s, it is a difficult
thing to find good methods for!--We shall begin to have a chance of
understanding Paganism, when we first admit that to its followers it
was, at one time, earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain that
men did believe in Paganism; men with open eyes, sound senses, men
made altogether like ourselves; that we, had we been there, should
have believed in it. Ask now, What Paganism could have been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things to
Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a
shadowing-forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual
form, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe.
Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, still
everywhere observably at work, though in less important things, That
what a man feels intensely, he struggles to speak-out of him, to see
represented before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of life
and historical reality in it. Now doubtless there is such a law, and
it is one of the deepest in human nature; neither need we doubt that
it did operate fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis which
ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little
more respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think,
would _we_ believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an
allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should
require. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die
is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a
stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way
towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan
Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew
about the Universe; and all Religions are Symbols of that, altering
always as that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and
even _in_version, 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 seri