giving it its most determinative
character, that it is evident that the institution could no more exist
without the legend, than the legend could have been retained without the
institution. This, therefore, the advocates of the historical character of
the legend think, gives probability at least to its truth.

Secondly. It is not contradicted by the scriptural history of the
transactions at the temple, and therefore, in the absence of the only
existing written authority on the subject, we are at liberty to depend on
traditional information, provided the tradition be, as it is contended
that in this instance it is, reasonable, probable, and supported by
uninterrupted succession.

Thirdly. It is contended that the very silence of Scripture in relation to
the death of Hiram, the Builder, is an argument in favor of the mysterious
nature of that death. A man so important in his position as to have been
called the favorite of two kings,--sent by one and received by the other
as a gift of surpassing value, and the donation thought worthy of a
special record, would hardly have passed into oblivion, when his labor was
finished, without the memento of a single line, unless his death had taken
place in such a way as to render a public account of it improper. And
this is supposed to have been the fact. It had become the legend of the
new Mysteries, and, like those of the old ones, was only to be divulged
when accompanied with the symbolic instructions which it was intended to
impress upon the minds of the aspirants.

But if, on the other hand, it be admitted that the legend of the third
degree is a fiction,--that the whole masonic and extra-scriptural account
of Hiram Abif is simply a myth,--it could not, in the slightest degree,
affect the theory which it is my object to establish. For since, in a
mythic relation, as the learned Mueller[34] has observed, fact and
imagination, the real and the ideal, are very closely united, and since
the myth itself always arises, according to the same author, out of a
necessity and unconsciousness on the part of its framers, and by impulses
which act alike on all, we must go back to the Spurious Freemasonry of the
Dionysiacs for the principle which led to the involuntary formation of
this Hiramic myth; and then we arrive at the same result, which has been
already indicated, namely, that the necessity of the religious sentiment
in the Jewish mind, to which the introduction of the legend of Dionys