If I deemed it necessary to substantiate the truth of the assertion that the mind of King Solomon was eminently symbolic in its propensities, I might easily refer to his writings, filled as they are to profusion with tropes and figures.  Passing over the Book of Canticles,—­that great lyrical drama, whose abstruse symbolism has not yet been fully evolved or explained, notwithstanding the vast number of commentators who have labored at the task,—­I might simply refer to that beautiful passage in the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes, so familiar to every Mason as being appropriated, in the ritual, to the ceremonies of the third degree, and in which a dilapidated building is metaphorically made to represent the decays and infirmities of old age in the human body.  This brief but eloquent description is itself an embodiment of much of our masonic symbolism, both as to the mode and the subject matter.

In attempting any investigation into the symbolism of Freemasonry, the first thing that should engage our attention is the general purport of the institution, and the mode in which its symbolism is developed.  Let us first examine it as a whole, before we investigate its parts, just as we would first view, as critics, the general effect of a building, before we began to inquire into its architectural details.

Looking, then, in this way, at the institution—­coming down to us, as it has, from a remote age—­having passed unaltered and unscathed through a thousand revolutions of nations—­and engaging, as disciples in its school of mental labor, the intellectual of all times—­the first thing that must naturally arrest the attention is the singular combination that it presents of an operative with a speculative organization—­an art with a science—­the technical terms and language of a mechanical profession with the abstruse teachings of a profound philosophy.

Here it is before us—­a venerable school, discoursing of the deepest subjects of wisdom, in which sages might alone find themselves appropriately employed, and yet having its birth and deriving its first life from a society of artisans, whose only object was, apparently, the construction of material edifices of stone and mortar.

The nature, then, of this operative and speculative combination, is the first problem to be solved, and the symbolism which depends upon it is the first feature of the institution which is to be developed.

Freemasonry, in its character as an operative art, is familiar to every one.  As such, it is engaged in the application of the rules and principles of architecture to the construction of edifices for private and public use—­houses for the dwelling-place of man, and temples for the worship of Deity.  It abounds, like every other art, in the use of technical terms, and employs, in practice, an abundance of implements and materials which are peculiar to itself.