n Jacob set up the stone on which he had slept in his journey to
Padan-aram, and where he was blessed with the vision of ascending and
descending angels, he anointed it with oil, and thus consecrated it as an
altar to God. Such an inunction was, in ancient times, as it still
continues to be in many modern countries and contemporary religions, a
symbol of the setting apart of the thing or person so anointed and
consecrated to a holy purpose.

Hence, then, we are reminded by this last impressive ceremony, that the
cultivation of virtue, the practice of duty, the resistance of temptation,
the submission to suffering, the devotion to truth, the maintenance of
integrity, and all those other graces by which we strive to fit our
bodies, as living stones, for the spiritual building of eternal life,
must, after all, to make the object effectual and the labor successful, be
consecrated by a holy obedience to God's will and a firm reliance on God's
providence, which alone constitute the chief corner-stone and sure
foundation, on which any man can build with the reasonable hope of a
prosperous issue to his work.

It may be noticed, in concluding this topic, that the corner-stone seems
to be peculiarly a Jewish symbol. I can find no reference to it in any of
the ancient pagan rites, and the EBEN PINAH, the _corner-stone,_ which is
so frequently mentioned in Scripture as the emblem of an important
personage, and most usually, in the Old Testament, of the expected
Messiah, appears, in its use in Masonry, to have had, unlike almost every
other symbol of the order, an exclusively temple origin.

XXIV.

The Ineffable Name.

Another important symbol is the Ineffable Name, with which the series of
ritualistic symbols will be concluded.

The Tetragrammaton,[122] or Ineffable Word,--the Incommunicable Name,--is
a symbol--for rightly-considered it is nothing more than a symbol--that
has more than any other (except, perhaps, the symbols connected with
sun-worship), pervaded the rites of antiquity. I know, indeed, of no
system of ancient initiation in which it has not some prominent form and
place.

But as it was, perhaps, the earliest symbol which was corrupted by the
spurious Freemasonry of the pagans, in their secession from the primitive
system of the patriarchs and ancient priesthood, it will be most expedient
for the thorough discussion of the subject which is proposed in the
present paper, that we should begin the inves