The Lost Key: An Explanation of Masonic Symbols

68The Lost Keyyour imagination and picture yourself breaking off the roughcorners of your character. What is a rough corner? It is any viceor weakness which you have and which makes your characterimperfect. How do you get rid of such a vice or weakness? Not bywishing, certainly. You have to work. You have to stifle that viceor weakness, to fight against it, to throttle it. It is not easy. It is ahard task. It is well symbolized by the breaking off of the roughknobs on the stone. But how do you do it? Well you do it by theexercise of the Will Power. Is not that true? You know thatwishing will not do it. You must use force. And that force must bedirected by the will. Hence the common Gavel is a symbol of WillPower directed by the intelligence or spirit.205. In the First Degree the candidate has been given certainsymbolic teaching. Now he is told that he must put that teachinginto practice and that it will require Will Power and Self Criticismto do it. The Gauge is a symbol of Self-Criticism, not a detailedcriticism such as is given by the other tools but that first, roughestimate of the powers and capacities. The Gavel is a symbol ofwill power and involves pain and suffering for the ashlar, could itfeel, would undoubtedly cry out in pain when its corners wereknocked off by the vigorous blows of the Gavel. So the individualfeels pain when he applies the Gavel to the ashlar of his characterand knocks off the defects, the most prominent defects, whichwould unfit his ashlar for building into the wall.206. Then he takes the Square and determines whether the sides ofthe ashlar are square to each other. He has knocked off the knobsso far as he is able by the use of the Gavel and now he comes to apoint where the self criticism must be much deeper and moresearching. This is symbolized by the Square. The Square as aWorking Tool has somewhat different meanings from the Squareas a Great Light, yet there is the basic relationship of squarenessand right conduct. The Square, applied to the surface of the