Two thousand years ago, the Greek world was nearer than we are now to the first wonder of the invention of writing. The mystery of it still seemed divine. The fact that certain signs, of little or no meaning in themselves, could communicate what a man felt or thought, not only to the generation of his fellows, but also to the generations that came afterwards, threw a kind of glamour over written words. It gave them an importance and an impressiveness which did not attach to any spoken words. They came in time to have, as it were, an existence of their own. Their precise relation to the person who first uttered them, and their literal meaning at the time of their utterance, tended to be overlooked or obscured.

In the case of the ancient poets, especially Homer, this glamour of written words was accompanied, and perhaps had been preceded, by two other feelings.

The one was the reverence for antiquity. The voice of the past sounded with a fuller note than that of the present. It came from the age of the heroes who had become divinities. It expressed the national legends and the current mythology, the primitive types of noble life and the simple maxims of awakening reflection, the “wisdom of the ancients,” which has sometimes itself taken the place of religion. The other was the belief in inspiration. With the glamour of writing was blended the glamour of rhythm and melody. When the gods spoke, they spoke in verse.[61] The poets sang under the impulse of a divine enthusiasm. It was a god who gave the words: the poet was but the interpreter.[62] The belief was not merely popular, but was found in the best minds of the imperial age. “Whatever wise and true words were spoken in the world about God and the universe, came into the souls of men not without the Divine will and intervention through the agency of divine and prophetic men.”[63] “To the poets sometimes, I mean the very ancient poets, there came a brief utterance from the Muses, a kind of inspiration of the divine nature and truth, like a flash of light from an unseen fire.”[64]

The combination of these three feelings, the mystery of writing, the reverence for antiquity, the belief in inspiration, tended to give the writings of the ancient poets a unique value. It lifted them above the common limitations of place and time and circumstance. The verses of Homer were not simply the utterances of a particular person with a particular meaning for a particular time. They had a universal validity. They were the voice of an undying wisdom. They were the Bible of the Greek races.[65]

When the unconscious imitation of heroic ideals passed into a conscious philosophy of life, it was necessary that that philosophy should be shown to be consonant with current beliefs, by being formulated, so to speak, in terms of the current standards; and when, soon afterwards, the conception of education, in the sense in which the term has ever since been understood, arose, it was inevitable that the ancient poets should be the basis of that education. Literature consisted, in effect, of the ancient poets. Literary education necessarily meant the understanding of them. “I consider,” says Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue which bears his name,[66] “that the chief part of a man’s education is to be skilled in epic poetry; and this means that he should be able to understand what the poets have said, and whether they have said it rightly or not, and to know how to draw distinctions, and to give an answer when a question is put to him.” The educators recognized in Homer one of themselves: he, too, was a “sophist,” and had aimed at educating men.[67] Homer was the common text-book of the grammar-schools as long as Greek continued to be taught, far on into imperial times. The study of him branched out in more than one direction. It was the beginning of that study of literature for its own sake which still holds its ground. It was continued until far on in the Christian era, partly by the schools of textual critics, and partly by the successors of the first sophists, who sharpened their wits by disputations as to Homer’s meaning, posing difficulties and solving them: of these disputations some relics survive in the Scholia, especially such as are based upon the Questions of Porphyry.[68] But in the first conception, literary and moral education had been inseparable. It was impossible to regard Homer simply as literature. Literary education was not an end in itself, but a means. The end was moral training. It was imagined that virtue, no less than literature, could be taught, and Homer was the basis of the one kind of education no less than of the other. Nor was it difficult for him to become so. For though the thoughts of men had changed, and the new education was bringing in new conceptions of morals, Homer was a force which could easily be turned in new directions. All imaginative literature is plastic when it is used to enforce a moral; and the sophists could easily preach sermons of their own upon Homeric texts. There was no fixed traditional interpretation; and they were but following a current fashion in drawing their own meanings from him. He thus became a support, and not a rival. The Hippias Minor of Plato furnishes as pertinent instances as could be mentioned of this educational use of Homer.

