arated in belief the extreme Roman Catholic and the extreme
Protestant, they both appeal to the same _Bible_. However far apart may
be the philosophic Vedantin and the most illiterate Vallabhacharya, they
both regard the same _Vedas_ as supreme. However bitterly opposed to
each other may be the Shias and the Sunnis, they both regard as sacred
the same _Kuran_. Controversies and quarrels may arise as to the meaning
of texts, but the Book itself, in every case, is looked on with the
utmost reverence. And rightly so; for all such books contain fragments
of The Revelation, selected by One of the great Ones who hold it in
trust; such a fragment is embodied in what down here we call a
Revelation, or a Scripture, and some part of the world rejoices in it as
in a treasure of vast value. The fragment is chosen according to the
needs of the time, the capacity of the people to whom it is given, the
type of the race whom it is intended to instruct. It is generally given
in a peculiar form, in which the outer history, or story, or song, or
psalm, or prophecy, appears to the superficial or ignorant reader to be
the whole book; but in these deeper meanings lie concealed, sometimes in
numbers, sometimes in words constructed on a hidden plan--a cypher, in
fact--sometimes in symbols, recognisable by the instructed, sometimes in
allegories written as histories, and in many other ways. These Books,
indeed, have something of a sacramental character about them, an outer
form and an inner life, an outer symbol and an inner truth. Those only
can explain the hidden meaning who have been trained by those instructed
in it; hence the dictum of S. Peter that "no prophecy of the Scripture
is of any private interpretation."[350] The elaborate explanations of
texts of the Bible, with which the volumes of patristic literature
abound, seem fanciful and overstrained to the prosaic modern mind. The
play upon numbers, upon letters, the apparently fantastic
interpretations of paragraphs that, on the face of them, are ordinary
historical statements of a simple character, exasperate the modern
reader, who demands to have his facts presented clearly and coherently,
and above all, requires what he feels to be solid ground under his feet.
He declines absolutely to follow the light-footed mystic over what seem
to him to be quaking morasses, in a wild chase after dancing
will-o'-the-wisps, which appear and disappear with bewildering and
irrational caprice. Yet the m