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

“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.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “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.”
  2. “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.”
  3. “For in the last resource no one can communicate the deeper things in Masonry to another. Every man must discover and learn them for himself, although a friend or brother may be able to conduct him a certain distance on the path of understanding.”
  4. “It is from lack of instruction rather than of desire to learn the meaning of Masonry that the Craft suffers to-day. But, as one finds everywhere, that desire exists; and so, for what they may be worth, these papers are offered to the Craft as a contribution towards satisfying it.”
  5. “I love you now again with an undivided song. Because I can never love you, I cannot do you wrong. I saw in your dying embraces the birth of a new embrace; In the tears of your pitiful faces, another Holier Face. Unknowing it, undesiring, your lips have led me higher; You have taught me purer songs that your souls did not desire; You have led me through your chambers, where the secret bolt was drawn, To the chambers of the Highest and the secrets of the Dawn! You have brought me to command you, and not to be denied; You have taught me in perfection to be unsatisfied; You have taught me midnight vigils, when you smiled in amorous sleep; You have even taught a man the woman’s way to weep.”