1723, contain the following regulation:
"No Master should take an Apprentice, unless he be a perfect youth having no maim or defect that may render him uncapable of learning the art."
Notwithstanding the positive demand for perfection, and the positive and explicit declaration that he must have no maim or defect, the remainder of the sentence has, within a few years past, by some Grand Lodges, been considered as a qualifying clause, which would permit the admission of candidates whose physical defects did not exceed a particular point.
But, in perfection, there can be no degrees of comparison, and he who is required to be perfect, is required to be so without modification or diminution.
That which is perfect is complete in all its parts, and, by a deficiency in any portion of its constituent materials, it becomes not less perfect, (which expression would be a solecism in grammar,) but at once by the deficiency ceases to be perfect at all—it then becomes imperfect.
In the interpretation of a law, "words," says Blackstone, "are generally to be understood in their usual and most known signification," and then "perfect" would mean, "complete, entire, neither defective nor redundant."
But another source of interpretation is, the "comparison of a law with other laws, that are made by the same legislator, that have some affinity with the subject, or that expressly relate to the same point."5
Applying this law of the jurists, we shall have no difficulty in arriving at the true signification of the word "perfect," if we refer to the regulation of 1683, of which the clause in question appears to have been an exposition.
Now, the regulation of 1683 says, in explicit terms, that the candidate must "have his right limbs as a man ought to have."
Comparing the one law with the other, there can be no doubt that the requisition of Masonry is and always has been, that admission could only be granted to him who was neither deformed nor dismembered, but of hale and entire limbs as a man should be.
But another, and, as Blackstone terms it, "the most universal and effectual way of discovering the true meaning of a law" is, to consider "the reason and spirit of it, or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it." Now, we must look for the origin of the law requiring physical perfection, not to the formerly operative character of the institution, (for there never was a time when it was not speculative as well as operative,) but to its symbolic nature. In the ancient temple, every stone was required to be perfect, for a perfect stone was the symbol of truth. In our mystic association, every Mason represents a stone in that spiritual temple, "that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," of which the temple of Solomon was the type. Hence it is required that he should present himself, like the perfect stone in the material temple, a perfect man in the spiritual building. "The symbolic relation of each member of the Order to its mystic temple, forbids the idea," says Bro. W.S. Rockwell, of Georgia,6 "that its constituent portions, its living stones, should be less perfect or less a type of their great original, than the immaculate material which formed the earthly dwelling place of the God of their adoration." If, then, as I presume it will be readily conceded, by all except those who erroneously suppose