and numerous cases where anything short of signs would be entirely useless. One of the Order, for example, is shipwrecked in a distant land. Penniless and friendless, he falls ill, and must have assistance, or perish. He cannot beg, and that which could open to him the gates of the Masonic templehis certificate-is lost in the sea. To save a brother from so painful a position, something more is requisite. A sign or token, a secret language unwritten-only upon the heart-and which, so long as the possessor has life and reason, cannot be lost or stolen-will alone meet the case. Our secrets, then, are only a few necessary signs, yet entirely valueless as things, which all good men may know, if they will but take upon themselves our vow of charity. We are not, therefore, a secret society. We have, it is true, rites that are not made public; but they are of the most harmless character, and are useful only as instruments or agencies for good.

The Order is based on the general principles of secrecy, because a unity and harmony can be secured thereby, which cannot be obtained in any other way. Secrecy has a mystic, almost supernatural force, and binds men more closely together than all other means combined. Mystery has charms for all men, and is closely allied to the most spiritual part of our nature. A secret shared between a certain number of persons is a perpetual bond of union and amity among them. The great temple

of the universe is a vast labyrinth of mysteries, and the progress of our race in knowledge and virtue, is a sublime and everlasting imitation, ever revealing more of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

The philosophy of secrecy and symbols is so well and ably set forth by one of the most brilliant writers* of this age, that we cannot do a better service to the reader than by giving his thoughts in his own language:

roots be hidden, Let the sun shine

"Bees will not work except in darkness; thoughts will not work except in silence; neither will virtue work except in secrecy. Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of ' those secrets known to all.' Is not shame the soil of all virtue, of all good manners, and good morals? Like other plants, virtue will not grow unless its buried from the eye of the sun. on it, nay, do but look at it privily thyself, the root withers and no flowers will glad thee. Oh! my friends, when we view the fair clustering flowers that over-wreath, for example, the marriage bower, and encircle man's life with the fragrance and hues of heaven, what hand will not smite the foul plunderer that grubs them up by the roots, and, with grinning, grunting satisfaction, shows us the dung they flourish in! Men speak much of the printing

* Thomas Carlyle-Sartor Resartus.

press with its newspapers; du himmel! what are they to clothes and the tailor's goose?

"Of kin to the so incalculable influences of concealment, and connected with still greater things, is the wondrous agency of symbols. In a symbol there is concealment, and yet revelation: here, therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. And if both the speech be itself high, and the silence fit and noble, how expressive will their union be! Thus in many a painted device, or simple seal emblem, the commonest truth stands out to us proclaimed with quite new emphasis.

"For it is here that Fantasy, with her mystic wonder-land, plays into the small prose domain of sense, and becomes incorporated therewith. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the infinite; the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, and, as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched. He everywhere finds himself encompassed with symbols, recognized as such or not recognized the universe is but one vast symbol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to sense of the mystic God-given force that is in him; a 'gospel of

freedom,' which he, the 'Messias of nature,' preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a thought; but bears visible record of invisible things; but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real."

'Man," says the professor elsewhere, in quite antipodal contrast with these high-soaring delineations, which we have here cut short on the verge of the inane," man is by birth somewhat of an owl. Perhaps, too, of all the owleries that ever possessed him, the most owlish, if we consider it, is that of your actually existing motive millowrights. Fantastic tricks enough has man played in his time; has fancied himself to be most things, down even to an animated heap of glass; but to fancy himself a dead iron balance for weighing pains and pleasures on, was reserved for this his latter era. There stands he, his universe one huge manger, filled with hay and thistles to be weighed against each other; and looks long-eared enough. Alas, poor devil! spectres are appointed to haunt him; one age he is hag-ridden, bewitched; the next, priest-ridden, befooled; in all ages bedeviled. And now the genius of mechanism smothers him worse than any nightmare did; till the soul is nigh choked out of him, and only a kind of digestive, mechanic life remains. In earth and in heaven he can see nothing but mechanism has fear for nothing else, hope in no

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thing else; the world would indeed grind him to pieces; but cannot he fathom the doctrine of motives, and cunningly compute these, and mechanize them to grind the other way?

"Were he not, as has been said, purblinded by enchantment, you had but to bid him open his eyes and look. In which country, in which time, was it hitherto that man's history, or the history of man, went on by calculated or calculable motives?' What make ye of your Christianities, and chivalries, and reformations, and Marsellaise hymns, and reigns of terror? Nay, has not perhaps the motivegrinder himself been in love? Did he never stand so much as a contested election? Leave him to time and the medicating virtue of nature ?"—" Yes, friends," elsewhere observes the professor, "not our logical, mensurative faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us; I might say, priest and prophet to lead us heavenward; or magician and wizard to leave us hellward. Nay, even for the basest sensualist, what is sense but the implement of fantasy, the vessel it drinks out of? Ever in the dullest existence there is a sheen either of inspiration or of madness (thou partly hast it in thy choice, which of the two) that gleams in from the circumambient eternity, and colors with its own hues our little islet of time. The understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but fantasy is thy eye, with its color-giving retina, healthy or diseased.