"Undoubtedly. That there may be some contradictions in our interpretations I admit, but still the palimpsest can be deciphered. The key needed is a knowledge of symbolism." And seeing that Durtal was listening to him with interest, the Abbe came back to his seat, and said,-- "What is a symbol? According to Littre it is a 'figure or image used as a sign of something else;' and we Catholics narrow the definition by saying with Hugues de Saint Victor that a symbol is an allegorical representation of a Christian principle under a tangible image. "Now symbolism has existed ever since the beginning of the world. Every religion adopted it, and in ours it came into being with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first chapter of Genesis, while it still is in full splendour in the last chapter of the Apocalypse. "The Old Testament is an anticipatory figure of all the New Testament tells us. The Mosaic dispensation contains, as in an allegory, what the Christian religion shows us in reality; the history of the People of God, its principal personages, its sayings and doings, the very accessories round about it, are a series of images; everything came to the Hebrews under a figure, Saint Paul tells us. Our Lord took the trouble to remind His disciples of this on various occasions, and He Himself, when addressing the multitude, almost always spoke in parables as a means of conveying one thing by an illustration from another. "Symbols, then, have a divine origin; it may be added that from the human point of view this form of teaching answers to one of the least disputable cravings of the human mind. Man feels a certain enjoyment in giving proof of his intelligence, in guessing the riddle thus presented to him, and likewise in preserving the hidden truth summed up in a visible formula, a perdurable form. Saint Augustine expressly says: 'Anything that is set forth in an allegory is certainly more emphatic, more pleasing, more impressive, than when it is formulated in technical words.'" "That is Mallarme's idea too," thought Durtal, "and this coincidence in the views of the saint and the poet, on grounds at once analogous and different, is whimsical, to say the least." "Thus in all ages," the Abbe went on, "men have taken inanimate objects, or animals and plants, to typify the soul and its attributes, its joys and sorrows, its virtues and its vices; thought has been materialized to fix it more securely in the memory, to make it less fugitive, more near to us, more real, almost tangible.