Rough Ashlar to Perfect Ashlar: A Mason's Lesson in Self-Refinement

In Freemasonry's symbolic language, the rough ashlar — stone as nature leaves it, unworked and full of hidden faults — and the perfect ashlar — that same stone squared and smoothed by the mason's discipline — have long stood together as one lesson in self-improvement, the labor of shaping a rough character into a finished one; above them sits the Square and Compasses enclosing the letter G, read across different lodges as Geometry, the science the working stonemasons depended on, or the Grand Architect of the Universe, the principle presiding over the craft.

WS Original.