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REOONCILIATION.
1075
grounded on the principles of truth unless those principles were known to some one already. Moreover,
* Cf." Pagan Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about the Universe ; and all Religions are symbols of that, altering always as that alters : but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even inversion, of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving cause, when it was rather the result and termination. To get beautiful allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the want of men ; but to know what they were to believe about this Universe, what course they were to steer in it; what, in this mysterious life of theirs, they had to hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. The Pilgrim's Progress is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious one: but consider whether Bunyan's Allegory could have preceded the Faith it symbolizes? The Faith has to be already there standing believed by everybody :-of which the Allegory could then become a shadow; and with all its seriousness, we may say, a sportful shadow, a mere play of the Fancy, in comparison with that awful fact and scientific certainty which it poetically strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product of the certainty, not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's nor in any other case. For Paganism, therefore, we have still to enquire, whence came that scientific certainty, the parent of such a bewildered heap of allegories, errors and confusions? How was it, what was it?
"Surely it were a foolish attempt to pretend "explaining,' in this place, or in any place, such a phenomenon as that far-distant distracted cloudy imbroglio of Paganism,-more like a cloud field than a distant continent of firm land and facts! It is no longer a reality, yet it was one. We ought to understand that this seeming cloud field was once a reality; that not poetic allegory, least of all that dupery and deception was the origin of it. Men, I say, never did believe idle songs, never risked their soul's life on allegories : men in all times, especially in early earnest times, have had an instinct for detecting quacks, for detesting quacks. Let us try if, leaving out both the quack theory and the allegory one, and listening with affectionate attention to that far-off confused rumour of the Pagan ages, we cannot ascertain so much as this at least, that there was a kind of fact at the heart of them; that they too were not mendacious and distracted, but in their own poor way true and sane." Heroes and Hero-Worship by Thomas Carlyle.
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