It is unnecessary to carry these parallelisms any farther.  Any one can, however, see in them an undoubted reference to that septenary division which so universally prevailed throughout the ancient world, and the influence of which is still felt even in the common day life and observances of our time.  Seven was, among the Hebrews, their perfect number; and hence we see it continually recurring in all their sacred rites.  The creation was perfected in seven days; seven priests, with seven trumpets, encompassed the walls of Jericho for seven days; Noah received seven days’ notice of the commencement of the deluge, and seven persons accompanied him into the ark, which rested on Mount Ararat on the seventh month; Solomon was seven years in building the temple:  and there are hundreds of other instances of the prominence of this talismanic number, if there were either time or necessity to cite them.

Among the Gentiles the same number was equally sacred.  Pythagoras called it a “venerable number.”  The septenary division of time into weeks of seven days, although not universal, as has been generally supposed, was sufficiently so to indicate the influence of the number.  And it is remarkable, as perhaps in some way referring to the seven-stepped ladder which we have been considering, that in the ancient Mysteries, as Apuleius informs us, the candidate was seven times washed in the consecrated waters of ablution.

There is, then, an anomaly in giving to the mystical ladder of Masonry only three rounds.  It is an anomaly, however, with which Masonry has had nothing to do.  The error arose from the ignorance of those inventors who first engraved the masonic symbols for our monitors.  The ladder of Masonry, like the equipollent ladders of its kindred institutions, always had seven steps, although in modern times the three principal or upper ones are alone alluded to.  These rounds, beginning at the lowest, are Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, Justice, Faith, Hope, and Charity.  Charity, therefore, takes the same place in the ladder of masonic virtues as the sun does in the ladder of planets.  In the ladder of metals we find gold, and in that of colors yellow, occupying the same elevated position.  Now, St. Paul explains Charity as signifying, not alms-giving, which is the modern popular meaning, but love—­that love which “suffereth long and is kind;” and when, in our lectures on this subject, we speak of it as the greatest of virtues, because, when Faith is lost and Hope has ceased, it extends “beyond the grave to realms of endless bliss,” we there refer it to the Divine Love of our Creator.  But Portal, in his Essay on Symbolic Colors, informs us that the sun represents Divine Love, and gold indicates the goodness of God.

So that if Charity is equivalent to Divine Love, and Divine Love is represented by the sun, and lastly, if Charity be the topmost round of the masonic ladder, then again we arrive, as the result of our researches, at the symbol so often already repeated of the solar orb.  The natural sun or the spiritual sun—­the sun, either as the vivifying principle of animated nature, and therefore the special object of adoration, or as the most prominent instrument of the Creator’s benevolence—­was ever a leading idea in the symbolism of antiquity.