The method lasted as long as Greek literature. It is found in full operation in the first centuries of our era. It was explicitly recognized, and most of the prominent writers of the time supply instances of its application. “In the childhood of the world,” says Strabo,[69] “men, like children, had to be taught by tales;” and Homer told tales with a moral purpose. “It has been contended,” he says again,[70] “that poetry was meant only to please:” on the contrary, the ancients looked upon poetry as a form of philosophy, introducing us early to the facts of life, and teaching us in a pleasant way the characters and feelings and actions of men. It was from Homer that moralists drew their ideals: it was his verses that were quoted, like verses of the Bible with us, to enforce moral truths. There is in Dio Chrysostom[71] a charming “imaginary conversation” between Philip and Alexander. “How is it,” said the father, “that Homer is the only poet you care for: there are others who ought not to be neglected?” “Because,” said the son, “it is not every kind of poetry, just as it is not every kind of dress, that is fitting for a king; and the poetry of Homer is the only poetry that I see to be truly noble and splendid and regal, and fit for one who will some day rule over men.” And Dio himself reads into Homer many a moral meaning. When, for example,[72] the poet speaks of the son of Kronos having given the staff and rights of a chief that he might take counsel for the people, he meant to imply that not all kings, but only those who have a special gift of God, had that staff and those rights, and that they had them, moreover, not for their own gratification, but for the general good; he meant, in fact, that no bad man can be a true master either of himself or of others—no, not if all the Greeks and all the barbarians join in calling him king.

It was not only the developing forms of ethics that were thus made to find a support in Homer, but all the varying theories of physics and metaphysics, one by one. The Heracliteans held, for example, that when Homer spoke of

he meant to say that all things are the offspring of flow and movement.[73] The Platonists held that when Zeus reminded Hera of the time when he had hung her trembling by a golden chain in the vast concave of heaven, it was God speaking to matter which he had taken and bound by the chains of laws.[74] The Stoics read into the poets so much Stoicism, that Cicero says, in good-humoured banter, that you would think the old poets, who had really no suspicion of such things, to have been Stoical philosophers.[75] Sometimes Homer was treated as a kind of encyclopædia. Xenophon, in his Banquet,[76] makes one of the speakers, who could repeat Homer by heart, say that “the wisest of mankind had written about almost all human things;” and there is a treatise by an unknown author of imperial times which endeavours to show in detail that he contains the beginning of every one of the later sciences, historical, philosophical, and political.[77] When he calls men deep-voiced and women high-voiced, he shows his knowledge of the distinctions of music. When he gives to each character its appropriate style of speech, he shows his knowledge of rhetoric. He is the father of political science, in having given examples of each of the three forms of government—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. He is the father of military science, in the information which he gives about tactics and siege-works. He knew and taught astronomy and medicine, gymnastics and surgery; “nor would a man be wrong if he were to say that he was a teacher of painting also.”

This indifference to the actual meaning of a writer, and the habit of reading him by the light of the reader’s own fancies, have a certain analogy in our own day in the feeling with which we sometimes regard other works of art. We stand before some great masterpiece of painting—the St. Cecilia or the Sistine Madonna—and are, as it were, carried off our feet by the wonder of it. We must be cold critics if we simply ask ourselves what Raffaelle meant by it. We interpret it by our own emotions. The picture speaks to us with a personal and individual voice. It links itself with a thousand memories of the past and a thousand dreams of the future. It translates us into another world—the world of a lost and impossible love, the dreamland of achieved aspirations, the tender and half-tearful heaven of forgiven sins: we are ready to believe, if only for a moment, that Raffaelle meant by it all that it means to us; and for what he did actually mean, we have but little care.

