BROTHERS and BUILDERS:
The Basis and Spirit of Freemasonry.
BY JOSEPH FORT NEWTON (Litt.D.)

CHAPTER IV - THE COMPASSES


IN our study of the Square we saw that it is nearly always 
linked with the Compasses, and these old emblems, joined 
with the Holy Bible, are the Great Lights of the Craft. If the 
Lodge is an "oblong square" and built upon the Square (as 
the earth was thought to be in olden time), over it arches the 
Sky, which is a circle. Thus Earth and Heaven are brought 
together in the Lodge - the earth where man goes forth to his 
labor, and the heaven to which he aspires. In other words, 
the light of Revelation and the law of Nature are like the two 
points of the Compasses within which our life is set tinder a 
canopy of Sun and Stars.


No symbolism can be more simple, more profound, more 
universal, and it becomes more wonderful the longer one 
ponders it. Indeed, if Masonry is in any sense a religion, it is 
Universe Religion, in which ail men can unite. Its principles 
are as wide as the world, as high as the sky. Nature and 
Revelation blend in its teaching; its morality is rooted in the 
order of the world, and its roof is the blue vault above. The 
Lodge, as we are apt to forget, is always open to the sky, 
whence come those influences which exalt and ennoble the 
life of man. Symbolically, at least, it has no rafters but the 
arching heavens to which, as sparks ascending seek the 
sun, our life and labor tend. Of the heavenly side of Masonry 
the Compasses are the symbol, and they are perhaps the 
most spiritual of our working tools.


As has been said, the Square and Compasses are nearly 
always together, and that is true as far back as we can go. In 
the sixth book of the philosophy of Mencius, in China, we 
find these words: "A Master Mason, in teaching Apprentices, 
makes use of the compasses and the square. Ye who are 
engaged in the pursuit of wisdom must also make use of the 
compass and the square," Note the order of the words: the 
Compass has first place, and it should have to a Master 
Mason. In the oldest classic of China, The Book of History, 
dating back two thousand years before our era, we find the 
Compasses employed without the Square: "Ye officers of the 
Government, apply the Compasses." Even in that far off time 
these symbols had the same meaning they have for us to-
day, and they seem to have been interpreted in the same 
way.


While in the order of the Lodge the Square is first, in point of 
truth it is not the first in order. The Square rests upon the 
Compasses before the Compasses rest upon the Square. 
That is to say, just as a perfect square is a figure that can be 
drawn only within a circle or about a circle, so the earthly life 
of man moves and is built within the Circle of Divine life and 
law and love which surrounds, sustains, and explains it. In 
the Ritual of the Lodge we see man, hoodwinked by the 
senses, slowly groping his way out of darkness, seeking the 
light of morality and reason. But he does so by the aid of 
inspiration from above, else he would live untroubled by a 
spark. Some deep need, some dim desire brought him to the 
door of the Lodge, in quest of a better life and a clearer 
vision. Vague gleams, impulses, intimations reached him in 
the night of Nature, and he set forth and finding a friendly 
hand to help knocked at the door of the House of Light.


As an Apprentice a man is, symbolically, in a crude, natural 
state, his divine life covered and ruled by his earthly nature. 
As a Fellowcraft he has made one step toward liberty and 
light, and the nobler elements in him are struggling to rise 
above and control his lower, lesser nature. In the sublime 
Degree of a Master Mason - far more sublime than we yet 
realize - by human love, by the discipline of tragedy, and still 
more by Divine help the divine in him has subjugated the 
earthly, and he stands forth strong, free, and fearless, ready 
to raise stone upon stone until naught is wanting. If we 
examine with care the relative positions of the Square and 
Compasses as he advanced through the Degrees, we learn 
a parable and a prophecy of what the Compasses mean in 
the life of a Mason.


Here, too, we learn what the old philosopher of China meant 
when be urged Officers of the Government to "apply the 
Compasses," since only men who have mastered 
themselves can really lead or rule others. Let us now study 
the Compasses apart from the Square, and try to discover 
what they have to teach us. There is no more practical 
lesson in Masonry and it behoves us to learn it and lay it to 
heart. As the light of the Holy Bible reveals our relation and 
duty to God, and the Square instructs us in our duties to our 
Brother and neighbour, so the Compasses teach us the 
obligation which we owe to ourselves. What that obligation is 
needs to be made plain: it is the primary, imperative, 
everyday duty of circumscribing his passions, and keeping 
his desires within due bounds. As Most Excellent King 
Solomon said long ago, "better is he that ruleth his spirit than 
he that taketh a city."


