In fact, man’s earliest instruction was by symbols.[39] The objective character of a symbol is best calculated to be grasped by the infant mind, whether the infancy of that mind be considered nationally or individually.  And hence, in the first ages of the world, in its infancy, all propositions, theological, political, or scientific, were expressed in the form of symbols.  Thus the first religions were eminently symbolical, because, as that great philosophical historian, Grote, has remarked, “At a time when language was yet in its infancy, visible symbols were the most vivid means of acting upon the minds of ignorant hearers.”

Again:  children receive their elementary teaching in symbols.  “A was an Archer;” what is this but symbolism?  The archer becomes to the infant mind the symbol of the letter A, just as, in after life, the letter becomes, to the more advanced mind, the symbol of a certain sound of the human voice.[40] The first lesson received by a child in acquiring his alphabet is thus conveyed by symbolism.  Even in the very formation of language, the medium of communication between man and man, and which must hence have been an elementary step in the progress of human improvement, it was found necessary to have recourse to symbols, for words are only and truly certain arbitrary symbols by which and through which we give an utterance to our ideas.  The construction of language was, therefore, one of the first products of the science of symbolism.

We must constantly bear in mind this fact, of the primary existence and predominance of symbolism in the earliest times.[41] when we are investigating the nature of the ancient religions, with which the history of Freemasonry is so intimately connected.  The older the religion, the more the symbolism abounds.  Modern religions may convey their dogmas in abstract propositions; ancient religions always conveyed them in symbols.  Thus there is more symbolism in the Egyptian religion than in the Jewish, more in the Jewish than in the Christian, more in the Christian than in the Mohammedan, and, lastly, more in the Roman than in the Protestant.

But symbolism is not only the most ancient and general, but it is also the most practically useful, of sciences.  We have already seen how actively it operates in the early stages of life and of society.  We have seen how the first ideas of men and of nations are impressed upon their minds by means of symbols.  It was thus that the ancient peoples were almost wholly educated.

“In the simpler stages of society,” says one writer on this subject, “mankind can be instructed in the abstract knowledge of truths only by symbols and parables.  Hence we find most heathen religions becoming mythic, or explaining their mysteries by allegories, or instructive incidents.  Nay, God himself, knowing the nature of the creatures formed by him, has condescended, in the earlier revelations that he made of himself, to teach by symbols; and the greatest of all teachers instructed the multitudes by parables.[42] The great exemplar of the ancient philosophy and the grand archetype of modern philosophy were alike distinguished by their possessing this faculty in a high degree, and have told us that man was best instructed by similitudes.” [43]