But these tendencies to draw a moral from all that Homer wrote, and to read philosophy into it, though common and permanent, were not universal. There was an instinct in the Greek mind, as there is in modern times, which rebelled against them. There were literalists who insisted that the words should be taken as they stood, and that some of the words as they stood were clearly immoral.[78] There were, on the other hand, apologists who said sometimes that Homer reflected faithfully the chequered lights and shadows of human life, and sometimes that the existence of immorality in Homer must clearly be allowed, but that if a balance were struck between the good and the evil, the good would be found largely to predominate.[79] There were other apologists who made a distinction between the divine and the human elements: the poets sometimes spoke, it was said, on their own account: some of their poetry was inspired, and some was not: the Muses sometimes left them: “and they may very properly be forgiven if, being men, they made mistakes when the divinity which spoke through their mouths had gone away from them.”[80]

But all these apologies were insufficient. The chasm between the older religion which was embodied in the poets, and the new ideas which were marching in steady progress away from the Homeric world, was widening day by day. A reconciliation had to be found which had deeper roots. It was found in a process of interpretation whose strength must be measured by its permanence. The process was based upon a natural tendency. The unseen working of the will which lies behind all voluntary actions, and the unseen working of thought which by an instinctive process causes some of those actions to be symbolical, led men in comparatively early times to find a meaning beneath the surface of a record or representation of actions. A narrative of actions, no less than the actions themselves, might be symbolical. It might contain a hidden meaning. Men who retained their reverence for Homer, or who at least were not prepared to break with the current belief in him, began to search for such meanings. They were assisted in doing so by the concomitant development of the “mysteries.” The mysteries were representations of passages in the history of the gods which, whatever their origin, had become symbolical. It is possible that no words of explanation were spoken in them; but they were, notwithstanding, habituating the Greek mind both to symbolical expression in general, and to the finding of physical or religious or moral truths in the representation of fantastic or even immoral actions.[81]

It is uncertain when this method of interpretation began to be applied to ancient literature. It was part of the general intellectual movement of the fifth century B.C. It is found in one of its forms in Hecatæus, who explained the story of Cerberus by the existence of a poisonous snake in a cavern on the headland of Tænaron.[82] It was elaborated by the sophists. It was deprecated by Plato. “If I disbelieved it,” he makes Socrates say,[83] in reference to the story of Boreas and Oreithyia, “as the philosophers do, I should not be unreasonable: then I might say, talking like a philosopher, that Oreithyia was a girl who was caught by a strong wind and carried off while playing on the cliffs yonder; ... but it would take a long and laborious and not very happy lifetime to deal with all such questions: and for my own part I cannot investigate them until, as the Delphian precept bids me, I first Know myself.” Nor will he admit allegorical interpretation as a sufficient vindication of Homer:[84] “The chaining of Hera, and the flinging forth of Hephæstus by his father, and all the fightings of gods which Homer has described, we shall not admit into our state, whether with allegories or without them.” But the direct line of historical tradition of the method seems to begin with Anaxagoras and his school.[85] In Anaxagoras himself the allegory was probably ethical: he found in Homer a symbolical account of the movements of mental powers and moral virtues: Zeus was mind, Athené was art. But the method which, though it is found in germ among earlier or contemporary writers, seems to have been first formulated by his disciple Metrodorus, was not ethical but physical.[86] By a remarkable anticipation of a modern science, possibly by a survival of memories of an earlier religion, the Homeric stories were treated as a symbolical representation of physical phenomena. The gods were the powers of nature: their gatherings, their movements, their loves, and their battles, were the play and interaction and apparent strife of natural forces. The method had for many centuries an enormous hold upon the Greek mind; it lay beneath the whole theology of the Stoical schools; it was largely current among the scholars and critics of the early empire.[87]

Its most detailed exposition is contained in two writers, of both of whom so little is personally known that there is a division of opinion whether the name of the one was Heraclitus or Heraclides,[88] and of the other Cornutus or Phornutus;[89] but both were Stoics, both are most probably assigned to the early part of the first century of our era, and in both of them the physical is blended with an ethical interpretation.

1. Heraclitus begins by the definite avowal of his apologetic purpose. His work is a vindication of Homer from the charge of impiety. “He would unquestionably be impious if he were not allegorical;”[90] but as it is, “there is no stain of unholy fables in his words: they are pure and free from impiety.”[91] Apollo is the sun; the “far-darter” is the sun sending forth his rays: when it is said that Apollo slew men with his arrows, it is meant that there was a pestilence in the heat of summer-time.[92] Athené is thought: when it is said that Athené came to Telemachus, it is meant only that the young man then first began to reflect upon the waste and profligacy of the suitors: a thought, shaped like a wise old man, came, as it were, and sat by his side.[93] The story of Proteus and Eidothea is an allegory of the original formless matter taking many shapes:[94] the story of Ares and Aphrodite and Hephæstus is a picture of iron subdued by fire, and restored to its original hardness by Poseidon, that is by water.[95]

