application of the same principles of instruction, that pervaded all the
surrounding Gentile nations, to the inculcation of truth. The very idea of
the ark itself[49] was borrowed, as the discoveries of the modern
Egyptologists have shown us, from the banks of the Nile; and the
breastplate of the high priest, with its Urim and Thummim,[50] was
indebted for its origin to a similar ornament worn by the Egyptian judge.
The system was the same; in its application, only, did it differ.

With the tabernacle of Moses the temple of King Solomon is closely
connected: the one was the archetype of the other. Now, it is at the
building of that temple that we must place the origin of Freemasonry in
its present organization: not that the system did not exist before, but
that the union of its operative and speculative character, and the mutual
dependence of one upon the other, were there first established.

At the construction of this stupendous edifice--stupendous, not in
magnitude, for many a parish church has since excelled it in size,[51] but
stupendous in the wealth and magnificence of its ornaments--the wise king
of Israel, with all that sagacity for which he was so eminently
distinguished, and aided and counselled by the Gentile experience of the
king of Tyre, and that immortal architect who superintended his workmen,
saw at once the excellence and beauty of this method of inculcating moral
and religious truth, and gave, therefore, the impulse to that symbolic
reference of material things to a spiritual sense, which has ever since
distinguished the institution of which he was the founder.

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