Brethren:

Good Citizenship and allegiance to the flag of our country and the principles which it symbolizes are among the fundamental teachings of Masonry.

Our government is a delicately balanced democracy in which the citizen is both governor and governed, ruler and ruled.  It is the same time inefficient and for that reasons demands more and constant attention.  It will perish as quickly in an attempt to do a right thing in a wrong way. 

Ours is the responsibility.  If the people are to govern, they must be alert enough to see their government encompassed in their right thinking.  They must detect deceit in whatever guise it presents itself.  The greatest mistake is adherence to the wrong standard.  If materiel wealth and fame, if social preferment and glory, if worldly advancement and prestige continue as the goal to be attained, then just so long will the world remain awry.  The whole teaching and principle of masonry makes it our responsibility to carry forward the enlightenment and education of the individual which results in the freedom of thought, action and conscience throughout the whole society. 

Down through the ages Masonry has striven to give each man his opportunity to see that he lived to his full responsibility, to take him out of mass ignorance and make him an individual thinker. 

The Washingtons, Hamiltons, and Franklins were very much in the minority of the their time.  The conditions they faced were an absolute parallel to today's.  Their problems seemed just as hopeless to them as ours do us.  They founded a nation that has become the largest and the oldest under one continuous unchanged form of government on Earth today.  They brought order out of chaos and announced the principles of free government in the midst of their wilderness of human fears and hopes.  they did it by pronouncing, iterating and reinserting the lessons of Freemasonry they knew and practiced. 

 

 

David R. Patterson, Master