ut
with the partiality of a neophyte. Some portions of their teaching,
magnificent in themselves, came like music to my inward ear, as if
the response to ideas, which, with little external to encourage
them, I had cherished so long. These were based on the mystical
or sacramental principle, and spoke of the various economies or
dispensations of the eternal. I understood them to mean that the
exterior world, physical and historical, was but the outward
manifestation of realities greater than itself. Nature was a
parable:[1] Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy,
and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the
Gospel. The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets;
for "thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given."
There had been a divine dispensation granted to the Jews; there had
been in some sense a dispensation carried on in favour of the
Gentiles. He who had taken the seed of Jacob for His elect people,
had not therefore cast the rest of mankind out of His sight. In the
fulness of time both Judaism and Paganism had come to nought; the
outward framework, which concealed yet suggested the living truth,
had never been intended to last, and it was dissolving under the
beams of the sun of justice behind it and through it. The process of
change had been slow; it had been done not rashly, but by rule and
measure, "at sundry times and in divers manners," first one
disclosure and then another, till the whole was brought into full
manifestation. And thus room was made for the anticipation of further
and deeper disclosures, of truths still under the veil of the letter,
and in their season to be revealed. The visible world still remains
without its divine interpretation; Holy Church in her sacraments and
her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the
world, only a symbol of those heavenly facts which fill eternity. Her
mysteries are but the expressions in human language of truths to
which the human mind is unequal. It is evident how much there was in
all this in correspondence with the thoughts which had attracted me
when I was young, and with the doctrine which I have already
connected with the Analogy and the Christian Year.

I suppose it was to the Alexandrian school and to the early church
that I owe in particular what I definitely held about the angels. I
viewed them, not only as the ministers employed by the Creator in the
Jewish and Chr