e of symbols reached
the Hebrews when they had formed a body of people near the Syrian
desert.

One of the most beautiful emblems of the Judaic books is this passage of
Ecclesiastes: "... when the grinders cease because they are few, and
those that look out of the windows be darkened, when the almond-tree
shall flourish and the grasshopper shall be a burden: or ever the silver
cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken
at the fountain...."

That signifies that the old men lose their teeth, that their sight is
dim, that their hair whitens like the flower of the almond-tree, that
their feet swell like the grasshopper, that they are no more fit for
engendering children, and that then they must prepare for the great
journey.

The "Song of Songs" is (as one knows) a continual emblem of the marriage
of Jesus Christ with the Church. It is an emblem from beginning to end.
Especially does the ingenious Dom Calmet demonstrate that the palm-tree
to which the well-beloved goes is the cross to which our Lord Jesus
Christ was condemned. But it must be avowed that a pure and healthy
moral philosophy is still preferable to these allegories.

One sees in this people's books a crowd of typical emblems which revolt
us to-day and which exercise our incredulity and our mockery, but which
appeared ordinary and simple to the Asiatic peoples.

In Ezekiel are images which appear to us as licentious and revolting: in
those times they were merely natural. There are thirty examples in the
"Song of Songs," model of the most chaste union. Remark carefully that
these expressions, these images are always quite serious, and that in no
book of this distant antiquity will you find the least mockery on the
great subject of generation. When lust is condemned it is in definite
terms; but never to excite to passion, nor to make the smallest
pleasantry. This far-distant antiquity did not have its Martial, its
Catullus, or its Petronius.

It results from all the Jewish prophets and from all the Jewish books,
as from all the books which instruct us in the usages of the Chaldeans,
the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Syrians, the Indians, the
Egyptians; it results, I say, that their customs were not ours, that
this ancient world in no way resembled our world. Go from Gibraltar to
Mequinez merely, the manners are no longer the same; no longer does one
find the same ideas; two leagues of sea have changed everything.

_ON TH