gazine for November, 1882. For a more
general discussion, see Archdeacon Farrar's History of Interpretation,
lect. i and ii, and Rev. Prof. H. P. Smith's Inspiration and Inerrancy,
Cincinnati, 1893, especially chap. iv; also Reuss, History of the New
Testament, English translation, pp. 527, 528.

An eminent scholar has said that while the letter of Scripture became
ossified in Palestine, it became volatilized at Alexandria; and the
truth of this remark was proved by the Alexandrian Jewish theologians
just before the beginning of our era.

This, too, was in obedience to a law of development, which is, that
when literal interpretation clashes with increasing knowledge or with
progress in moral feeling, theologians take refuge in mystic meanings--a
law which we see working in all great religions, from the Brahmans
finding hidden senses in the Vedas, to Plato and the Stoics finding
them in the Greek myths; and from the Sofi reading new meanings into the
Koran, to eminent Christian divines of the nineteenth century giving a
non-natural sense to some of the plainest statements in the Bible.

Nothing is more natural than all this. When naive statements of sacred
writers, in accord with the ethics of early ages, make Brahma perform
atrocities which would disgrace a pirate; and Jupiter take part in
adventures worthy of Don Juan; and Jahveh practise trickery, cruelty,
and high-handed injustice which would bring any civilized mortal into
the criminal courts, the invention of allegory is the one means of
saving the divine authority as soon as men reach higher planes of
civilization.

The great early master in this evolution of allegory, for the
satisfaction of Jews and Christians, was Philo: by him its use came in
as never before. The four streams of the garden of Eden thus become the
four virtues; Abraham's country and kindred, from which he was commanded
to depart, the human body and its members; the five cities of Sodom,
the five senses; the Euphrates, correction of manners. By Philo and
his compeers even the most insignificant words and phrases, and those
especially, were held to conceal the most precious meanings.

A perfectly natural and logical result of this view was reached when
Philo, saturated as he was with Greek culture and nourished on pious
traditions of the utterances at Delphi and Dodona, spoke reverently of
the Jewish Scriptures as "oracles". Oracles they became: as oracles they
appeared in the early histor