owledge may be of what I
might have known, had I more faithfully walked in the light I had, is
beyond my conjecture or confession: but as I never wrote for my own
pleasure or self-proclaiming, I have been guarded, as men who so write
always will be, from errors dangerous to others; and the fragmentary
expressions of feeling or statements of doctrine, which from time to
time I have been able to give, will be found now by an attentive reader
to bind themselves together into a general system of interpretation of
Sacred literature,--both classic and Christian, which will enable him
without injustice to sympathize in the faiths of candid and generous
souls, of every age and every clime.

53. That there _is_ a Sacred classic literature, running parallel with
that of the Hebrews, and coalescing in the symbolic legends of
mediaeval Christendom, is shown in the most tender and impressive way
by the independent, yet similar, influence of Virgil upon Dante, and
upon Bishop Gawaine Douglas. At earlier dates, the teaching of every
master trained in the Eastern schools was necessarily grafted on the
wisdom of the Greek mythology; and thus the story of the Nemean Lion,
with the aid of Athena in its conquest, is the real root-stock of the
legend of St. Jerome's companion, conquered by the healing gentleness
of the Spirit of Life.

54. I call it a legend only. Whether Heracles ever slew, or St. Jerome
ever cherished, the wild or wounded creature, is of no moment to us in
learning what the Greeks meant by their vase-outlines of the great
contest, or the Christian painters by their fond insistence on the
constancy of the Lion-friend. Former tradition, in the story of
Samson,--of the disobedient prophet,--of David's first inspired victory,
and finally of the miracle wrought in the defence of the most favoured
and most faithful of the greater Prophets, runs always parallel in
symbolism with the Dorian fable: but the legend of St. Jerome takes up
the prophecy of the Millennium, and foretells, with the Cumaean Sibyl,
and with Isaiah, a day when the Fear of Man shall be laid in
benediction, not enmity, on inferior beings,--when they shall not hurt
nor destroy in all the holy Mountain, and the Peace of the Earth shall
be as far removed from its present sorrow, as the present gloriously
animate universe from the nascent desert, whose deeps were the place of
dragons, and its mountains, domes of fire.

Of that day knoweth no man; but the Kingdo