring
than civilizations.
It begins in God, Who is from everlasting to everlasting; then
descends into the valley of mortality, where the flood of
years sweeps the generations away. Having begun in God, it
returns to Him at last, in Whose eternal life man has a share
by virtue of his passion for righteousness, his quest of truth,
and his love of "the beauty that passes with the sun on her
wings."
ANOTHER Finis, another year ended. We may have to write
the word a few more times, and then the end of ends. How
little we remember - only a few delightful passages, dear,
brief, never forgotten. A few more years, and be bold the end
itself coming to an end, and the Infinite beginning.
Time goes, you say; ah, no,
Alas, time stays; we go.
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