aimed for them is,
that in some there is simply a substratum of history, the edifice
constructed on this foundation being purely inventive, to serve us a
medium for inculcating some religious truth; in others, nothing more than
an idea to which the legend or myth is indebted for its existence, and of
which it is, as a symbol, the exponent; and in others, again, a great deal
of truthful narrative, more or less intermixed with fiction, but the
historical always predominating.

Thus there is a legend, contained in some of our old records, which states
that Euclid was a distinguished Mason, and that he introduced Masonry
among the Egyptians.[149] Now, it is not at all necessary to the orthodoxy
of a Mason's creed that he should literally believe that Euclid, the great
geometrician, was really a Freemason, and that the ancient Egyptians were
indebted to him for the establishment of the institution among them.
Indeed, the palpable anachronism in the legend which makes Euclid the
contemporary of Abraham necessarily prohibits any such belief, and shows
that the whole story is a sheer invention. The intelligent Mason, however,
will not wholly reject the legend, as ridiculous or absurd; but, with a
due sense of the nature and design of our system of symbolism, will rather
accept it as what, in the classification laid down on a preceding page,
would be called "a philosophical myth"--an ingenious method of conveying,
symbolically, a masonic truth.

Euclid is here very appropriately used as a type of geometry, that science
of which he was so eminent a teacher, and the myth or legend then
symbolizes the fact that there was in Egypt a close connection between
that science and the great moral and religious system, which was among the
Egyptians, as well as other ancient nations, what Freemasonry is in the
present day--a secret institution, established for the inculcation of the
same principles, and inculcating them in the same symbolic manner. So
interpreted, this legend corresponds to all the developments of Egyptian
history, which teach us how close a connection existed in that country
between the religious and scientific systems. Thus Kenrick tells us, that
"when we read of foreigners [in Egypt] being obliged to submit to painful
and tedious ceremonies of initiation, it was not that they might learn the
secret meaning of the rites of Osiris or Isis, but that they might partake
of the knowledge of astronomy, physic, geometry, and theo