Time is rather like money: it can be kept or lost, it can be saved or wasted, given or received, made or spent. A young man once arrived on a new motorcycle at his grandfather’s door. ‘Do you know, grandfather,’ he said, ‘that with this new bike I have saved ten minutes on the journey here.’ ‘Saved ten minutes, eh?’ answered the old man. ‘And what are you going to do with them?
     One should always have a purpose in saving time. The biblical book Ecclesiastes which contains the wonderful advice to ‘remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth’ also contains eight verses on the use of time, beginning, ‘To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven’. It is the opening of chapter three, and is well worth reading right through.
     Freemasonry has a lot to say about time too, both directly and indirectly. First then, what do we mean by dating the current year as ‘AD 2007, AL 6007’? An explanation of the Grand Lodge Certificate tells us that AL is Anno Lucis, ‘the Year of Masonic Light, which preceded the Christian Era by four millenaries’.
     This is interesting because until the middle of the seventeenth century no one had made a very serious attempt to put dates on biblical events.
     They had established the system of BC and AD by putting the birth of Jesus Christ down as ‘the year Dot’ and working backwards (BC) and forwards (AD) from that.
     Then in AD 1664 a certain Archbishop Ussher took a more firm grip on history. He calculated the average lifespan of a man from his birth to the birth of that man’s first descendant. Ussher then went through the Bible and added up all the ‘begats’ from Adam to Christ, multiplied the total by the average lifespan, and came up with the conclusion that Creation, as described in Genesis, must have happened in the year 4004 BC, probably one day in October at nine o'clock in the morning!
     Curiously enough, Ussher’s calculations were widely accepted, and Bibles were soon being printed, I have one on my desk, with dates at the top of each page. Thus the first page of Genesis is topped by ‘BC 4004’; by the time we get to the Flood in Genesis chapter 7, the date is apparently BC 2448. I am not sure how the Archbishop worked out the average lifespan of people like Methuselah and Noah who are both credited with ages just short of 1000 each. Abraham comes along at BC 1918, Moses at 1491 and Samuel at 1165. It seemed quite natural therefore to date Solomon’s Temple around the year BC 1000, so anything that happened during the building of the Temple could reasonably be described as ‘three thousand years after the Creation of the World.’
     Of course modern archaeology has proved that Ussher’s dates – his early ones at any rate – could not possibly be true, but we have to ask ourselves, does it really matter? Does the fact that these dates are so blatantly false disprove the whole story? Surely not. Anachronisms occur in all sorts of stories. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 1, contains this conversation: ‘Peace; count the clock’ (clock strikes) ‘The clock hath stricken three’. ‘It is time to part’. Oh yes, there were striking clocks in Shakespeare’s day.
     But not in Julius Caesar’s. Should we reject the whole play for that one anachronism? Of course not. So Freemasonry has stuck – more or less – with Archbishop Ussher. The odd four years in 4004 have since been dropped because, I imagine, it is easier to remember ‘AD 2007, AL 6007’ rather than ‘AD 2007, AL 6011’. Oh, well...
     All this could perhaps be described as ‘long time’. Let us now reflect on ‘short time’. How do masons measure the divisions of the day? The twenty-four inch gauge, we are told, represents the twenty-four hours of the day, and the writers of our ritual were not in full agreement whether to use ancient or modern style. Modern time starts each day at midnight and finishes twenty-four hours later with the next midnight. ‘High Twelve’ therefore refers to 12 noon or ‘the Meridian’. The Bible more often uses the ancient reckoning where one begins at sundown with twelve hours of darkness, followed by twelve hours of daylight. Thus the third hour of the day was what we would call 9 a.m. and so on.
     Incidentally this makes more sense of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, for those who came in at ‘the eleventh hour’ really arrived at 5 p.m. with only one hour of daylight left to work in.
     Some of the so-called ‘side degrees’ of masonry use one and some the other method of timing, but the Craft generally prefers the more modern variety where the hour is High Noon for ever, somewhere in the world. Certain lodges have a delightful custom which I am happy to commend: on the secretary’s table stands a clock mechanism; not necessarily a whole clock but just the mechanism. When a candidate perambulates the lodge, the secretary touches a button and a bell strikes twelve times. The candidate sees no clock, but he can hear it, and he will remember that at his Initiation ‘the sun was at its meridian’.
     But now it looks as though I must stop because, although there is a lot more to be said on the subject of time, yet one never seems to have enough of it – which is yet another limitation that it shares with money!