The Deeper Symbolism of Freemasonry from The Meaning of Masonry by Walter Leslie Wilmshurst.

“Anyone, of course, can understand the simpler meaning of our symbols, especially with the help of the explanatory lectures; but he may still miss the meaning of the scheme as a vital whole.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “We meet in our Lodges regularly we perform our ceremonial work and repeat catechetical instruction-lectures night after night with a less or greater degree of intelligence and verbal perfection, and there our work ends, though the ability to perform this work creditably were the be-all and the end-all of Masonic work: Seldom or never do we employ our Lodge meeting for that purpose for which, quite as much as for ceremonial purposes, they were intended, for ‘expatiating on the mysteries of the Craft,’ and perhaps our neglect to do so is because we have ourselves imperfectly realized what those mysteries are into which our Order was primarily formed to introduce us.”
  2. “Any one who has any experience of any mystical state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound symbols, whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the dream that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for years.”
  3. “The most important, the most precise of all Shelley’s symbols, the one he uses with the fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and Evening Star. It rises and sets for ever over the towers and rivers, and is the throne of his genius.”
  4. “It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature.”
  5. “In brief, the vaguest notions obtain about the origin and history of the Craft, whilst the still more vital subject of its immediate and present purpose, and of its possibilities, remains almost entirely outside the consciousness of many of its own members.”