With this view I propose, in the next place, to enter upon an examination of that science and philosophy as they are developed in the system of symbolism, which owes its existence to this peculiar origin and organization of the order, and without a knowledge of which, such as I have attempted to portray it in this preliminary inquiry, the science itself could never be understood.

X.

The System of Symbolic Instuction.

The lectures of the English lodges, which are far more philosophical than our own,—­although I do not believe that the system itself is in general as philosophically studied by our English brethren as by ourselves,—­have beautifully defined Freemasonry to be “a science of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.”  But allegory itself is nothing else but verbal symbolism; it is the symbol of an idea, or of a series of ideas, not presented to the mind in an objective and visible form, but clothed in language, and exhibited in the form of a narrative.  And therefore the English definition amounts, in fact, to this:  that Freemasonry is a science of morality, developed and inculcated by the ancient method of symbolism.  It is this peculiar character as a symbolic institution, this entire adoption of the method of instruction by symbolism, which gives its whole identity to Freemasonry, and has caused it to differ from every other association that the ingenuity of man has devised.  It is this that has bestowed upon it that attractive form which has always secured the attachment of its disciples and its own perpetuity.

The Roman Catholic church[37] is, perhaps, the only contemporaneous institution which continues to cultivate, in any degree, the beautiful system of symbolism.  But that which, in the Catholic church, is, in a great measure, incidental, and the fruit of development, is, in Freemasonry, the very life-blood and soul of the institution, born with it at its birth, or, rather, the germ from which the tree has sprung, and still giving it support, nourishment, and even existence.  Withdraw from Freemasonry its symbolism, and you take from the body its soul, leaving behind nothing but a lifeless mass of effete matter, fitted only for a rapid decay.

Since, then, the science of symbolism forms so important a part of the system of Freemasonry, it will be well to commence any discussion of that subject by an investigation of the nature of symbols in general.

There is no science so ancient as that of symbolism,[38] and no mode of instruction has ever been so general as was the symbolic in former ages.  “The first learning in the world,” says the great antiquary, Dr. Stukely, “consisted chiefly of symbols.  The wisdom of the Chaldeans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Jews, of Zoroaster, Sanchoniathon, Pherecydes, Syrus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, of all the ancients that is come to our hand, is symbolic.”  And the learned Faber remarks, that “allegory and personification were peculiarly agreeable to the genius of antiquity, and the simplicity of truth was continually sacrificed at the shrine of poetical decoration.”