2. Cornutus writes in vindication not so much of the piety of the ancients as of their knowledge: they knew as much as men of later times, but they expressed it at greater length and by means of symbols. He rests his interpretation of those symbols to a large extent upon etymology. The science of religion was to him, as it has been to some persons in modern days, an extension of the science of philology. The following are examples: Hermes (from ἐρεῖν, “to speak”) is the power of speech which the gods sent from heaven as their peculiar and distinguishing gift to men. He is called the “conductor,” because speech conducts one man’s thought into his neighbour’s soul. He is the “bright-shiner,” because speech makes dark things clear. His winged feet are the symbols of “winged words.” He is the “leader of souls,” because words soothe the soul to rest; and the “awakener from sleep,” because words rouse men to action. The serpents twined round his staff are a symbol of the savage natures that are calmed by words, and their discords gathered into harmony.[96] The story of Prometheus (“forethought”), who made a man from clay, is an allegory of the providence and forethought of the universe: he is said to have stolen fire, because it was the forethought of men found out its use: he is said to have stolen it from heaven, because it came down in a lightning-flash: and his being chained to a rock is a picture of the quick inventiveness of human thought chained to the painful necessities of physical life, its liver gnawed at unceasingly by petty cares.[97]

Two other examples of the method may be given from later writers, to show the variety of its application.

The one is from Sallust, a writer of the fourth century of our era. He thus explains the story of the judgment of Paris. The banquet of the gods is a picture of the vast supra-mundane Powers, who are always in each other’s society. The apple is the world, which is thrown from the banquet by Discord, because the world itself is the play of opposing forces; and different qualities are given to the world by different Powers, each trying to win the world for itself; and Paris is the soul in its sensuous life, which sees not the other Powers in the world, but only Beauty, and says that the world is the property of Love.[98]

The other is from a writer of a late but uncertain age. He deals only with the Odyssey. Its hero is the picture of a man who is tossed upon the sea of life, drifted this way and that by adverse winds of fortune and of passion: the companions who were lost among the Lotophagi are pictures of men who are caught by the baits of pleasure and do not return to reason as their guide: the Sirens are the pleasures that tempt and allure all men who pass over the sea of life, and against which the only counter-charm is to fill one’s senses and powers of mind full of divine words and actions, as Odysseus filled his ears with wax, that, no part of them being left empty, pleasure may knock at their doors in vain.[99]

The method survived as a literary habit long after its original purpose failed. The mythology which it had been designed to vindicate passed from the sphere of religion into that of literature; but in so passing, it took with it the method to which it had given rise. The habit of trying to find an arrière pensée beneath a man’s actual words had become so inveterate, that all great writers without distinction were treated as writers of riddles. The literary class insisted that their functions were needed as interpreters, and that a plain man could not know what a great writer meant. “The use of symbolical speech,” said Didymus, the great grammarian of the Augustan age, “is characteristic of the wise man, and the explanation of its meaning.”[100] Even Thucydides is said by his biographer to have purposely made his style obscure that he might not be accessible except to the truly wise.[101] It tended to become a fixed idea in the minds of many men that religious truth especially must be wrapped up in symbol, and that symbol must contain religious truth. The idea has so far descended to the present day, that there are, even now, persons who think that a truth which is obscurely stated is more worthy of respect, and more likely to be divine, than a truth which “he that runs may read.”

