esses, and
even immoralities to the Almighty.

Starting with a mistaken translation of a verse in the book of Proverbs,
Origen presented as a basis for his main structure the idea of
a threefold sense of Scripture: the literal, the moral, and the
mystic--corresponding to the Platonic conception of the threefold nature
of man. As results of this we have such masterpieces as his proof, from
the fifth verse of chapter xxv of Job, that the stars are living beings,
and from the well-known passage in the nineteenth chapter of St. Matthew
his warrant for self-mutilation. But his great triumphs were in the
allegorical method. By its use the Bible was speedily made an oracle
indeed, or, rather, a book of riddles. A list of kings in the Old
Testament thus becomes an enumeration of sins; the waterpots of stone,
"containing two or three firkins apiece," at the marriage of Cana,
signify the literal, moral, and spiritual sense of Scripture; the
ass upon which the Saviour rode on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem
becomes the Old Testament, the foal the New Testament, and the two
apostles who went to loose them the moral and mystical senses; blind
Bartimeus throwing off his coat while hastening to Jesus, opens a whole
treasury of oracular meanings.

The genius and power of Origen made a great impression on the strong
thinkers who followed him. St. Jerome called him "the greatest master in
the Church since the apostles," and Athanasius was hardly less emphatic.

The structure thus begun was continued by leading theologians during
the centuries following: St. Hilary of Poitiers--"the Athanasius of
Gaul"--produced some wonderful results of this method; but St. Jerome,
inspired by the example of the man whom he so greatly admired, went
beyond him. A triumph of his exegesis is seen in his statement that
the Shunamite damsel who was selected to cherish David in his old age
signified heavenly wisdom.

The great mind of St. Augustine was drawn largely into this kind of
creation, and nothing marks more clearly the vast change which had come
over the world than the fact that this greatest of the early Christian
thinkers turned from the broader paths opened by Plato and Aristotle
into that opened by Clement of Alexandria.

In the mystic power of numbers to reveal the sense of Scripture
Augustine found especial delight. He tells us that there is deep meaning
in sundry scriptural uses of the number forty, and especially as the
number of da