the various parts of Christianity as so many interpretations of human life in its ideal aspects. But we are not attempting to narrate facts so much as to advance an idea, and the illustrations given will perhaps suffice to make our conception intelligible. There is, however, a possible misunderstanding which we should be careful to avoid in this dangerous field of philosophic interpretation. In saying that a given religion was the poetic transformation of an experience, we must not imagine that it was thought to be such—for it is evident that every sincere Christian believed in the literal and empirical reality of all that the Christian epic contained. Nor should we imagine that philosophic ideas, or general reflections on life, were the origin of religion, and that afterward certain useful myths, known to be such by their authors, were mistaken for history and for literal prophecy. That sometimes happens, when historians, poets, or philosophers are turned by the unintelligent veneration of posterity into religious prophets. Such was the fate of Plato, for instance, or of the writer of the "Song of Solomon"; but 110 great and living religion was ever founded in that way.

Had Christianity or any other religion had its basis in literary or philosophical allegories, it would never have become a religion, because the poetry of it would never have been interwoven with the figures and events of real life. No tomb, no relic, no material miracle, no personal derivation of authority, would have existed to serve as the nucleus of devotion and the point of junction between this world and the other. The origin of Christian dogma lay in historic facts and in doctrines literally meant by their authors. It is one of the greatest possible illusions in these matters to fancy that the meaning which we see in parables and mysteries was the meaning they had in the beginning, but which later misinterpretation had obscured. On the contrary—as a glance at any incipient religious movement now going on will show us—the authors of doctrines, however obvious it may be to every one else that these doctrines have only a figurative validity, are the first dupes to their own intuitions. This is no less true of metaphysical theories than of spontaneous superstitions: did their promulgator understand the character of their justification he would give himself out for a simple poet, appeal only to cultivated minds, and never turn his energies to stimulating private delusions, not to speak of public fanaticisms. The best philosophers seldom perceive the poetic merit of their systems.

So among the ancients it was not an abstract observation of Nature, with conscious allegory supervening, that 

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