The same kind of difficulty which had been felt on a large scale in the Greek world in regard to Homer, was felt in no less a degree by those Jews who had become students of Greek philosophy in regard to their own sacred books. The Pentateuch, in a higher sense than Homer, was regarded as having been written under the inspiration of God. It, no less than Homer, was so inwrought into the minds of men that it could not be set aside. It, no less than Homer, contained some things which, at least on the surface, seemed inconsistent with morality. To it, no less than to Homer, was applicable the theory that the words were the veils of a hidden meaning. The application fulfilled a double purpose: it enabled educated Jews, on the one hand, to reconcile their own adoption of Greek philosophy with their continued adhesion to their ancestral religion, and, on the other hand, to show to the educated Greeks with whom they associated, and whom they frequently tried to convert, that their literature was neither barbarous, nor unmeaning, nor immoral. It may be conjectured that, just as in Greece proper the adoption of the allegorical method had been helped by the existence of the mysteries, so in Egypt it was helped by the large use in earlier times of hieroglyphic writing, the monuments of which were all around them, though the writing itself had ceased.[102]

The earliest Jewish writer of this school of whom any remains have come down to us, is reputed to be Aristobulus (about B.C. 170-150).[103] In an exposition of the Pentateuch which he is said to have addressed to Ptolemy Philometor, he boldly claimed that, so far from the Mosaic writings being outside the sphere of philosophy, the Greek philosophers had taken their philosophy from them. “Moses,” he said, “using the figures of visible things, tells us the arrangements of nature and the constitutions of important matters.” The anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament were explained on this principle. The “hand” of God, for example, meant His power, His “feet,” the stability of the world.

But by far the most considerable monument of this mode of interpretation consists of the works of Philo. They are based throughout on the supposition of a hidden meaning. But they carry us into a new world. The hidden meaning is not physical, but metaphysical and spiritual. The seen is the veil of the unseen, a robe thrown over it which marks its contour, “and half conceals and half reveals the form within.”

It would be easy to interest you, perhaps even to amuse you, by quoting some of the strange meanings which Philo gives to the narratives of familiar incidents. But I deprecate the injustice which has sometimes been done to him by taking such meanings apart from the historical circumstances out of which allegorical interpretation grew, and the purpose which it was designed to serve. I will give only one passage, which I have chosen because it shows as well as any other the contemporary existence of both the methods of interpretation of which I have spoken—that of finding a moral in every narrative, and that of interpreting the narrative symbolically: the former of these Philo calls the literal, the latter the deeper meaning. The text is Gen. xxviii. 11, “He took the stones of that place and put them beneath his head;” the commentary is:[104]

In all this, Philo was following not a Hebrew but a Greek method. He expressly speaks of it as the method of the Greek mysteries. He addresses his hearers by the name which was given to those who were being initiated. He bids them be purified before they listen. And in this way it was possible for him to be a Greek philosopher without ceasing to be a Jew.

The earliest methods of Christian exegesis were continuations of the methods which were common at the time to both Greek and Græco-Judæan writers. They were employed on the same subject-matter. Just as the Greek philosophers had found their philosophy in Homer, so Christian writers found in him Christian theology. When he represents Odysseus as saying,[105] “The rule of many is not good: let there be one ruler,” he means to indicate that there should be but one God; and his whole poem is designed to show the mischief that comes of having many gods.[106] When he tells us that Hephæstus represented on the shield of Achilles “the earth, the heaven, the sea, the sun that rests not, and the moon full-orbed,”[107] he is teaching us the divine order of creation which he learned in Egypt from the books of Moses.[108] So Clement of Alexandria interprets the withdrawal of Oceanus and Tethys from each other to mean the separation of land and sea;[109] and he holds that Homer, when he makes Apollo ask Achilles, “Why fruitlessly pursue him, a god,” meant to show that the divinity cannot be apprehended by the bodily powers.[110] Some of the philosophical schools which hung upon the skirts of Christianity mingled such interpretations of Greek mythology with similar interpretations of the Old Testament. For example, the writer to whom the name Simon Magus is given, is said to have “interpreted in whatever way he wished both the writings of Moses and also those of the (Greek) poets;”[111] and the Ophite writer, Justin, evolves an elaborate cosmogony from a story of Herakles narrated in Herodotus,[112] combined with the story of the garden of Eden.[113] But the main application was to the Old Testament exclusively. The reasons given for believing that the Old Testament had an allegorical meaning were precisely analogous to those which had been given in respect to Homer. There were many things in the Old Testament which jarred upon the nascent Christian consciousness. “Far be it from us to believe,” says the writer of the Clementine Homilies,[114] “that the Master of the universe, the Maker of heaven and earth, ‘tempts’ men as though He did not know—for who then does foreknow? and if He ‘repents,’ who is perfect in thought and firm in judgment? and if He ‘hardens’ men’s hearts, who makes them wise? and if He ‘blinds’ them, who makes them to see? and if He desires ‘a fruitful hill,’ whose then are all things? and if He wants the savour of sacrifices, who is it that needeth nothing? and if He delights in lamps, who is it that set the stars in heaven?”

