THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

distinguished, and aided and counselled by the Gentile experience of
the
king of Tyre, and that immortal architect who superintended his
workmen,
saw at once the excellence and beauty of this method of inculcating
moral
and religious truth, and gave, therefore, the impulse to that symbolic
reference of material things to a spiritual sense, which has ever since
distinguished the institution of which he was the founder.
If I deemed it necessary to substantiate the truth of the assertion
that
the mind of King Solomon was eminently symbolic in its propensities, I
might easily refer to his writings, filled as they are to profusion
with
tropes and figures. Passing over the Book of Canticles,--that great
lyrical drama, whose abstruse symbolism has not yet been fully evolved
or
explained, notwithstanding the vast number of commentators who have
labored at the task,--I might simply refer to that beautiful passage in
the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes, so familiar to every Mason as
being
appropriated, in the ritual, to the ceremonies of the third degree, and
in
which a dilapidated building is metaphorically made to represent the
decays and infirmities of old age in the human body. This brief but
eloquent description is itself an embodiment of much of our masonic
symbolism, both as to the mode and the subject matter.
In attempting any investigation into the symbolism of Freemasonry, the
first thing that should engage our attention is the general purport of
the
institution, and the mode in which its symbolism is developed. Let us
first examine it as a whole, before we investigate its parts, just as
we
would first view, as critics, the general effect of a building, before
we
began to inquire into its architectural details.
Looking, then, in this way, at the institution--coming down to us, as
it
has, from a remote age--having passed unaltered and unscathed through a
thousand revolutions of nations--and engaging, as disciples in its
school
of mental labor, the intellectual of all times--the first thing that
must
naturally arrest the attention is the singular combination that it
presents of an operative with a speculative organization--an art with a
science--the technical terms and language of a mechanical profession
with
the abstruse teachings of a profound philosophy.
Here it is before us--a venerable school, discoursing of the deepest
subjects of wisdom, in which sages might alone find themselves
appropriately employed, and yet having its birth and deriving its first
life from a society of artisans, whose only object was, apparently, the
construction of material edifices of stone and mortar.