upon its restoration to its original wealth and dignities as being
prophetically symbolized.

In some of the high philosophical degrees it is taught that the whole
legend refers to the sufferings and death, with the subsequent
resurrection, of Christ.[166]

Hutchinson, who has the honor of being the earliest philosophical writer
on Freemasonry in England, supposes it to have been intended to embody the
idea of the decadence of the Jewish religion, and the substitution of the
Christian in its place and on its ruins.[167]

Dr. Oliver--"clarum et venerabile nomen"--thinks that it is typical of the
murder of Abel by Cain, and that it symbolically refers to the universal
death of our race through Adam, and its restoration to life in the
Redeemer,[168] according to the expression of the apostle, "As in Adam we
all died, so in Christ we all live."

Ragon makes Hiram a symbol of the sun shorn of its vivifying rays and
fructifying power by the three winter months, and its restoration to
generative heat by the season of spring.[169]

And, finally, Des Etangs, adopting, in part, the interpretation of Ragon,
adds to it another, which he calls the moral symbolism of the legend, and
supposes that Hiram is no other than eternal reason, whose enemies are the
vices that deprave and destroy humanity.[170]

To each of these interpretations it seems to me that there are important
objections, though perhaps to some less so than to others.

As to those who seek for an astronomical interpretation of the legend, in
which the annual changes of the sun are symbolized, while the ingenuity
with which they press their argument cannot but be admired, it is evident
that, by such an interpretation, they yield all that Masonry has gained
of religious development in past ages, and fall back upon that corruption
and perversion of Sabaism from which it was the object, even of the
Spurious Freemasonry of antiquity, to rescue its disciples.

The Templar interpretation of the myth must at once be discarded if we
would avoid the difficulties of anachronism, unless we deny that the
legend existed before the abolition of the Order of Knights Templar, and
such denial would be fatal to the antiquity of Freemasonry.[171]

And as to the adoption of the Christian reference, Hutchinson, and after
him Oliver, profoundly philosophical as are the masonic speculations of
both, have, I am constrained to believe, fallen into a great error in
calling the Master Ma