it has a strict and beautiful reference to the purposes for which it was
used in the ancient temple; for as it was there employed "to spread the
cement which united the building in one common mass," so is it selected as
the symbol of brotherly love--that cement whose object is to unite our
mystic association in one sacred and harmonious band of brethren.

Here, then, we perceive the first, or, as I have already called it, the
elementary form of our symbolism--the adaptation of the terms, and
implements, and processes of an operative art to a speculative science.
The temple is now completed. The stones having been hewed, squared, and
numbered in the quarries by the apprentices,--having been properly
adjusted by the craftsmen, and finally secured in their appropriate
places, with the strongest and purest cement, by the master builders,--the
temple of King Solomon presented, in its finished condition, so noble an
appearance of sublimity and grandeur as to well deserve to be selected, as
it has been, for the type or symbol of that immortal temple of the body,
to which Christ significantly and symbolically alluded when he said,
"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."

This idea of representing the interior and spiritual man by a material
temple is so apposite in all its parts as to have occurred on more than
one occasion to the first teachers of Christianity. Christ himself
repeatedly alludes to it in other passages, and the eloquent and
figurative St. Paul beautifully extends the idea in one of his Epistles to
the Corinthians, in the following language: "Know ye not that ye are the
temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you?" And again, in
a subsequent passage of the same Epistle, he reiterates the idea in a more
positive form: "What, know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?" And
Dr. Adam Clarke, while commenting on this latter passage, makes the very