The Builders: A Story and Study of Masonry

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open to his senses are more than mere facts, having other and hidden meanings. The whole world was close to him as an infinite parable, a mystical and prophetic scroll the lexicon of which he set himself to find. Both he and

the scenery of the visible to make vivid the realities of the world Unseen. What wonder, then, that trees grew in his fancy, flowers bloomed in his faith, and the victory of spring over winter gave him hope of life after death, while the march of the sun and the great stars invited him to "thoughts th

e and obvious fact, albeit not less wonderful because obvious. Socrates made the discovery-perhaps the greatest ever made-that human nature is universal. By his searching questions he found out that when men think round a problem, and think deeply, they disclose a common nature and a common system of truth. So there dawned upon him, from this fact, the

t aspiration and thought. We need not infer that one people learned them from another, or that there existed a mystic, universal order which had them in keeping. They simply betray the unity of the human mind, and show how and why, at the same stage of culture, races far removed from each other came to the same conclusions and used much

senses, God is multiple, and the result is polytheism and its gods without number. For the reason, God is a dualism made up of matter and mind, as in the faith of Zoroaster and many other cults. But when the social life of man becomes the prism of faith, God is a trinity of Father, Mother, Child. Almost as old as human thought, we find the idea of the trinity and its triangle emblem everywhere-S

al-grounds of North America. There have been many interpretations of it. Perhaps the meaning most usually assigned to it is that of the Sanskrit word having in its roots an intimation of the beneficence of life, to be and well. As such, it is a sign indicating "that the maze of life may bewilder, but a path of light runs through it: It is well is the name of the path, and the key to life eternal is in the strange labyrinth for those whom God leadeth."[11] Others hold it to have been an emblem of the Pole Star whose stability in the sky, and the procession of the Ursa Major around it

art of the world carved on coins, altars, and tombs, and furnishing a design for temple architecture in Mexico and Peru, in the pagodas of India, not less than in the churches of Christ. Ages before our era, even from the remote time of the cliff-dweller, the Cross seems to have been a symbol of life, though for what reason no one knows. More often it was an emblem of eternal life, especially when inclosed within a Circle w

ancy, but as forms of reality as it revealed itself to the mind of man. Sometimes we find them united, the Square within the Circle, and within that the Triangle, and at the center the Cross. Earliest of emblems, they show us hints and foregleams of the highest faith and philosophy, betraying not only t

e an Idealist, and living in a world of radiant mystery, it was inevitable that man should attach moral and spiritual meanings to the tools, laws, and materials of building. Even so, in almost every land and in the remotest ages we find great and beautiful truth hovering about the builder an

of hewn stones was forbidden.[15] With the advent of the cut cube, the temple became known as the House of the Hammer-its altar, always in the center, being in the form of a cube and regarded as "an index or emblem of Truth, ever true to itself."[16] Indeed, the cube, as Plutarch points out in his essay On the Cessation of Oracles, "is palpably the proper emblem of rest, on account of the security and firmness of the superficies." He further tells us that the pyramid is an image o

mple of Amenta, at the door of the house of Ptah-as, later, in the porch of the temple of Solomon-stood two pillars. Still further back, in the old solar myths, at the gateway of eternity stood two pillars-Strength and Wisdom. In India, and among the Mayas and Incas, there were three pillars at the portals of the earthly and skyey temple-Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty. When man set up a pillar, he became a fellow-worker with Him whom the old

sions more than seven hundred years before the Christian era. For example, in the famous canonical work, called The Great Learning, which has been referred to the fifth century B.C., we read, that a man should abstain from doing unto others what he would not they should do to him; "and this," the writer adds, "is called the principle of acting on the square." So also Con

ompasses and the square. Ye who are engaged in the pursuit

s to have gathered about a symbolical temple put up in the desert, that the various officers of the faith were distinguished by symbolic jewels, and that at its rites they wore leather aprons.[22] From such records as we have it is not possible to say whether the builders themselves used their tools as emblems, or whether it

man; but the builder of all thing

ation a tried stone, a precious c

ers rejected is become th

nes, are built up into

ompass upon the face of the deep, when he marked out the found

id unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A plumbline. Then said the Lord, Behold, I wil

ation foursquare, with the

uare, and the length is a

llar in the temple of my God; and I

rnacle is dissolved, we have a building of God, an h

earning and religion, dating back, it is thought, to the fifteenth century before Christ. It was removed to Alexandria and re-erected by a Roman architect and engineer named Pontius, B.C. 22. When it was taken down in 1879 to be brought to America, all the emblems of the builders were found in the foundation. The rough Cube and the polished Cube in pure white limestone, the Square cut in syenite, an iron Trowel, a lead Plummet, the arc of a Circle, the serpent-s

emember the importance of the builder both to religion and the state. What though the builders have fallen into dust, to which all things mortal decline, they still hold out their symbols for us to read, speaking their thoughts in a language easy to understand. Across the piled-up debris of ages they whisper the old familiar truths, and it will be a part of this study to trace those symbols thro

calls

line is

TNO

dictum is: "Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty." The thesis of the second is that Masonry is founded upon Egyptian eschatology, which may be true; but unfortunately the book is too polemical. Both books partake of the poetry, if not the confusion, of the subject; but not for a world of dust would one clip t

n the Pattern,

that the Swastika is the symbol of the Supreme Architect of the Universe among

Symbols, Church

s and Legends of Freemasonry, by Finlayson, but he often strains facts in order to stretch them over wide gaps of time. Dr. Mackey's Symbolism of Freemasonry, though written more than sixty years ago, remains a classic of the order. Unfortunately the lectures of Albert Pike on

Exod.

ties of Corn

xviii; also in the Bible, Deut. 32:18, II Sam

Pillar Cult, S

Psa. 75:8, Job

, Giles. Also Gould, His.

lassics, by Le

121-24. It is not too much to say that the Transactions of this Lodg

of man, without whose bounding and redeeming influence he would be dissipat

Heb

Isa.

118:22, Ma

I Pet

:27-30, Revi

Amos

Ezk.

Rev.

Rev.

II Co

anderbilt, was examined by the Grand Lodge of New York, and its emblems pronounced to be unmistakably Masonic. This boo

AMA OF

s we can conceive of our separate existence, the quest goes on-an attainment continued henceforward. And ever s

e we seek to go, namely, the goal which is in God. Taking nothing with us which does not belong to ourselves, leaving nothing behind us that

Waite, The Se