d idea held by
the learned of antiquity, but space does not here allow a full
treatment of the subject. What is important to note is that Simon
claimed this as a method of his School, and therefore, in dealing with
his system, we cannot leave out so important a factor, and persist in
taking allegorical and symbolical expressions as literal teachings. We
may say that the method is misleading and has led to much superstition
among the ignorant, but we have no right to criticize the literal and
historical meaning of an allegory, and then fancy that we have
criticized the doctrine it enshrines. This has been the error of all
rationalistic critics of the world bibles. They have wilfully set on one
side the whole method of ancient religious teaching, and taken as
literal history and narrative what was essentially allegorical and
symbolical. Perhaps the reason for this may be in the fact that wherever
religion decays and ignorance spreads herself, there the symbolical and
allegorical is materialized into the historical and literal. The spirit
is forgotten, the letter is deified. Hence the reaection of the
rationalistic critic against the materialism and literalism of sacred
verities. Nevertheless, such criticism does not go deep enough to affect
the real truths of religion and the convictions of the human soul, any
more than an aesthetic criticism on the shape of the Roman letters and
Arabic figures can affect the truth of an algebraical formula.
Rationalistic criticism may stir people from literalism and dogmatic
crystallization, in fact it has done much in this way, but it does not
reach the hidden doctrines.

Now Simon contended that many of the narrations of Scripture were
allegorical, and opposed those who held to the dead-letter
interpretation. To the student of comparative religion, it is difficult
to see what is so highly blameworthy in this. On the contrary, this view
is so worthy of praise, that it deserves to be widely adopted to-day, at
the latter end of the nineteenth century. To understand antiquity, we
must follow the methods of the wise among the ancients, and the method
of allegory and parable was the manner of teaching of the great Masters
of the past.

But supposing we grant this, and admit that all Scriptures possess an
inner meaning and lend themselves to interpretation on every plane of
being and thought, who is to decide whether any particular
interpretation is just or no? Already we have writers arisi