but at the same time most
abstruse, doctrines of the science of masonic symbolism, that the Mason is
ever to be in search of truth, but is never to find it. This divine truth,
the object of all his labors, is symbolized by the WORD, for which we all
know he can only obtain a _substitute_; and this is intended to teach the
humiliating but necessary lesson that the knowledge of the nature of God
and of man's relation to him, which knowledge constitutes divine truth,
can never be acquired in this life. It is only when the portals of the
grave open to us, and give us an entrance into a more perfect life, that
this knowledge is to be attained. "Happy is the man," says the father of
lyric poetry, "who descends beneath the hollow earth, having beheld these
mysteries; he knows the end, he knows the origin of life."

The Middle Chamber is therefore symbolic of this life, where the symbol
only of the word can be given, where the truth is to be reached by
approximation only, and yet where we are to learn that that truth will
consist in a perfect knowledge of the G.A.O.T.U. This is the reward of the
inquiring Mason; in this consist the wages of a Fellow Craft; he is
directed to the truth, but must travel farther and ascend still higher to
attain it.

It is, then, as a symbol, and a symbol only, that we must study this
beautiful legend of the Winding Stairs. If we attempt to adopt it as an
historical fact, the absurdity of its details stares us in the face, and
wise men will wonder at our credulity. Its inventors had no desire thus to
impose upon our folly; but offering it to us as a great philosophical
myth, they did not for a moment suppose that we would pass over its
sublime moral teachings to accept the allegory as an historical narrative,
without meaning, and wholly irreconcilable with the records of Scripture,
and opposed by all the principles of probability. To suppose that eighty
thousand craftsmen were weekly paid in the narrow precincts of the temple
chambers, is simply to suppose an absurdity. But to believe that all this
pictorial representation of an ascent by a Winding Staircase to the place
where the wages of labor were to be received, was an allegory to teach us
the ascent of the mind from ignorance, through all the toils of study and
the difficulties of obtaining knowledge, receiving here a little and there
a little, adding something to the stock of our ideas at each step, until,
in the middle chamber of life,--in t