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

one; in the latter, the symbolic was always the original signification
of
every ceremony.
[38] /P "Was not all the knowledge Of the Egyptians writ in mystic
symbols? Speak not the Scriptures oft in parables? Are not the choicest
fables of the poets, That were the fountains and first springs of
wisdom,
Wrapped in perplexed allegories?"
BEN JONSON, _Alchemist_, act ii. sc. i. P/
[39] The distinguished German mythologist Mueller defines a symbol to
be
"an eternal, visible sign, with which a spiritual feeling, emotion, or
idea is connected." I am not aware of a more comprehensive, and at the
same time distinctive, definition.
[40] And it may be added, that the word becomes a symbol of an idea;
and
hence, Harris, in his "Hermes," defines language to be "a system of
articulate voices, the symbols of our ideas, but of those principally
which are general or universal."--_Hermes_, book iii. ch. 3.
[41] "Symbols," says Mueller, "are evidently coeval with the human
race;
they result from the union of the soul with the body in man; nature has
implanted the feeling for them in the human heart."--_Introduction to a
Scientific System of Mythology_, p. 196, Leitch's translation.--R.W.
Mackay says, "The earliest instruments of education were symbols, the
most
universal symbols of the multitudinously present Deity, being earth or
heaven, or some selected object, such as the sun or moon, a tree or a
stone, familiarly seen in either of them."--_Progress of the
Intellect_,
vol. i p. 134.
[42] Between the allegory, or parable, and the symbol, there is, as I
have
said, no essential difference. The Greek verb [Greek: paraballo],
whence
comes the word _parable_, and the verb [Greek: symballo] in the same
language, which is the root of the word _symbol_, both have the
synonymous
meaning "to compare." A parable is only a spoken symbol. The definition
of
a parable given by Adam Clarke is equally applicable to a symbol, viz.:
"A
comparison or similitude, in which one thing is compared with another,
especially spiritual things with natural, by which means these
spiritual
things are better understood, and make a deeper impression on the
attentive mind."
[43] North British Review, August, 1851. Faber passes a similar
encomium.
"Hence the language of symbolism, being so purely a language of ideas,