A single example of the symbolism of _words_ will indicate to you one branch of Masonic study. We find in the English Rite this phrase: "I will always _hail_, ever conceal, and never reveal;" and in the Catechism, these:
and ignorance, misunderstanding the word "_hail_," has interpolated the phrase, "From whence do you _hail_?"
But the word is really "_hele_," from the Anglo-Saxon verb Ðelan, _helan_, to _cover, hide_, or _conceal_. And this word is rendered by the Latin verb _tegere_, to _cover_ or _roof over_. "That ye fro me no thynge woll hele," says Gower. "They _hele_ fro me no priuyte," says the Romaunt of the Rose. "To _heal_ a house," is a common phrase in Sussex; and in the west of England, he that covers a house with slates is called a _Healer_. Wherefore, to "_heal_" means the same thing as to "_tile_,"--itself symbolic, as meaning, primarily, to _cover_ a house with _tiles_,--and means to _cover, hide_, or _conceal_. Thus language too is symbolism, and words are as much misunderstood and misused as more material symbols are.
Symbolism tended continually to become more complicated; and all the powers of Heaven were reproduced on earth, until a web of fiction and allegory was woven, partly by art and partly by the ignorance of error, which the wit of man, with his limited means of explanation, will never unravel. Even the Hebrew Theism became involved in symbolism and image-worship, borrowed probably from an older creed and remote regions of Asia,--the worship of the Great Semitic Nature-God AL or ELS and its symbolical representations of JEHOVAH Himself were not even confined to poetical or illustrative language. The priests were monotheists: the people idolaters.
There are dangers inseparable from symbolism, which afford an impressive lesson in regard to the similar risks attendant on the use of language. The imagination, called in to assist the reason, usurps its place or leaves its ally helplessly entangled in its web. Names which stand for things are confounded with them; the means are mistaken for the end; the instrument of interpretation for the object; and thus symbols come to usurp an independent character as truths and persons. Though perhaps a necessary path, they were a dangerous one by which to approach the Deity; in which many, says PLUTARCH, "mistaking the sign for the thing signified, fell into a ridiculous superstition; while others, in avoiding one extreme, plunged into the no less hideous gulf of irreligion and impiety."