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The adventures with robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and the tendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the author's part to escape from the unrealities which he must have felt harassingly, German as he was.
Allegorization of myth is only a work of fancy, but it always implies a tendency to self-deception. So long as we see tales like the stories of creation in a sanely historical way, we realize that these men of the past were stating their own naïve beliefs and were not teaching our own views in the guise of a poetic version.
When the progress of thought, especially in Greece, made it impossible to accept the current beliefs concerning gods and their doings, it was felt necessary to put some higher meaning into them they were rationalized and spiritualized by a process of allegorization.
But, on the other hand, when we pass from external conditions to intrinsic purport, nothing shows better the difference between Theocritus and Canticles than the fact that the Hebrew poem has been so susceptible of allegorization.
However difficult it may be, we must accustom ourselves to the belief that his assertions of the personal existence of his God represent the efficient element in his thought, and that if other passages seem inconsistent with that idea seem to point to mere abstraction or allegorization of the mind of the race it is these passages, and not the more full-blooded pronouncements, that must be cancelled as misleading or inadequate.
The adventures with robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and the tendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the author's part to escape from the unrealities which he must have felt harassingly, German as he was.
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