The Statue was There All the Time
THE STORY is told of the man who turned to a famous sculptor whose work he had been admiring and asked, “How do you take a rough chunk of stone and make of it such a beautiful statue?” A silly question, of course, but the answer of the sculptor is one to intrigue Masons: “There is really nothing to it. All do is chisel away the stone I do not want and there is the statue. It was there all the time.”
Then there is the woman who asked a great columnist, “How in the world do you write all those witty paragraphs?” He responded, “There’s nothing to it. All I do is sit down to the typewriter and write them as they occur to me, The writing is easy, it is the occurring that is difficult.”
I imagine there has to be some occurring with the sculptor who knocks away chunks of stone in order to uncover the beautiful statue, but isn’t there a Masonic lesson in the story of the sculptor and statue? Don’t we take men in the raw and knock off the rough parts to reveal the beauty within that was there all the time? Of course with such persons as — we didn’t knock off very much, but, seriously, Masonry doesn’t take men for the purpose of giving them new souls. It doesn’t want them unless under the rough exterior there is concealed a beauty of character that may be revealed through proper manipulation of our Working Tools, that may be developed through what Freemasonry has to offer.