MAGLSBradley
Contents
H(ENRY) STILES BRADLEY 1872-?
died after 1921
- Masonic membership unknown
- Grand Chaplain 1915, 1916
BIOGRAPHY
SPEECHES
AT DEDICATION OF WORCESTER MASONIC HALL, SEPTEMBER 1913
From Proceedings, Page 1913-166:
The Masons of Worcester are to be congratulated upon the completion of this splendid temple. The entire city and State should be glad that an order which stands for the best things in our social, political, moral, and religious life has erected such a handsome home for itself, and, in so doing, has given a fresh evidence of its life, vigor, and progress.
Masons have for long been builders. If all historians do not accept the statements of Dr. James Anderson that Masonry had its origin at least fifteen centuries before Christ, and that Moses and Solomon were Grand Masters of Lodges, there is no question in the mind of any that it has nourished several hundred years, and that to its members belongs the credit for the erection and embellishment of the most beautiful temples of worship of the world. Such exquisite "sermons in stone" as the great English cathedrals were the expressions of the deep religious sentiments of Freemasons. Travelers in Europe to-day stand entranced before the ruins of those temples to the Great Architect which the piety and devotion of those who handled reverently and symbolically the square, the compass, the level, and the plummet fashioned through years of patient and loving toil.
No one possesses a thought, principle, or power until he has given it expression. The poem is only half the poet's till he has written or spoken it. The symphony or oratorio may sing itself vaguely in the soul of the composer before he catches it on paper or reproduces it upon instruments, but it becomes his own only when he gives it to the world.
Many of the noblest thoughts and aspirations of the human soul were grasped and expressed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the members of this ancient and honorable Order when, with chisel and mallet, they translated into enduring stone their psalms of praise to Almighty God, and many of the most beautiful and unselfish sentiments of the human heart were given everlasting setting in the secret chambers of the Lodge-rooms when apprentices were taught by precept and example to be true to God, faithful to duty, loyal to friends, to uphold justice and right, and to show charity to all.
MASONIC CHARACTERISTICS. For hundreds of years this noble Order has stood for the great fundamental virtues. Its members have incarnated and exemplified honesty, justice, courage, patriotism, kindness, and brotherly love. It has stood as a bulwark against infidelity. No man can become or continue a Mason without a belief in God. Independent of clime, color, caste, or creed, it has appealed to those high qualities which are either dormant or active in all men, and no man can estimate its influence for good in our present civilization.
If I were called upon to name the chief foundation stones upon which Masonry rests, I should name, next to faith in God and belief in immortality, the insistence upon Truth and Love as the principles for the guidance of life. Masons have always held that the golden age would come when trust in God, loyalty to truth, and the practice of love became universal, and in this they are in complete harmony with Jesus Christ. The Mason looks out upon the universe with its myriad whirling worlds and satellites whose distances from us and from each other are measured in light-years, watches their orderly procession, computes their periods, finds that they vary not the tick of a clock from their calculated revolutions and he says with Addison:
In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice;
Forever singing as they shine:
"The hand that made us is divine."
He turns his eye to the microcosm; sees in a drop of water from the ditch the myriad forms of living things, each a marvel of beauty and grace; and he says that the All-Powerful is also the All-Patient. To the Mason the attempt to account for such a universe as this on which we live, on the hypothesis of mere chance, is as unreasonable as it would be to explain the Iliad on the theory that the Greek letters happened to fall into the relation and order in which we find them in Homer's poem. If the Iliad requires a Homer for explanation, the universe requires a God.
The Mason believes in truth. He seeks for reality. He desires that his thoughts and opinions shall correspond with facts of life, and so with open and candid mind he seeks knowledge. Truth is also the agreement of speech and fact, so he strives for accuracy and veracity. Truth is again the agreement of thought and word, so the true Mason is sincere in speech and free from hypocrisy in his acts. Finally, he believes in the formation of truth, and so he aims at fidelity and constancy in all his human relations. The true Mason holds that love is the controlling motive of all worthy living. Hatred, anger, malice, and selfishness he banishes from his heart. He sets before himself the welfare of his Brothers, and if ever his own individual interests seem to conflict with the interests of his neighbors, his city, or his country, he cheerfully yields, in obedience to the great law of love.
THE GRAVE IS NOT THE END. The true Mason believes in the immortality of the soul. He repudiates the dreary doctrine that the grave is the end of all. With Victor Hugo, he says: "When I go down to the grave, I can say, like many others, I have finished my day's work, but I cannot say, I have finished my life. My days will begin again the next morning. The tomb is not a blind alley. It is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight to open on the dawn."
There are in the United States to-day more than a million Masons, and while their influence is quiet and unobtrusive, like the leaven in the meal, they are among the most potent agents for good in our civilization. It would be nothing short of a calamity for this noble Order to perish from the earth.
Let us congratulate ourselves that the principles of Masonry are commending themselves more and more to right-thinking men the world over, and that especially in our own country the Lodges are increasing in number and members.
We set to-day this corner-stone in an already completed temple. May the good God, in whose name it is erected, grant it the smile of His favor; may He forever protect it from every unrighteous and unholy thing; may pure faith, sincere truth, unwearied kindness, staunch virtue, robust courage, and deathless love find here an altar and a hearthstone; may those who enter its sacred precincts be forever faithful to the principles upon which the great Order is founded; may they never forget them or hold them in light esteem. When at last the slow-footed seasons have reduced this house to dust, may another and nobler temple rise to take its place, and may every Brother who closes his earthly fellowship here enter into the larger and more abiding fellowship of the Grand Lodge above.
