TRANSMUTATION

from the book "The Lost keys of Freemasonry or The Secret of Hiram Abiff"
by Manly Palmer Hall.

TRANSMUTATION

Masonry is eternal truth, personified, idealized, and yet made simple. Eternal truth alone can serve it. Virtue is its priest, patience its warden, illumination its master. The world cannot know this, however, save when Masons in their daily life prove that it is so. Its truth is divine, and is not to be desecrated or defamed by the thoughtlessness of its keepers. Its temple is a holy place, to be entered in reverence. Material thoughts and material dissensions must be left without its gate. They may not enter. Only the pure of heart, regenerated and transmuted, may pass the sanctity of its veil.

The schemer has no place in its ranks, nor the materialist in its shrine; for Masons walk on hallowed ground, sanctified by the veneration of ages. Let the tongue be stilled, let the heart be stilled, let the mind be stilled. In reverence and in the silence, stillness shall speak: the voice of stillness is the voice of the Creator. Show your light and your power to men, but before God what have you to offer, save in humility? Your robes, your tinsel, and your jewels mean naught to Him, until your own body and soul, gleaming with the radiance of perfection, become the living ornaments of your Lodge.

Table of Contents of the rest of this book:
Introduction
In the Fields of Chaos
Temple Builders
The Eternal Quest
Thoughtlessness
The Candidate
The Entered Apprentice
The Fellow Craft
The Master Mason
Transmutation
The presence of the Master
Masons, Awake!
Epilogue of the Priest of Ra
Friendship
The Emerald Table of Hermes (Tabula Smaragdina)
Finish of the Tabula Smaragdina
Motive