have adopted as not materially
differing from the common version, but which is far more poetical and more
in the strain of the original, thus explains the allusions to the
foundation-stone: "It was the custom to celebrate the laying of the
corner-stone of an important building with music, songs, shouting, &c.
Hence the morning stars are represented as celebrating the laying of the
corner-stone of the earth." [220]

Upon this meagre statement have been accumulated more traditions than
appertain to any other masonic symbol. The Rabbins, as has already been
intimated, divide the glory of these apocryphal histories with the Masons;
indeed, there is good reason for a suspicion that nearly all the masonic
legends owe their first existence to the imaginative genius of the writers
of the Jewish Talmud. But there is this difference between the Hebrew and
the masonic traditions, that the Talmudic scholar recited them as truthful
histories, and swallowed, in one gulp of faith, all their impossibilities
and anachronisms, while the masonic student has received them as
allegories, whose value is not in the facts, but in the sentiments which
they convey.

With this understanding of their meaning, let us proceed to a collation of
these legends.

In that blasphemous work, the "_Toldoth Jeshu_" or _Life of Jesus_,
written, it is supposed, in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we find
the following account of this wonderful stone:--

"At that time [the time of Jesus] there was in the House of the Sanctuary
[that is, the temple] a Stone of Foundation, which is the very stone that
our father Jacob anointed with oil, as it is described in the
twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Genesis. On that stone the letters of
the tetragrammaton were inscribed, and whosoever of the Israelites should
learn that name would be able to master the world. To prevent, therefore,
any one from learning these letters, two iron dogs were placed upon two
columns in front of the Sanctuary. If any person, having acquired the
knowledge of these letters, desired to depart from the Sanctuary, the
barking of the dogs, by magical power, inspired so much fear, that he
suddenly forgot what he had acquired."

This passage is cited by the learned Buxtorf, in his "_Lexicon
Talmudicum_;" [221] but in the copy of the "_Toldoth Jeshu_" which I have
the good fortune to possess (for it is among the rarest of books), I find
another passage which gives some additional parti