By this method of interpretation the devout adapted the Bible to their own uses, smoothing away its contradictions and explaining away passages, like the command in Genesis to kill uncircumcised children, which, read literally, would have seemed to them barbarous and immoral. We must be careful, however, not to misunderstand this method of thought. When they said that the beautiful woman in the Song of Solomon was the Church, they were not conscious, as we are, that this is a figure of speech. There had not entered into their habits of thought the kind of analytical precision in which one thing can mean only one thing. It is no contradiction to say that the allegory was taken literally; certainly there was no sense of unreality about it, as there is for us. “These and similar allegorical interpretations may be suitably put ...” says St. Augustine, speaking here to the educated minority, “without giving offense to anyone, while yet we believe the strict truth of the history confirmed by its circumstantial narrative of facts.” But at last men became too analytical and too self-conscious to accept the naive use of allegory. They realized that allegory was a loose method of interpretation which lent itself easily to the citing of scripture in order to justify heresy. If the ten planks in Noah’s Ark could mean a different set of truths on each day in Lent, there was no telling what they might come to mean in the end. It was clear, therefore, that allegory was dangerous [p039] and might, as Luther said, “degenerate into a mere monkey game”; it was wanton, like “a sort of beautiful harlot who proves herself spiritually seductive to idle men.” This danger was a result of the general loosening of organic faith which was already evident in Luther’s day. To men who had the unconscious certainties about God and his universe, allegory was a perfectly safe method of interpreting the Bible because all the interpretations, however fantastic, were inspired by the same pre-judgments and tended therefore to confirm the same convictions. The allegories of simple men are like many-colored flowers in one garden, growing from the same soil, watered by the same rains, turning their faces toward the same sun. But as men became emancipated from their ancestral way of life, their convictions about God and destiny and human morality changed. Then the method of allegory ceased to be the merely exuberant expression of the same ancient truths, and became a confusing method of rationalizing all kinds of new experiments. It promoted heresy because men had become heretical, where once, while men were devout, it had only embroidered their devotions.