approach of cowans and eavesdroppers, and to guard against surprise.
The reason assigned in the lecture for this assembling on high places, is the modern, but not the true one. The fact is, that mountains and other high places were almost always considered as holy, and peculiarly appropriate for religious purposes, and we have abundant evidence in Scripture that the Jews were accustomed to worship on the tops of the highest hills, as it was believed that sacrifices offered from these elevated places were most acceptable to the Deity. Hutchinson says that "the highest hills and the lowest valleys were, from the earliest times, deemed sacred, and it was supposed that the Spirit of God was peculiarly diffusive in those places."
A Lodge is said, symbolically, to extend in length from east to west; in breadth, from north to south; in height, from the earth to the highest heavens; in depth, from the surface to the center. And a Lodge is said to be of these vast dimensions to denote the universality of Masonry, and to teach us that a Mason's charity should be equally as extensive.
There is a peculiar fitness in this theory, which is really only making the Masonic Lodge a symbol of the world. It must be
