TEMPLE. An edifice erected for religious purposes. As the grand symbols of Freemasonry are a temple and its ornaments, and to construct temples was the business of the original Masons, some remarks upon these structures cannot but be instructive. The word temple is derived from the Latin Templum, and this word templum seems to have been derived from the old Latin verb, Templari, to contemplate. The ancient augurs undoubtedly applied the name templa to those parts of the heavens which were marked out for obser vation of the flight of birds. Temples, originally, were all open; and hence most likely • came their name. These structures are among the most ancient monuments. They were the first built, and the most noticeable of public edifices. As soon as a nation had acquired any degree of civilization the people consecrated particular spots to the worship of their duties. In the earliest instances they contented them selves with erecting altars of earth or ashes in the open air, and sometimes resorted, for the purposes of worship, to the depths of solitary woods. At length they acquired the practice of building cells or chapels within the enclosure of which they placed the image of their divinities, and assem bled to offer up their supplications, thanksgivings, and sacri fices. These were chiefly formed like their own dwellings.
The Troglodytes adored their gods in grottoes; the people who lived in cabins, erected temples like cabins in shape. Clemens, Alexandrinus, and Eusebius refer the origin of temples to sepulchers; and this notion has been illustrated and confirmed from a variety of testimonies.* At the time when the Greeks suspassed all other people in the arts introduced among them from Phoenicia, Syria, and Egypt, they devoted much time, care and expense to the building of temples. No country has surpassed, or perhaps equaled, them in this respect; the Romans alone successfully rivaled them, and they took the Greek structures for models. Ac cording to Vitruvius, the situations of the temples were regulated chiefly by the nature and characteristics of the various divinities. Thus the temples of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, who were considered by the inhabitants of many cities as their protecting deities, were erected on spots sufficiently elevated to enable them to overlook the whole town, or, at least the principal part of it. Minerva, the tutelary deity of Athens, had her seat on the Acropolis. In like manner the temple of Solomon was built on Mount Moriah.