continues the task by cultivating those virtues which give form
and impression to the character, as well adapted stones give shape and
stability to the building. And hence the "working tools" of the Fellow
Craft are referred, in their symbolic application, to those virtues. In
the alphabet of symbolism, we find the square, the level, and the plumb
appropriated to this second degree. The square is a symbol denoting
morality. It teaches us to apply the unerring principles of moral science
to every action of our lives, to see that all the motives and results of
our conduct shall coincide with the dictates of divine justice, and that
all our thoughts, words, and deeds shall harmoniously conspire, like the
well-adjusted and rightly-squared joints of an edifice, to produce a
smooth, unbroken life of virtue.

The plumb is a symbol of rectitude of conduct, and inculcates that
integrity of life and undeviating course of moral uprightness which can
alone distinguish the good and just man. As the operative workman erects
his temporal building with strict observance of that plumb-line, which
will not permit him to deviate a hair's breadth to the right or to the
left, so the speculative Mason, guided by the unerring principles of right
and truth inculcated in the symbolic teachings of the same implement, is
steadfast in the pursuit of truth, neither bending beneath the frowns of
adversity nor yielding to the seductions of prosperity.[61]

The level, the last of the three working tools of the operative craftsman,
is a symbol of equality of station. Not that equality of civil or social
position which is to be found only in the vain dreams of the anarchist or
the Utopian, but that great moral and physical equality which affects the
whole human race as the children of one common Father, who causes his sun
to shine and his rain to fall on all alike, and who has so appointed the
universal lot of humanity, that death, the leveller of all human
greatness, is made to visit with equal pace the prince's palace and the
peasant's hut.[62]

Here, then, we have three more signs or hieroglyphics added to our
alphabet of symbolism. Others there are in this degree, but they belong
to a higher grade of interpretation, and cannot be appropriately discussed
in an essay on temple symbolism only.

We now reach the third degree, the Master Masons of the modern science,
and the Epopts, or beholders of the sacred things in the ancient
Mysteries.

In the