ion:

"'And Rebecca arose'--hereby is signified an elevation of the affection
of truth: 'And her damsels'--hereby are signified subservient
affections: 'And they rode upon camels'--hereby is signified the
intellectual principle elevated above natural scientifics."!

Of all this pious sort of folly we may say with the Master--"Enough."

It is the common mistake which gathers a nimbus of mystic sense around
every book excessively revered. Thus the Greeks fancied an inner and
mystical sense in Homer; and thus Italian professors expound the esoteric
significance of Dante.

The fantastic dream of mysterious meanings in the Bible must take wings
after its kindred fancies of Greeks and Italians, at the touch of a
ripening literary judgment. One rule holds of all human letters. Where
there is legend, myth, metaphor, or other clear form of poetic fancy,
language is to be read imaginatively. Otherwise, in the Bible, as out of
it, the ordinary meaning of words must be followed.

III.

_It is a wrong use of the Bible to construct a theology out of it, by the
mechanical system of proof texts in vogue in the churches._

With a preconceived system of thought in their minds, drawn from the most
highly evolved speculations of the New Testament, men have gone through
both Testaments; and whenever they have lighted upon a sentence which
seemed to coincide with this system, it has been torn bleeding from its
place in a living texture of thought, impaled on some one of the "Five
Points," and set up in the Theological Cabinet, duly labelled "Proof-Text
of Original Sin," or "Proof Text of Future Punishment."

What a monstrosity an ordinary Sunday School Scripture Catechism is, with
its statements of received doctrines, to which are appended proof-texts
drawn from Genesis and Isaiah and Paul; _i.e._, from some pre-historic
tradition, from a Hebrew states, man's oration and from a Christian
apostle's letter. It makes no difference what the character of the writing
from which the sentence is taken. Everything is grist for this mill. A
"judgment" or "doom" of the nomadic Hebrews, a burning metaphor from a
late poet and a metaphysical proposition from an Alexandrian philosopher
are jumbled together side by side, as co-equal proofs of the most awful
doctrines.

An ancient historian, gathering up the traditions of his primitive
fore-fathers, records the legend of the Flood, in which it is told that

"God saw that