natural sense of the words, to
give them a mystical and spiritual sense which they call allegorical and
figurative; claiming, for example, that the people of Israel and Judea,
to whom these promises were made, were not understood as the Israelites
after the body, but the Israelites in spirit: that is to say, the
Christians which are the Israel of God, the true chosen people that by
the promise made to this enslaved people, to deliver it from captivity,
it is understood to be not the corporal deliverance of a single captive
people, but the spiritual deliverance of all men from the servitude of
the Devil, which was to be accomplished by their Divine Saviour; that by
the abundance of riches, and all the temporal blessings promised to this
people, is meant the abundance of spiritual graces; and finally, that by
the city of Jerusalem, is meant not the terrestrial Jerusalem, but the
spiritual Jerusalem, which is the Christian Church.

But it is easy to see that these spiritual and allegorical meanings
having only a strange, imaginary sense, being a subterfuge of the
interpreters, can not serve to show the truth or the falsehood of a
proposition, or of any promises whatever. It is ridiculous to forge such
allegorical meanings, since it is only by the relations of the natural
and true sense that we can judge of their truth or falsehood. A
proposition, a promise, for example, which is considered true in the
proper and natural sense of the terms in which it is expressed, will not
become false in itself under cover of a strange sense, one which does
not belong to it. By the same reasoning, that which is manifestly false
in its proper and natural sense, will not become true in itself,
although we give it a strange sense, one foreign to the true.

We can say that the prophecies of the Old Testament adjusted to the New,
would be very absurd and puerile things. For example, Abraham had two
wives, of which the one, who was but a servant, represented the
synagogue, and the other one, his lawful wife, represented the Christian
Church; and that this Abraham had two sons, of which the one born of
Hagar, the servant, represented the Old Testament; and the other, born
of Sarah, the wife, represented the New Testament. Who would not laugh
at such a ridiculous doctrine?

Is it not amusing that a piece of red cloth, exhibited by a prostitute
as a signal to spies, in the Old Testament is made to represent the
blood of Jesus Christ shed in the