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

dedication of a church:--
"The perfect world by Adam trod
Was the first temple built by God;
His fiat laid the corner stone,
And heaved its pillars, one by one.
"He hung its starry roof on high--
The broad, illimitable sky;
He spread its pavement, green and bright,
And curtained it with morning light.
"The mountains in their places stood,
The sea, the sky, and 'all was good;'
And when its first pure praises rang,
The 'morning stars together sang.'
"Lord, 'tis not ours to make the sea,
And earth, and sky, a house for thee;
But in thy sight our offering stands,
A humbler temple, made with hands."
[66] "The idea," says Dudley, "that the earth is a level surface, and
of a
square form, is so likely to have been entertained by persons of little
experience and limited observation, that it may be justly supposed to
have
prevailed generally in the early ages of the world."--_Naology_, p. 7.
[67] The quadrangular form of the earth is preserved in almost all the
scriptural allusions that are made to it. Thus Isaiah (xi. 12) says,
"The
Lord shall gather together the dispersed of Judah from the _four
corners_
of the earth;" and we find in the Apocalypse (xx. 9) the prophetic
version
of "four angels standing on the _four corners_ of the earth."
[68] "The form of the lodge ought to be a double cube, as an expressive
emblem of the powers of darkness and light in the creation."--OLIVER,
_Landmarks_, i. p. 135, note 37.
[69] Not that whole visible universe, in its modern signification, as
including solar systems upon solar systems, rolling in illimitable
space,
but in the more contracted view of the ancients, where the earth formed
the floor, and the sky the ceiling. "To the vulgar and untaught eye,"
says
Dudley, "the heaven or sky above the earth appears to be co-extensive
with
the earth, and to take the same form, enclosing a cubical space, of
which
the earth was the base, the heaven or sky the upper surface."--
_Naology_,
7.--And it is to this notion of the universe that the masonic symbol of
the lodge refers.