[63] It is worth noticing that the verb natzach, from which the title of the menatzchim (the overseers or Master Masons in the ancient temple), is derived, signifies also in Hebrew to be perfected, to be completed.  The third degree is the perfection of the symbolism of the temple, and its lessons lead us to the completion of life.  In like manner the Mysteries, says Christie, “were termed [Greek:  teletai\], perfections, because they were supposed to induce a perfectness of life.  Those who were purified by them were styled [Greek:  teloume/noi], and [Greek:  tetelesme/noi], that is, brought to perfection.”—­Observations on Ouvaroff’s Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries, p. 183.

[64] Dr. Oliver, in the first or preliminary lecture of his “Historical Landmarks,” very accurately describes the difference between the pure or primitive Freemasonry of the Noachites, and the spurious Freemasonry of the heathens.

[65] The idea of the world, as symbolically representing God’s temple, has been thus beautifully developed in a hymn by N.P.  Willis, written for the 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.