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But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it.

The allegorising fancy of the Indians gave it a mystic meaning, and the learned have built I know not what worlds of religious theories on this 'pre-Christian cross, which is probably a piece of hasty decorative work, with no original mystic meaning at all.

Paul, a practised Platonic dialectician; but it seems to me, as to Philo, to be a fair, perhaps a necessary, corollary from the Genetic Philosophy, both of Moses and of Solomon. But in one thing he was unfair; namely, in his allegorising. But unfair to whom? To Socrates and Plato, I believe, as much as to Moses and to Samuel.

In calling this person the Logos, and making him the source of all human reason, and knowledge of eternal laws, he only translated from Hebrew into Greek the name which he found in his sacred books, "The Word of God." As yet we have found no unfair allegorising of Moses, or twisting of Plato. How then has he incurred this accusation?

Socrates and Plato were as little inclined to separate the man and the philosopher as Moses, Solomon, or Isaiah were. When Philo, by allegorising away the simple human parts of his books, is untrue to Moses's teaching, he becomes untrue to Plato's. He becomes untrue, I believe, to a higher teaching than Plato's.

It was easy to show how mystical religion had often led its too eager, or too untaught followers into the most mischievous antinomianism of doctrine and life, into allegorising away the most fundamental grounds of Christianity, and into the vaguest Pantheism.

And so on for pages; the sort of words which poor Brangwain may have overheard on the calm sea, when the terrible knowledge rushed cold to her heart that Tristram and Yseult had drained the fatal potion. All this is foolish and unwholesome enough, just twice as much so, for its spiritual allegorising, as the worldly love poetry of these often foolish and unwholesome German chivalrous poets.

It is almost inconceivable to us how so disgusting a cultus could have been joined with innocence of life; but as Priapus long maintained his place as a rustic deity we must suppose that the hideous literalism of his surroundings must have been got over by ingenious allegorising, or forgotten by rustic veneration. On the MS. of Petronius.

A propos of this, I think of the famous sonnet in which, allegorising on his own name Salvator he utters his deep indignation at his enemies and persecutors who accused him of plundering from older writers in his poetry, which, indeed, is all ruggedness, and deficient in interior connectedness." "But," said Lothair, "to return to Ottmar's Novella.

As to allegorising, I say that the Alexandrians erred, whenever and as far as they proceeded "to obscure the primary meaning of Scripture, and to weaken the force of historical facts and express declarations," p. 69.