cts announced in this 15th proposition, are content to find the
origin of Freemasonry at the temple of Solomon. But if my theory be
correct, the truth is, that it there received, not its birth, but only a
new modification of its character. The legend of the third degree--the
golden legend, the _legenda aurea_--of Masonry was there adopted by pure
Freemasonry, which before had no such legend, from spurious Freemasonry.
But the legend had existed under other names and forms, in all the
Mysteries, for ages before. The doctrine of immortality, which had
hitherto been taught by the Noachites simply as an abstract proposition,
was thenceforth to be inculcated by a symbolic lesson--the symbol of Hiram
the Builder was to become forever after the distinctive feature of
Freemasonry.

16. But another important modification was effected in the Masonic system
at the building of the temple. Previous to the union which then took
place, the pure Freemasonry of the Noachites had always been speculative,
but resembled the present organization in no other way than in the
cultivation of the same abstract principles of divine truth.

17. The Tyrians, on the contrary, were architects by profession, and, as
their leaders were disciples of the school of the spurious Freemasonry,
they, for the first time, at the temple of Solomon, when they united with
their Jewish contemporaries, infused into the speculative science, which
was practised by the latter, the elements of an operative art.

18. Therefore the system continued thenceforward, for ages, to present the
commingled elements of operative and speculative Masonry. We see this in
the _Collegia Fabrorum_, or Colleges of Artificers, first established at
Rome by Numa, and which were certainly of a Masonic form in their
organization; in the Jewish sect of the Essenes, who wrought as well as
prayed, and who are claimed to have been the descendants of the temple
builders, and also, and still more prominently, in the Travelling
Freemasons of the middle ages, who identify themselves by their very name
with their modern successors, and whose societies were composed of learned
men who thought and wrote, and of workmen who labored and built. And so
for a long time Freemasonry continued to be both operative and
speculative.

19. But another change was to be effected in the institution to make it
precisely what it now is, and, therefore, at a very recent period
(comparatively speaking), the operative f