The initiated brother realizes that his so called symbols and rituals are merely blinds fabricated by the wise

By Manly P. Hall – “The initiated brother realizes that his so called symbols and rituals are merely blinds fabricated by the wise to perpetuate ideas incomprehensible to the average individual.

He also realizes that few Masons of today know appreciate the mystic meaning concealed within these rituals.

With religious faith we perpetuate the form, worshiping it instead of the life, but those who have not recognized the truth in the crystallized ritual, those who have not liberated the spiritual germ from the shell of empty words, are not Masons, regardless of their physical degrees and outward honors.

There comes a time in the growth of every living individual thing when it realizes with dawning consciousness that it is a prisoner.

While apparently free to move and have its being, the struggling life cognizes through ever greater vehicles its own limitations.

It is at this point that man cries out with greater insistence to be liberated from the binding ties which, though invisible to mortal eyes, still chain him with bonds far more terrible than those of any physical prison.” – Manly P. Hall