no farther than these preliminaries has scarcely advanced beyond the
rudiments of our science. There is a far nobler series of doctrines with
which Freemasonry is connected, and which no student ever began to
investigate who did not find himself insensibly led on, from step to step
in his researches, his love and admiration of the order increasing with
the augmentation of his acquaintance with its character. It is this which
constitutes the science and the philosophy of Freemasonry, and it is this
alone which will return the scholar who devotes himself to the task a
sevenfold reward for his labor.

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