an explicit assertion that his influence and love are perpetual; whereas
the original parable revealed at most the wish and aspiration, contrary
to fact, that they might have been so. By substituting embodiment for
allegory, the Greek mind thus achieved something very congenial to its
habits: it imagined the full and adequate expression, not in words but
in existences, of the emotion to be conveyed. The Eucharist is to the
Last Supper what a centaur is to a horseman or a tragedy to a song.
Similarly a Dantesque conception of hell and paradise embodies in living
detail the innocent apologue in the gospel about a separation of the
sheep from the goats. The result is a chimerical metaphysics,
containing much which, in reference to existing facts, is absurd; but
that metaphysics, when taken for what it truly is, a new mythology,
utters the subtler secrets of the new religion not less ingeniously and
poetically than pagan mythology reflected the daily shifts in nature and
in human life.

[Sidenote: Hebrew philosophy of history identified with Platonic
cosmology.]

Metaphysics became not only a substitute for allegory but at the same
time a background for history. Neo-Platonism had enlarged, in a way
suited to the speculative demands of the time, the cosmos conceived by
Greek science. In an intelligible region, unknown to cosmography and
peopled at first by the Platonic ideas and afterward by Aristotle's
solitary God, there was now the Absolute One, too exalted for any
predicates, but manifesting its essence in the first place in a supreme
Intelligence, the second hypostasis of a Trinity; and in the second
place in the Soul of the World, the third hypostasis, already relative
to natural existence. Now the Platonists conceived these entities to be
permanent and immutable; the physical world itself had a meaning and an
expressive value, like a statue, but no significant history. When the
Jewish notion of creation and divine government of the world presented
itself to the Greeks, they hastened to assimilate it to their familiar
notions of imitation, expression, finality, and significance. And when
the Christians spoke of Christ as the Son of God, who now sat at his
right hand in the heavens, their Platonic disciples immediately thought
of the Nous or Logos, the divine Intelligence, incarnate as they had
always believed in the whole world, and yet truly the substance and
essence of divinity. To say that this incarnation had tak