Lodge Burroughs Strange No. 87
Vijayawada, India

Put your feet on solid ground, not on shifting sands and build your future home on love and trust. If you do that, joy and happiness will abide within your home and no one can bring fear, doubt or unhappiness therein. Your home will be a haven to the weary for they will find within it love and trust, and they will be imbued with strength to start again and rebuild their own homes more securely this time using love and trust. From you they will have learned that love and trust must be the foundation of their homes for without these the home becomes only a house no matter how valuable the material used; without love and trust, joy and peace cannot enter, neither can happiness come in, Here only deceit and selfishness will dwell, and lust, greed and misery will move in and soon bickering will become the head of the house, causing much unhappiness and grief, each member of the household hating the other, magnifying the other's folly and not noticing his own. No matter how much gold you have and how much material it enables you to buy, no real joy or happiness will you find until you have destroyed deceit, selfishness and greed and cleared out of the home all that is evil and detrimental to yourself and brought back love and trust.

You will, my brethren, find what I have written is true. All you have to do is to look about you - look into the homes that harbour malice, selfishness, deceit, lust and greed. What do you find? What effect have these had on the children? What kind of character have they built up in their children? Do these children respect their parents ? Are these children considerate of other? These children soon lose respect for their parents and become demanding and overbearing, following in their parents' footsteps, falling further away from the right path day by day. Parents that live only for material things accumulate sin not only against God and their souls but against their children who will have to bear the heavy burden all their lives. Their lives are made or marred by their lives. Their lives are made or marred by their home life. In many instances the home is built without love and trust, without any spiritual understanding and it is from such homes - it matters not whether it is a home of wealth or poverty - that the criminals and the never do well come. All children are born innocent. They do not inherit evil or wrongdoing from their parents or forefathers but they do absorb evil from the environment they live in. The only time evil ancestors can have any bearing on the life of the child is when presents or other continuously harp on their resemblance in looks or habits to "so and so"; then the child begins to believe them and in that way forms certain habits. It is wrong to teach them that "blood will tell" and that they inherit evil. The soul of a child is an individual soul pure and sweet - a spark of the divine love of our Father, God. A new soul is not soiled by any past misdeeds.

What I am trying to convey is the importance of teaching your children the true meaning of life, that there is a purpose to life - a purpose for their being here, and that it depends on themselves how they carry out that purpose. Teach them that their soul is a part of God, part of all, and that the physical body that clothes the real self is a part of the parent's body, built and developed by the food of which they partake. Teach them how important it is for them to live a clean and whole, some life, to care for the body - the real self, the soul, the spirit is able to express itself at its best and in that way perform its purpose on this earth, thereby preparing and fitting itself for the next step which beings as soon as it lays aside the physical garment, the body. The reward they receive from the G.A.O.T.U. depends on the life they lived on earth, and even their spiritual garment reflects their earth life. In the House of God gold and chattels will not help you. Teach you child God is love, God is natural law and that law must be obeyed. Show them the hopelessness of the youth whom parents allow to go on without restraint, for our reform schools and jails are filled with lost souls, lost hopes, frustrated youth that could have been saved if they had received love and right teaching at an early age. Set you child an example by your way of life, by your actions for it is easy if one really wants to live right.

Build your home on love and trust; fill your heart with love; look about you at the sun and the sky, at the trees, the birds and the bees take nature as a whole and be at one with then ask yourself, "Has not Freemasons taught us all these allegorically, and can doubt that there is a Supreme Creative Power behind all this and that Power is Just ? It God, my Brother, love and trust HIM.

My Brethren, let us pray that only the good seed will flourish and bring forth abundance fruit.