One early answer to all such difficulties was, like a similar answer to difficulties about the Homeric mythology, that there was a human as well as a divine element in the Old Testament: some things in it were true, and some were false: and “this was indeed the very reason why the Master said, ‘Be genuine money-changers,’[115] testing the Scriptures like coins, and separating the good from the bad.” But the answer did not generally prevail. The more common solution, as also in the case of Homer, was that Moses had written in symbols in order to conceal his meaning from the unwise; and Clement of Alexandria, in an elaborate justification of this method, mentions as analogies not only the older Greek poetry, but also the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians.[116] The Old Testament thus came to be treated allegorically. A large part of such interpretation was inherited. The coincidences of mystical interpretation between Philo and the Epistle of Barnabas show that such interpretations were becoming the common property of Jews and Judæo-Christians.[117] But the method was soon applied to new data. Exegesis became apologetic. Whereas Philo and his school had dealt mainly with the Pentateuch, the early Christian writers came to deal mainly with the prophets and poetical books; and whereas Philo was mainly concerned to show that the writings of Moses contained Greek philosophy, the Christian writers endeavoured to show that the writings of the Hebrew preachers and poets contained Christianity; and whereas Philo had been content to speak of the writers of the Old Testament, as Dio Chrysostom spoke of the Greek poets, as having been stirred by a divine enthusiasm, the Christian writers soon came to construct an elaborate theory that the poets and preachers were but as the flutes through which the Breath of God flowed in divine music into the souls of men.[118]

The prophets, even more than the poets, lent themselves easily to this allegorical method of interpretation. The nabi was in an especial sense the messenger of God and an interpreter of His will. But his message was often a parable. He saw visions and dreamed dreams. He wrote, not in plain words, but in pictures. The meaning of the pictures was often purposely obscure. The Greek word “prophet” sometimes properly belonged, not to the nabi himself, but to those who, in his own time or in after time, explained the riddle of his message. When the message passed into literature, the interpretation of it became linked with the growing conception of the foreknowledge and providence of God: it was believed that He not only knew all things that should come to pass, but also communicated His knowledge to men. The nabi, through whom He revealed His will as to the present, was also the channel through whom He revealed His intention as to the future. The prophetic writings came to be read in the light of this conception. The interpreters wandered, as it were, along vast corridors whose walls were covered with hieroglyphs and paintings. They found in them symbols which might be interpreted of their own times. They went on to infer the divine ordering of the present from the coincidence of its features with features that could be traced in the hieroglyphs of the past. A similar conception prevailed in the heathen world. It lay beneath the many forms of divination. Hence Tertullian[119] speaks of Hebrew prophecy as a special form of divination, “divinatio prophetica.” So far from being strange to the Greek world, it was accepted. Those who read the Old Testament without accepting Christianity, found in its symbols prefigurings, not of Christianity, but of events recorded in the heathen mythologies. The Shiloh of Jacob’s song was a foretelling of Dionysus: the virgin’s son of Isaiah was a picture of Perseus: the Psalmist’s “strong as a giant to run his course” was a prophecy of Herakles.[120]

The fact that this was an accepted method of interpretation enabled the Apologists to use it with great effect. It became one of the chief evidences of Christianity. Explanations of the meaning of historical events and poetical figures which sound strange or impossible to modern ears, so far from sounding strange or impossible in the second century, carried conviction with them. When it was said, “The government shall be upon his shoulder,” it was meant that Christ should be extended on the cross;[121] when it was said, “He shall dip his garment in the blood of the grape,” it was meant that his blood should be, not of human origin, but, like the red juice of the grape, from God;[122] when it was said that “He shall receive the power of Damascus,” it was meant that the power of the evil demon who dwelt at Damascus should be overcome, and the prophecy was fulfilled when the Magi came to worship Christ.[123] The convergence of a large number of such interpretations upon the Gospel history was a powerful argument against both Jews and Greeks. I need not enlarge upon them. They have formed part of the general stock of Christian teaching ever since. But I will draw your attention to the fact that the basis of this use of the Old Testament was not so much the idea of prediction as the prevalent practice of treating ancient literature as symbolical or allegorical.

