Once more we come to a much debated question, about which not a little has been written, and most of it wide of the mark--the question of the origin of the Third Degree. Here again students have gone hither and yon hunting in every cranny for the motif of this degree, and it would seem that their failure to find it would by this time have turned them back to the only place where they may ever hope to discover it--in Masonry itself. But no; they are bound to bring mystics, occultists, alchemists, Culdees or Cabalists--even the _Vehmgerichte_ of Germany--into the making of Masonry somewhere, if only for the sake of glamor, and this is the last opportunity to do it.[123] Willing to give due credit to Cabalists and Rosicrucians, the present writer rejects all such theories on the ground that there is no reason for thinking that they helped to make Masonry, _much less any fact to prove it_. Hear now a review of the facts in the case. No one denies that the Temple of Solomon was much in the minds of men at the time of the organization of the Grand Lodge, and long before--as in the Bacon romance of the _New Atlantis_ in 1597.[124] Broughton, Selden, Lightfoot, Walton, Lee, Prideaux, and other English writers were deeply interested in the Hebrew Temple, not, however, so much in its symbolical suggestion as in its form and construction--a model of which was brought to London by Judah Templo in the reign of Charles II.[125] It was much the same on the Continent, but so far from being a new topic of study and discussion, we may trace this interest in the Temple all through the Middle Ages. Nor was it peculiar to the Cabalists, at least not to such a degree that they must needs be brought in to account for the Biblical imagery and symbolism in Masonry. Indeed, it might with more reason be argued that Masonry explains the interest in the Temple than otherwise. For, as James Fergusson remarks--and there is no higher authority than the historian of architecture: "There is perhaps no building of the ancient world which has excited so much attention since the time of its destruction, as the Temple of Solomon built in Jerusalem, and its successor as built by Herod. _Throughout the Middle Ages it influenced to a considerable degree the forms of Christian churches, and its peculiarities were the watchwords and rallying points of associations of builders._"[126] Clearly, the notion that interest in the Temple was new, and that its symbolical meaning was imposed upon Masonry as something novel, falls flat.