39. The distinguished German mythologist Müller defines a symbol to be "an eternal, visible sign, with which a spiritual feeling, emotion, or idea is connected." I am not aware of a more comprehensive, and at the same time distinctive, definition.
40. And it may be added, that the word becomes a symbol of an idea; and hence, Harris, in his "Hermes," defines language to be "a system of articulate voices, the symbols of our ideas, but of those principally which are general or universal."—Hermes, book iii. ch. 3.
41. "Symbols," says Müller, "are evidently coeval with the human race; they result from the union of the soul with the body in man; nature has implanted the feeling for them in the human heart."—Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, p. 196, Leitch's translation.—R.W. Mackay says, "The earliest instruments of education were symbols, the most universal symbols of the multitudinously present Deity, being earth or heaven, or some selected object, such as the sun or moon, a tree or a stone, familiarly seen in either of them."—Progress of the Intellect, vol. i p. 134.
42. Between the allegory, or parable, and the symbol, there is, as I have said, no essential difference. The Greek verb παραβαλλω, whence comes the word parable, and the verb συμβαλλω in the same language, which is the root of the word symbol, both have the synonymous meaning "to compare." A parable is only a spoken symbol. The definition of a parable given by Adam Clarke is equally applicable to a symbol, viz.: "A comparison or similitude, in which one thing is compared with another, especially spiritual things with natural, by which means these spiritual things are better understood, and make a deeper impression on the attentive mind."
43. North British Review, August, 1851. Faber passes a similar encomium. "Hence the language of symbolism, being so purely a language of ideas, is, in one respect, more perfect than any ordinary language can be: it possesses the variegated elegance of synonymes without any of the obscurity which arises from the use of ambiguous terms."—On the Prophecies, ii. p. 63.
44. "By speculative Masonry we learn to subdue our passions, to act upon the square, to keep a tongue of good report, to maintain secrecy, and practise charity."—Lect. of Fel. Craft. But this is a very meagre definition, unworthy of the place it occupies in the lecture of the second degree.
45. "Animal worship among the Egyptians was the natural and unavoidable consequence of the misconception, by the vulgar, of those emblematical figures invented by the priests to record their own philosophical conception of absurd ideas. As the pictures and effigies suspended in early Christian churches, to commemorate a person or an event, became in time objects of worship to the vulgar, so, in Egypt, the esoteric or spiritual meaning of the emblems was lost in the gross materialism of the beholder. This esoteric and allegorical meaning was, however, preserved by the priests, and communicated in the mysteries alone to the initiated, while the uninstructed retained only the grosser conception."—GLIDDON, Otia Aegyptiaca, p. 94.
46. "To perpetuate the esoteric signification of these symbols to the initiated, there were established the Mysteries, of which institution we have still a trace in Freemasonry."—GLIDDON, Otia Aegyp. p. 95.
47. Philo Judaeus says, that "Moses had been initiated by the Egyptians into the philosophy of symbols and hieroglyphics, as well as into the ritual of the holy animals." And Hengstenberg, in his learned work on "Egypt and the Books of Moses," conclusively shows, by numerous examples, how direct were the Egyptian references of the Pentateuch; in which fact, indeed, he recognizes "one of the most powerful arguments for its credibility and for its composition by Moses."—HENGSTENBERG, p. 239, Robbins's trans.
48. Josephus, Antiq. book iii. ch. 7.