by virtue in the heart, and summarily implies the arrangement and
perfection of those holy and sublime principles by which the soul is
fitted for a meet temple of God in a world of immortality." [214]

Charles Scott has devoted one of the lectures in his "Analogy of Ancient
Craft Masonry to Natural and Revealed Religion" to a thorough
consideration of this subject. The language is too long for quotation, but
the symbol has been well interpreted by him.[215]

Still more recently, Bro. John A. Loclor has treated the topic in an
essay, which I regret has not had a larger circulation. A single and brief
passage may show the spirit of the production, and how completely it
sustains the idea of this symbolism.

"We may disguise it as we will," says Bro. Lodor, "we may evade a scrutiny
of it; but our character, as it is, with its faults and blemishes, its
weaknesses and infirmities, its vices and its stains, together with its
redeeming traits, its better parts, is our speculative temple." And he
goes on to extend the symbolic idea: "Like the exemplar temple on Mount
Moriah, it should be preserved as a hallowed shrine, and guarded with the
same vigilant care. It should be our pearl of price set round with walls
and enclosures, even as was the Jewish temple, and the impure, the
vicious, the guilty, and the profane be banished from even its outer
courts. A faithful sentinel should be placed at every gate, a watchman on
every wall, and the first approach of a cowan and eavesdropper be
promptly met and resisted."

Teachings like this are now so common that every American Mason who has
studied the symbolism of his Order believes, with Carlyle, that "there is
but one temple in the world, and that is the body of man."

This inquiry into the meaning and object of labor, as a masonic symbol,
brings us to these conclusions:--

1. That our ancient brethren worked as long as the operative art
predominated in the institution at material temples, the most prominent of
these being the temple of King Solomon.

2. That when the speculative science took the place of the operative art,
the modern Masons, working no longer at material temples, but holding
still to the sacred thought, the reverential idea, of a holy temple, a
Lord's house to be built, began to labor at living temples, and to make
man, the true house of the Lord, the tabernacle for the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit.

And, 3. Therefore to every Freemason who rightly comprehend