There is another epithet bestowed upon Clement, more widely and with better authority than that of "trifler." He is called a mystic. He deals in allegorical interpretations of Holy Scripture, in fanciful analogies, and whimsical reasonings; he was carried away by the spirit of Neo-Platonism, and substituted a number of idle myths for the stern realities of the Gospel. It is not our business at present to show, by references, that this accusation is untrue; but we may admit at once that it is not unfounded, and we maintain that it points to an excellence, rather than a defect, in his teaching. From the remarks made just now, the reader will be prepared to expect that a teacher in Alexandria in Clement's days _must_ have been a mystic. It was simply the fashion; and a fashion, in thought and speech, exacts a certain amount of compliance from those who think or speak for the good of its followers. Neo-Platonism was not extant in his time as a definite system, but ever since the days of Philon its spirit had been the spirit of the Museum. Nature, in its beauty and variety, was an allegory of the soul so said the philosophers, and the crowd caught it up with eagerness. The natural philosopher could not lecture on Aristotle _De Animalibus_ without deducing morals in the style of AEsop. The moralist, in his turn, could hardly keep up his class-list without embodying his Beautiful and his Good in the aesthetical garb of a myth--the more like Plato, the better. The mathematician discoursed of numbers, of lines, and of angles, but the interesting part of his lecture was when he drew the analogy from lines and numbers to the soul and to God. Alexandria liked allegory, and believed, or thought she believed, that the Seen was always a type of the Unseen. Such a belief was not unnatural, and by no means hopelessly erroneous; nay, was it not highly useful to a Christian teacher, with the Bible in his hand, in which he would really have to show them so many things, _per allegoriam dicta?_ Clement took up the accustomed tone. Had he done otherwise, he would have been strange and old-fashioned, whereas he {54} wanted to get the ear of his countrymen, and therefore thought it no harm to fall in with their humor for the mythical; just as good Father Faber preached and wrote like a modern Englishman, and not like an antique Douai controversialist, or a well-meaning translator of "Sermons from the French." But, say the objectors, Clement's interpretation of Scripture is so very forced and unnatural. The whole subject of allegorical interpretation of Sacred Scripture is too wide to be entered upon here; but that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, _has_ an allegorical sense, no one denies, and the decision of what is the true allegorical sense depends more upon the authority of the teacher than upon the interpretation itself. In the time of Clement, when the Gnostics were attributing the Old Testament to the Evil Principle,