(By Albert Pike – foundation for the 27 degree Scottish Rite Freemasonry) – Truth, in act, profession, and opinion, is rarer now albert-pikethan in the days of chivalry.

Falsehood has become a current coin, and circulates with a certain degree of respectability; because it has an actual value.

It is indeed the great Vice of the Age—it, and its twin-sister, Dishonesty.

Men, for political preferment, profess whatever principles are expedient and profitable.

At the bar, in the pulpit, and in the halls of legislation, men argue against their own convictions, and, with what they term logic, prove to the satisfaction of others that which they do not themselves believe.

Insincerity and duplicity are valuable to their possessors, like estates in stocks, that yield a certain revenue: and it is no longer the truth of an opinion or a principle, but the net profit that may be realized from it, which is the measure of its value.

The Press is the great sower of falsehood.

To slander a political antagonist, to misrepresent all that he says, and, if that be impossible, to invent for him what he does not say; to put in circulation whatever baseless calumnies against him are necessary to defeat him,–these are habits so common as to have ceased to excite notice or comment, much less surprise or disgust (Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, 1871, p. 578-579).

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