urs it came into being with the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first chapter of Genesis, while it
still is in full splendour in the last chapter of the Apocalypse.

"The Old Testament is an anticipatory figure of all the New Testament
tells us. The Mosaic dispensation contains, as in an allegory, what the
Christian religion shows us in reality; the history of the People of
God, its principal personages, its sayings and doings, the very
accessories round about it, are a series of images; everything came to
the Hebrews under a figure, Saint Paul tells us. Our Lord took the
trouble to remind His disciples of this on various occasions, and He
Himself, when addressing the multitude, almost always spoke in parables
as a means of conveying one thing by an illustration from another.

"Symbols, then, have a divine origin; it may be added that from the
human point of view this form of teaching answers to one of the least
disputable cravings of the human mind. Man feels a certain enjoyment in
giving proof of his intelligence, in guessing the riddle thus presented
to him, and likewise in preserving the hidden truth summed up in a
visible formula, a perdurable form. Saint Augustine expressly says:
'Anything that is set forth in an allegory is certainly more emphatic,
more pleasing, more impressive, than when it is formulated in technical
words.'"

"That is Mallarme's idea too," thought Durtal, "and this coincidence in
the views of the saint and the poet, on grounds at once analogous and
different, is whimsical, to say the least."

"Thus in all ages," the Abbe went on, "men have taken inanimate objects,
or animals and plants, to typify the soul and its attributes, its joys
and sorrows, its virtues and its vices; thought has been materialized to
fix it more securely in the memory, to make it less fugitive, more near
to us, more real, almost tangible.

"Hence the emblems of cruelty and craft, of courtesy and charity,
embodied by certain creatures, personified by certain plants; hence the
spiritual meanings attributed to precious stones, and to colours. And it
may be added that in times of persecution, in the early Christian times,
this hidden language enabled the initiated to hold communication, to
give each other some token of kinship, some password which the enemy
could not interpret. Thus, in the paintings discovered in catacombs, the
Lamb, the Pelican, the Lion, the Shepherd, all meant the Son; the Fish
_Ichthys