ing always
as that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even
inversion, of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving
cause, when it was rather the result and termination. To get beautiful
allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the want of men; but to
know what they were to believe about this Universe, what course they
were to steer in it; what, in this mysterious Life of theirs, they
had to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. The _Pilgrim's
Progress_ is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious one: but
consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have _preceded_ the Faith it
symbolizes! The Faith had to be already there, standing believed by
everybody;--of which the Allegory could _then_ become a shadow; and,
with all its seriousness, we may say a _sportful_ shadow, a mere play of
the Fancy, in comparison with that awful Fact and scientific certainty
which it poetically strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product of
the certainty, not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's nor in any other
case. For Paganism, therefore, we have still to inquire, Whence came
that scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap of
allegories, errors and confusions? How was it, what was it?

Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend "explaining," in this place,
or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted cloudy
imbroglio of Paganism,--more like a cloud-field than a distant continent
of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We
ought to understand that this seeming cloud-field was once a reality;
that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was
the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked
their soul's life on allegories: men in all times, especially in early
earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting
quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the
allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off
confused rumor of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at
least, That there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too
were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true and
sane!

You remember that fancy of Plato's, of a man who had grown to maturity
in some dark distance, and was brought on a sudden into the upper air to
see the sun rise. What would his wonder be, his rapt aston