It replaces the three pillars of the old Temple, with three that have already been explained to you, - Fith, Hope, and Charity. To be trustful, to be hopeful, to be indulgent; these, in an age of selfishness, of ill opinion of human nature, of harsh and bitter judgment, are the most important of Masonic Virtues, and the true support of every Masonic Temple. And they are the old pillars of the Temple under different names. For he only is wise who judges others charitably; he only is strong who is hopeful; and there is no beauty like a firm faith in God, our fellows and ourself.
The second apartment, clothed in mourning, the columns of the Temple shattered and prostrate, and the brethren bowed down in the deepest dejection, represent the world under the tyranny of the Principles of Evil; where virtue is persecuted and vice rewarded; where the righteous starve for bread, and the wicked live sumptiously and dress in purple and fine linen; where insolent ignorance rules, and genius serves; where King and Priest trample on liberty and the rights of conscience; where freedome hides in caves and mountains, and sycophancy and servility fawn and thrive; where the cry of the widow and the orphan starving for want of food, and shivering with cold, rises ever to Heaven, from a million miserable hovels; where men, willing to labor, and starving, they and their children and the wives of their bosoms, beg plantively for work, when the pampered capitalist stops his mills; where the law puishes her who, starving, steal a loaf, and lets the seducer go free; where the success of a party justifies murder, and violence and rapine go unpunished; and where he who with many years cheating and grinding the faces of the poor grows rice, receives office and honor in life, and after death brave funeral and a splendid mausoleum;- this world, where, since its making, war has never ceased, nor man paused in the sad task of tortuing and murdering his brother; and of which ambition, avarice, envy, hatred, lust, and the rest of Ahriman's and Typhon's army make a Pandemonium; this world, sunk in sin, reeking with baseness, clamorous with sorrow and misery. If any see in it also a type of the sorrow of the Craft for the death of Hiram, the grief of the Jews at the fall of Jerusalem, the misery of the Templars at the ruin of their order and the death of De Molay, or the worlds agony and pangs of woe at the death of the Redeemer, it is the right of each to do so.
