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

“The Craft whose work we are taught to honour with the name of a ‘science,’ a ‘royal art,’ has surely some larger end in view than merely inculcating the practice of social virtues common to all the world and by no means the monopoly of Freemasons.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “There is surely, too, no need for us to join a secret society to be taught that the volume of the Sacred Law is a fountain of truth and instruction; or to go through the great and elaborate ceremony of the third degree merely to learn that we have each to die.”
  2. “and since the Order accords perfect liberty of opinion to all men, the truths it has to offer are entirely ‘free to’ us according to our capacity to assimilate them, whilst those to whom they do not appeal, those who think they can find a more sufficing philosophy elsewhere, are equally at liberty to be ‘free from’ them”
  3. “It is absurd to think that a vast organization like Masonry was ordained merely to teach to grown men of the world the symbolical meaning of a few simple builders’ tools, or to impress upon us such elementary virtues as temperance and justice:–the children in every village school are taught such things; or to enforce such simple principles morals as brotherly love, which every church and every religion teaches; or as relief, which is practised quite as much by non-Masons as by us; or of truth which every infant learns upon its mother’s knee.”
  4. “In all periods the world’s history, and in every part of the globe, the secret orders and societies have existed outside the limits of the official churches for the purpose of teaching what are called ‘the Mysteries’: for imparting to suitable and prepared minds certain truths of human life, certain instructions about divine things, about the things that belong to our peace, about human nature and human destiny, which it was undesirable to publish to the multitude who would but profane those teachings and apply the esoteric knowledge that was communicated to perverse and perhaps to disastrous ends.”
  5. “To state things briefly, Masonry offers us, in dramatic form and by means of dramatic ceremonial a philosophy of the spiritual life of man and a diagram of the process of regeneration.”