nce of Masonry.

The interpretation, I conceive, is briefly this: Every Speculative Mason
is familiar with the fact that the east, as the source of material light,
is a symbol of his own order, which professes to contain within its bosom
the pure light of truth. As, in the physical world, the morning of each
day is ushered into existence by the reddening dawn of the eastern sky,
whence the rising sun dispenses his illuminating and prolific rays to
every portion of the visible horizon, warming the whole earth with his
embrace of light, and giving new-born life and energy to flower and tree,
and beast and man, who, at the magic touch, awake from the sleep of
darkness, so in the moral world, when intellectual night was, in the
earliest days, brooding over the world, it was from the ancient priesthood
living in the east that those lessons of God, of nature, and of humanity
first emanated, which, travelling westward, revealed to man his future
destiny, and his dependence on a superior power. Thus every new and true
doctrine, coming from these "wise men of the east," was, as it were, a new
day arising, and dissipating the clouds of intellectual darkness and
error. It was a universal opinion among the ancients that the first
learning came from the east; and the often-quoted line of Bishop
Berkeley, that--

"Westward the course of empire takes its way"--

is but the modern utterance of an ancient thought, for it was always
believed that the empire of truth and knowledge was advancing from the
east to the west.

Again: the north, as the point in the horizon which is most remote from
the vivifying rays of the sun when at his meridian height, has, with equal
metaphorical propriety, been called the place of darkness, and is,
therefore, symbolic of the profane world, which has not yet been
penetrated and illumined by the intellectual rays of masonic light. All
history concurs in recording the fact that, in the early ages of the
world, its northern portion was enveloped in the most profound moral and
mental darkness. It was from the remotest regions of Northern Europe that
those barbarian hordes "came down like the wolf on the fold," and
devastated the fair plains of the south, bringing with them a dark curtain
of ignorance, beneath whose heavy folds the nations of the world lay for
centuries overwhelmed. The extreme north has ever been, physically and
intellectually, cold, and dark, and dreary. Hence, in Masonry, the north
h