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

epeatedly alludes to it in other passages, and the eloquent and
figurative St. Paul beautifully extends the idea in one of his Epistles
to
the Corinthians, in the following language: "Know ye not that ye are
the
temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you?" And again,
in
a subsequent passage of the same Epistle, he reiterates the idea in a
more
positive form: "What, know ye not that your body is the temple of the
Holy
Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?"
And
Dr. Adam Clarke, while commenting on this latter passage, makes the
very
allusions which have been the topic of discussion in the present essay.
"As truly," says he, "as the living God dwelt in the Mosaic tabernacle
and
in the temple of Solomon, so truly does the Holy Ghost dwell in the
souls
of genuine Christians; and as the temple and all its _utensils_ were
holy,
separated from all common and profane uses, and dedicated alone to the
service of God, so the bodies of genuine Christians are holy, and
should
be employed in the service of God alone."
The idea, therefore, of making the temple a symbol of the body, is not
exclusively masonic; but the mode of treating the symbolism by a
reference
to the particular temple of Solomon, and to the operative art engaged
in
its construction, is peculiar to Freemasonry. It is this which isolates
it
from all other similar associations. Having many things in common with
the
secret societies and religious Mysteries of antiquity, in this "temple
symbolism" it differs from them all.
XIII.
The Form of the Lodge.
In the last essay, I treated of that symbolism of the masonic system
which
makes the temple of Jerusalem the archetype of a lodge, and in which,
in
consequence, all the symbols are referred to the connection of a
speculative science with an operative art. I propose in the present to
discourse of a higher and abstruser mode of symbolism; and it may be
observed that, in coming to this topic, we arrive, for the first time,