The method came to be applied to the books which were being formed into a new volume of sacred writings, side by side with the old. It was so applied, in the first instance, not by the Apologists, but by the Gnostics. It was detached from the idea of prediction. It was linked with the idea of knowledge as a secret. This extension of the method was inevitable. The earthly life of Christ presented as many difficulties to the first Christian philosophers as the Old Testament had done. The conception of Christ as the Wisdom and the Power of God seemed inconsistent with the meanness of a common human life; and that life resolved itself into a series of symbolic representations of superhuman movements, and the record of it was written in hieroglyphs. When Symeon took the young child in his arms and said the Nunc dimittis, he was a picture of the Demiurge who had learned his own change of place on the coming of the Saviour, and who gave thanks to the Infinite Depth.[124] The raising of Jairus’ daughter was a type of Achamoth, the Eternal Wisdom, the mother of the Demiurge, whom the Saviour led anew to the perception of the light which had forsaken her. Even the passion on the Cross was a setting forth of the anguish and fear and perplexity of the Eternal Wisdom.[125]

The method was at first rejected with contumely. Irenæus and Tertullian bring to bear upon it their batteries of irony and denunciation. It was a blasphemous invention. It was one of the arts of spiritual wickedness against which a Christian must wrestle. But it was deep-seated in the habits of the time; and even while Tertullian was writing, it was establishing a lodgment inside the Christian communities which it has never ceased to hold. It did so first of all in the great school of Alexandria, in which it had grown up as the reconciliation of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology. The methods of the school of Philo were applied to the New Testament even more than to the Old. When Christ said, “The foxes have holes, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head,” he meant that on the believer alone, who is separated from the rest, that is from the wild beasts of the world, rests the Head of the universe, the kind and gentle Word.[126] When he is said to have fed the multitude on five barley-loaves and two fishes, it is meant that he gave mankind the preparatory training of the Law, for barley, like the Law, ripens sooner than wheat, and of philosophy, which had grown, like fishes, in the waves of the Gentile world.[127] When we read of the anointing of Christ’s feet, we read of both his teaching and his passion; for the feet are a symbol of divine instruction travelling to the ends of the earth, or, it may be, of the Apostles who so travelled, having received the fragrant unction of the Holy Ghost; and the ointment, which is adulterated oil, is a symbol of the traitor Judas, “by whom the Lord was anointed on the feet, being released from his sojourn in the world: for the dead are anointed.”[128]

But it may reasonably be doubted whether the allegorical method would have obtained the place which it did in the Christian Church if it had not served an other than exegetical purpose. It is clear that after the first conflicts with Judaism had subsided, the Old Testament formed a great stumbling-block in the way of those who approached Christianity on its ideal side, and viewed it by the light of philosophical conceptions. Its anthropomorphisms, its improbabilities, the sanction which it seemed to give to immoralities, the dark picture which it sometimes presented of both God and the servants of God, seemed to many men to be irreconcilable with both the theology and the ethics of the Gospel. An important section of the Christian world rejected its authority altogether: it was the work, not of God, but of His rival, the god of this world: the contrast between the Old Testament and the New was part of the larger contrast between matter and spirit, darkness and light, evil and good.[129] Those who did not thus reject it were still conscious of its difficulties. There were many solutions of those difficulties. Among them was that which had been the Greek solution of analogous difficulties in Homer. It was adopted and elaborated by Origen expressly with an apologetic purpose. He had been trained in current methods of Greek interpretation. He is expressly said to have studied the books of Cornutus.[130] He found in the hypothesis of a spiritual meaning as complete a vindication of the Old Testament as Cornutus had found of the Greek mythology. The difficulties which men find, he tells us, arise from their lack of the spiritual sense. Without it he himself would have been a sceptic.