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.

The Master Mason - January 1926