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

“By their help, too, he will perceive that he himself, his body and his soul, are ‘holy ground,’ upon which he should build the altar of his own spiritual life, an altar which he should suffer no ‘iron tool,’ no debasing habit of thought or conduct, to defile.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Remember that you first wore it with the flap raised, it being thus a five-cornered badge, indicating the five senses, by means of which we enter into relations with the material world around us (our ‘five points of fellowship’ with the material world), but indicating also by the triangular portion above, in conjunction with the quadrangular portion below, that man’s nature is a combination of soul and body”
  2. “An elementary and formal secrecy is requisite as a practical precaution against the intrusion of improper persons and for preventing profanation. In other respects the vital secrets of life, and of any system expounding life, protect themselves even though shouted from the housetops, because they mean nothing to those as yet unqualified for the knowledge and unready to identify themselves with it by incorporating it into their habitual thought and conduct.”
  3. “and men of honour will find it their duty to withdraw from the Order rather than suffer the harmony of thought that should characterize the Craft to be disturbed by their presence.”
  4. “This, our body of mortality, this veil of flesh and blood clothing the inner soul of us, this is the real ‘badge of innocence,’ the common ‘bond of friendship,’ with which the Great Architect has been pleased to invest us all this, the human body, is the badge which is ‘older and nobler than that of any other Order in existence'”
  5. “But upon entering this world, the soul must needs assume material form; in other words it takes upon itself a physical body to enable it to enter into relations with the physical world, and to perform the functions appropriate to it in this particular phase of its career. Need I say that the physical form with which we have all been invested by the Creator upon our entrance into this world, and of which we shall all divest ourselves when we leave the Lodge of this life, is represented among us by our Masonic apron?”