ous
one: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have _preceded_ the
Faith it symbolises! The Faith had to be already there, standing
believed by everybody;--of which the Allegory could _then_ become a
shadow; and, with all its seriousness, we may say a _sportful_ shadow,
a mere play of the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and
scientific certainty which it poetically strives to emblem. The
Allegory is the product of the certainty, not the producer of it; not
in Bunyan's, nor in any other case. For Paganism, therefore, we have
still to inquire, Whence came that scientific certainty, the parent of
such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors and confusions? How was
it, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend 'explaining,' in this
place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant
distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism,--more like a cloudfield than
a distant continent of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality,
yet it was one. We ought to understand that this seeming cloudfield
was once a reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery
and deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle
songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories; men in all times,
especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting
quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the
quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate
attention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot
ascertain so much as this at least, That there was a kind of fact at
the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted,
but in their own poor way true and sane!

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturity
in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper air
to see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt astonishment
at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free open
sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart
would be kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to be
Godlike, his soul would fall down in worship before it. Now, just such
a childlike greatness was in the primitive nations. The first Pagan
Thinker among rude men, the first man that began to think, was
precisely this child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with
the depth and strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he