In short, it is the old triad, without which character loses its 
symmetry, and life may easily end in chaos and confusion. It 
has been put in many ways, but never better than in the 
three great words: self-knowledge, self-reverence, self-
control; and we cannot lose any one of the three and keep 
the other two. To know ourselves, our strength, our 
weakness, our limitations, is the first principle of wisdom, 
and a security against many a pitfall and blunder. Lacking 
such knowledge, or disregarding it, a man goes too far, loses 
control of himself, and by the very fact loses, in some 
measure, the self-respect which is the corner stone of a 
character. If he loses respect for himself, he does not long 
keep his respect for others, and goes down the road to 
destruction, like a star out of orbit, or a car into the ditch.


The old Greeks put the same truth into a trinity of maxims: 
"Know thyself; in nothing too much; think as a mortal" ; and it 
made them masters of the art of life and the life of art. Hence 
their wise Doctrine of the Limit, as a basic idea both of life 
and of thought, and their worship of the God of Bounds, of 
which the Compasses are a symbol. It is the wonder of our 
human life that we belong to the limited and to the unlimited. 
Hemmed in, hedged about, restricted, we long for a liberty 
without rule or limit. Yet limitless liberty is anarchy and 
slavery. As in the great word of Burke, "it is ordained in the 
eternal constitution of things, that a man of intemperate 
passions cannot be free; his passions forge their fetters." 
Liberty rests upon law. The wise man is he who takes full 
account of both, who knows how, at all points, to qualify the 
one by the other, as the Compasses, if he uses them aright, 
will teach him how to do.


Much of our life is ruled for us whether we will or not. The 
laws of nature throw about us their restraining bands, and 
there is no place where their writ does not run. The laws of 
the land make us aware that our liberty is limited by the 
equal rights and liberties of others. Our neighbour, too, if we 
fail to act toward him squarely may be trusted to look after 
his own rights. Custom, habit, and the pressure of public 
opinion are impalpable restraining forces which we dare not 
altogether defy. These are so many roads from which our 
passions and appetites stray at our peril. But there are other 
regions of life where personality has free play, and they are 
the places where most of our joy and sorrow lie. It is in the 
realm of desire, emotion, motive, in the inner life where we 
are freest and most alone, that we need a wise and faithful 
use of the Compasses.


How to use the Compasses is one of the finest of all arts, 
asking for the highest skill of a Master Mason. If he is 
properly instructed, he will rest one point on the innermost 
centre of his being, and with the other draw a circle beyond 
which he will not go, until he is ready and able to go farther. 
Against the littleness of his knowledge he will set the depth 
of his desire to know, against the brevity of his earthly life the 
reach of his spiritual hope. Within a wise limit he will live and 
labour and grow, and when he reaches the outer rim of the 
circle he will draw another, and attain to a full-orbed life, 
balanced, beautiful, and finely poised No wise man dare 
forget the maxim, "In nothing too much, " for there are 
situations where a word too much, a step too far, means 
disaster. If he has a quick tongue, a hot temper, a dark 
mood, he will apply the Compasses, shut his weakness 
within the circle of his strength, and control it.


Strangely enough, even a virtue, if unrestrained and left to 
itself, may actually become a vice. Praise, if pushed too far, 
becomes flattery. Love often ends in a soft sentimentalism, 
flabby and foolish. Faith, if carried to the extreme by the will 
to believe, ends in over-belief and superstition. It is the 
Compasses that help us to keep our balance, in obedience 
to the other Greek maxim: "Think as a mortal" -- that is, 
remember the limits of human thought. An old mystic said 
that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere, and its 
circumference nowhere. But such an idea is all a blur. Our 
minds can neither grasp nor hold it. Even in our thought 
about God we must draw a circle enclosing so much of His 
nature as we can grasp and realize, enlarging the circle as 
our experience and thought and vision expand. Many a man 
loses all truth in his impatient effort to reach final truth. It is 
the man who fancies that he has found the only truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and who seeks to 
impose his dogma upon others, who becomes the bigot, the 
fanatic, the persecutor.


Here, too, we must apply the Compasses, if we would have 
our faith fulfil itself in fellowship. Now we know in part - a 
small part, it may be, but it is real as far as it goes - though it 
be as one who sees in a glass darkly. The promise is that if 
we are worthy and well qualified, we shall see God face to 
face and know ever as we are known. But God is so great, 
so far beyond my mind and yours, that if we are to know Him 
at all truly, we must know Him together, in fellowship and 
fraternity. And so the Poet-Mason was right when he wrote:-



"He drew a circle that shut me out, 
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout; 
But love and I had the wit to win, 
We drew a circle that took him in."