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

“For he who is not pure in body and mind he who is enslaved by passions and desires, or by bondage to the material interests of this world, is, by the very fact of his uncleanness, prevented from passing on. Nothing unclean or that defileth a man, we are told, can enter into the kingdom; and, therefore, our candidates are told that if they have ‘money or metals about them’; if, that is, they are subject to any physical attraction or mental defilement, their real initiation into the higher things, of which our ceremony is but a dramatic symbol, must be deferred and repeated again and again until they are cleansed and fitted to pass on.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “Remember that when you first wore it it was a piece of pure white lambskin; an emblem of that purity and innocence which we always associate with the lamb and with the newborn child.”
  2. “I sometimes fear that the too conspicuous display of the emblems and trappings of mortality in our Lodges is apt to create the false impression that the death to which the third degree alludes is the mere physical change that awaits all men. But a far deeper meaning is intended.”
  3. “As the admission of every candidate into a Lodge presupposes his prior existence in the world without the Lodge, so our doctrine presupposes that ever soul born into this world has lived in, and has come hither from, an anterior state of life. It has lives elsewhere before it entered this world: it will live elsewhere when it passes hence, human life being but a parenthesis in the midst of eternity.”
  4. “The initiate placed in the N.E. corner is intended to see, then, that on the one side of him is the path that leads to the perpetual light of the East, into which he is encouraged to proceed, and that on the other is that of spiritual obscurity and ignorance into which it is possible for him to remain or relapse.”
  5. “Two paths are open to him at this stage, a path of light and a path of darkness; a path of good and a path of evil. The N.E. corner is the symbolical dividing place between the two.”