Excerpt from The Meaning of Masonry -W.L. Wilmhurst

To each of us from our birth have been given three lesser lights, by which the lodge within ourselves may be illumined. For the "sun" symbolizes our spiritual consciousness, the higher aspirations and emotions of the soul; the "moon" betokens our reasoning or intellectual faculties, which (as the moon reflects the light of the sun) should reflect the light coming from the higher spiritual faculty and transmit it into our daily conduct; while "the Master of the Lodge" is a symbolical phrase denoting the will-power of man, which should enable him to be master of his own life, to control his own actions and keep down the impulses of his lower nature, even as the stroke of the Master's gavel controls the lodge and calls to order and obedience the brethren under his direction. By the assistance of these lesser lights within us, a man is enabled to perceive what is, again symbolically, called the "form of a lodge," i.e., the way in which his own human nature has been composed and constituted, the length, breadth, height and depth of his own being. By their help, too, he will perceive that he himself, his body and his soul, are "holy ground," upon which he should build the altar of his own spiritual life, an alter which he should suffer no "iron tool," no debacing habit of thought or conduct, to defile. By them too, he will perceive how Wisdom, Strength and Beauty have been employed by the Creator, like three grand supporting pillars, in the structure of his own organism. And by these finally he will discern how that there is a mystical "ladder of many rounds or staves," i.e., that there are innumerable paths or methods by means of which men are led upwards to spiritual Light encircling us all, and in which we live and move and have our being, but that of the three principal methods, the greatest of these, the one that comprehends them all and brings us nearest Heaven, is Love, in the full exercise of which God-like virtue a Mason reaches the summit of his profession; that summit being God Himself, whose name is Love.