"As to the earthly Paradise, the plain word of Scripture [Genesis, ii, 8; iii, 24] compelled most Theologians to place it in the Furthest East, though a minority inclined to give a symbolic meaning to the crucial words, 'The Lord God planted a garden _eastward_ in Eden ... and placed Cherubim at the East of the Garden, to keep the way of the Tree of Life.' Augustine, here as elsewhere, shows himself inclined to compromise, as well became one who attempted such a task as the re-statement of the whole Catholic Faith. His knowledge was too many-sided, and his intelligence too keen, for him not to perceive the importance of a certain liberality of temper in a creed which aspired to conquer the world, and his treatment of the question of the terrestrial Paradise is a good example of his method. For himself, he holds fast to the real existence of Eden, and the literal sense of Scripture on its position, but he allows any one who will to give the texts at issue a symbolical meaning (_De Civ. Dei_, XIII, ch. xxi; see also Eucherius, Comm. on Genesis in the _Max. Bibl. Vet. Pat._ vi, 874, and A. Graf's interesting essay on the _Legends of the terrestrial Paradise_, Turin, 1878). To the same effect, though more doubtfully, speaks St. Isidore of Seville, who in so many ways reproduces at the end of the sixth century the spirit and method of the Bishop of Hippo in the fifth. In one place the Spanish Doctor repeats the traditional language about Eden, placed in the East, blessed with perpetual summer, but shut off from the approach of man by the fiery wall which reached almost to the Heaven: yet elsewhere he seems to countenance a purely figurative sense. His scepticism is expressed in the _De Differentiis_, i, 10; his traditionalism in the _Etymologies_ or _Origins_, XIV, 3 (De Asia). "The ordinary conclusion of the more philosophic school of Churchmen is perhaps expressed by Moses Bar-Cepha, 'Bishop of Bethraman and Guardian of sacred things in Mozal' [_i.e._, Mosul? or Nineveh], near Bagdad, about A.D. 900 [Migne's editor of Moses, in _Pat. Græc._, cxi, pp. 482-608 (1863), places him later, about A.D. 950; but Marinelli, Erdkunde, 20-1, dates him about A.D. 700, doubtless with the assent of S. Günther and L. Neumann, who are responsible for the enlarged German edition of Marinelli's admirable essay. The most interesting passages of Moses' geography are in Pt. I, chs. i, ii, vii-ix, xi-xiv]. In his _Commentary on Paradise_, the ingenious prelate solves past difficulties in the spirit of Hegel himself. The terrestrial Eden had one existence under two conditions, visible and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, sensual and intellectual. As pertaining to this world, it existed, he considers, in a land which was on, but not of, the earth that we inhabit; for it lay on higher ground, it breathed a purer air, and, though many of the saints had fixed it in the East, it was really beyond our ken.