THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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is a sergeant presupposes a sergeant somewhere else. And it is reasonable to assume that the deistic brothers of tolerance took some of their plagiarized architectural
metaphors from the church masons' guilds; whereby at least a clouded access, not merely faute de mieux, may open up to the latter. The back­connection with the
masons' guilds was perhaps supplied by Rosicrucianism, which may well go back to the late Middle Ages and from which the freemasons branched off at the beginning
of the eighteenth century. In the Rosicrucian Comenius we find again for the first time a recollection of the ‘cutting of the stone to just proportions’. Then in the
freemasons, in the midst of all other mystagogy, so­called ancestors of masonry are listed; likewise with conspicuous reference to the church masons' guilds which in the
eighteenth century had disappeared from view long ago. These ancestors were supposed to be: Moses and the Egyptian priest­architects; the Chaldaeans and
magicians on the Euphrates and Tigris; Hiram, the builder of Solomon's temple; the Roman priest­king Numa Pompilius, first Pontifex, and his collegia fabrorum. These
were joined by Erwin von Steinbach, the builder of Strassburg cathedral, and around him the whole ‘Solomonic’ tradition of the medieval ‘basis of stone­masonry’.
Pious legends were also added, like the Byzantine one that the ground­plan of the Hagia Sophia had been conveyed to its builder by the archangel Rasiel in a dream.
From which therefore, by virtue of the harmony of this church with the divine ground­plan of heaven and of earth, the magical significance of its pillar positions and
proportions originates and ensues in detail. Moreover, connections with the Order of the Knights Templar are not lacking in freemasonry either, and with its churches
which were decorated with undoubtedly gnostic­cabbalistic emblems. But the peak of perfection for the freemasons was precisely the above­mentioned Solomon's
temple:— this highest symbol of all for the church masons' guilds. The constitutional book of the first freemasons calls the temple ‘the finest work of masonry on earth,
from the beginning up till today’, for the reason that Hiram's, the builder's, architecture ‘stood under the special protection and guidance of heaven and the noble and
wise counted it an honour to be the assistants of the astute master craftsmen and artisans’. Actually even the hyperbole ‘of the finest work on earth’ did not grow on the
soil of freemasonry but is only used decoratively in it; it was at work in real terms throughout the entire history of Christian architecture. The ground­plan of Solomon's
temple influenced the first Christian basilicas almost a thousand years after its destruction, and the medieval church masons' guilds saw it as the sacred model.
Freemasonry did not fail to