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." 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.2 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

1 Clem. Alex. Strom. 5. 8, p. 673.

2 Marcellinus, Vita Thucydidis, c. 35, áσapŵs dè déywv ảvýp étityδες ἵνα μὴ πᾶσιν εἴη βατὸς μηδὲ εὐτελὴς φαίνηται παντὶ τῷ βουλομένῳ νοούμενος εὐχερῶς ἀλλὰ τοῖς λίαν σόφοις δοκιμαζόμενος παρὰ τούτοις θαυμάζηται.

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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.1

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).2 In an exposition of the

1 The analogy is drawn by Clem. Alex. Strom. 5, chapters 4 and 7. 2 It is impossible not to mention Aristobulus: he is quoted by Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 1. 15, 22; 5. 14; 6. 3), and extracts

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 contemfrom him are given by Eusebius (Præp. Evang. 8. 10; 13. 12; but the genuineness of the information that we possess about him is much controverted and has given rise to much literature, of which an account will be found in Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, 2er Th. p. 760; Drummond, Philo-Judæus, i. 242.

porary 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:1

"The words are wonderful, not only because of their allegorical and physical meaning, but also because of their literal teaching of trouble and endurance. The writer does not think that a student of virtue should have a delicate and luxurious life, imitating those who are called fortunate, but who are in reality full of misfortunes, eager anxieties and rivalries, whose whole life the Divine Lawgiver describes as a sleep and a dream. These are men who, after spending their days in doing injuries to others, return to their homes and upset them-I mean, not the houses they live in, but the body which is the home of the soul-by immoderate eating and drinking, and at night lie down in soft and costly beds. Such men are not the disciples of the sacred word. Its disciples are real men, lovers of temperance and sobriety and modesty, who make self-restraint and contentment and endurance the corner-stones, as it were, of their lives who rise superior to money and pleasure and fame: who are ready, for the sake of acquiring virtue, to endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold: whose costly couch is a soft turf, whose bedding is grass and leaves, whose pillow is a heap of stones or a hillock rising a little above the ground. Of such men, Jacob is an example: he put a stone for his pillow: a little while afterwards (v. 20), we find him asking only for nature's wealth of food and raiment: he is the archetype of a soul that disciplines itself, one who is at war with every kind of effeminacy.

"But the passage has a further meaning, which is conveyed in symbol. You must know that the divine place and the holy

1 Philo, de somniis, i. 20, vol. i. p. 639.

ground is full of incorporeal Intelligences, who are immortal souls. It is one of these that Jacob takes and puts close to his mind, which is, as it were, the head of the combined person, body and soul. He does so under the pretext of going to sleep, but in reality to find repose in the Intelligence which he has chosen, and to place all the burden of his life upon it."

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,1 "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.2 When he tells us shield of Achilles.

that Hephaestus represented on the

"the earth, the heaven, the sea, the sun that rests not, and the moon full-orbed," he is teaching us the divine

1 Hom. Il. 2. 204.

Ps-Justin (probably Apollonius, see Dräseke, in the Jahrb. f. protestant Theologie, 1885, p. 144), c. 17.

Hom. Il. 18. 483.

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