The Rule & the Gavel | Force and Law | Albert Pike, Morals & Dogma

The two working tools of the Entered Apprentice — the rule crossed with the common gavel. In Morals and Dogma (1871), the frontier lawyer, poet, and Masonic philosopher Albert Pike — a mountain of a man who spent decades distilling the world's mysteries into a single monumental book — read them as far more than instruments of stone. The gavel is Force: the raw energy of the people, blind and destructive when left to itself. The rule is Intellect and Law, the measure that gives that force its direction. Power confined by law, for Pike, is what turns mere strength into liberty. WS Original. Catalog No. 1201.