Building Builders!: Random Building Thoughts

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Random Building Thoughts - 2021-03-30

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"Freemasonry is confessedly an allegory, and as an allegory only must it be supported, for its traditional history admits of no palliation. Whoever would remove Freemasonry out of the category, as an allegorical institution, might as well destroy its existence; for in no other character would it be able to hold its own. It is one consistent and intelligible assemblage of symbols, and any attempt to explain it, by reference to facts, is sure to fail: instead of a clear, beautiful, and harmonious system connected in all its parts, a distorted caricature will be produced without a single redeeming trait of character."

– Bro. George Oliver

COACH'S NOTE: To Study Freemasonry is to Study Allegory!!!!!

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palliation (noun)

A cloaking or concealment; a means of hiding or concealing.
The act of palliating or concealing the more flagrant circumstances of an offense, crime, etc.; a lessening or toning down of the enormity or gravity of a fault, offense, etc., by the urging of extenuating circumstances, or by favorable representations; extenuation.
Mitigation or alleviation, as of a disease.

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Enthusiasm = Charcoal, Clay

c.1600, from M.Fr. enthousiasme (16c.) and directly from L.L. enthusiasmus, from Gk. enthousiasmos "divine inspiration," from enthousiazein "be inspired or possessed by a god, be rapt, be in ecstasy," from entheos "divinely inspired, possessed by a god," from en "in" + theos "god" (see Thea).

Acquired a derogatory sense of "excessive religious emotion" (1650s) under the Puritans; generalized sense of "fervor, zeal" (the main modern sense) is first recorded 1716.

Masons know why!

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

--Theodore Roosevelt

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