in its connexion with the age from which it proceeded. They had
no idea of development, of the differences of ages, of the process
by which our race has been "educated." In their attempts to
reconcile the religions of the world, they were thus thrown back
upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. The religions of
the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages in a
regular development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side
by side, and substantially in agreement with one another. And
here the first necessity was to misrepresent the language, the
conceptions, the sentiments, it was [35] proposed to compare and
reconcile. Plato and Homer must be made to speak agreeably to
Moses. Set side by side, the mere surfaces could never unite in
any harmony of design. Therefore one must go below the
surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more
remote meaning,--that diviner signification held in reserve, in
recessu divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or
figure of speech in the books of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if
you will, into which we may peep for a moment, and see it at
work weaving strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the
fifteenth century has its interest. With its strange web of
imagery, its quaint conceits, its unexpected combinations and
subtle moralising, it is an element in the local colour of a great
age. It illustrates also the faith of that age in all oracles, its desire
to hear all voices, its generous belief that nothing which had ever
interested the human mind could wholly lose its vitality. It is the
counterpart, though certainly the feebler counterpart, of that
practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of Greece with the
Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the time. And it is