The allegorical method of interpretation has survived the circumstances of its birth and the gathered forces of its opponents. It has filled a large place in the literature of Christianity. But by the irony of history, though it grew out of a tendency towards rationalism, it has come in later times to be vested like a saint, and to wear an aureole round its head. It has been the chief instrument by which the dominant beliefs of every age have constructed their strongholds.[143] It was harmless so long as it was free. It was the play of innocent imagination on the surface of great truths. But when it became authoritative, when the idea prevailed that only that poetical sense was true of which the majority approved, and when moreover it became traditional, so that one generation was bound to accept the symbolical interpretations of its predecessors, it became at once the slave of dogmatism and the tyrant of souls. Outside its relation to dogmatism, it has a history and a value which rather grow than diminish with time. It has given to literature books which, though of little value for the immediate purpose of interpretation, are yet monuments of noble and inspiring thoughts. It has contributed even more to art than to literature. The poetry of life would have been infinitely less rich without it. For though without it Dante might have been stirred to write, he would not have written the _Divine Comedy_; and though without it Raffaelle would have painted, he would not have painted the St. Cecilia; and though without it we should have had Gothic cathedrals, we should not have had that sublime symbolism of their structure which is of itself a religious education. It survives because it is based upon an element in human nature which is not likely to pass away: whatever be its value in relation to the literature of the past, it is at least the expression in relation to the present that our lives are hedged round by the unknown, that there is a haze about both our birth and our departure, and that even the meaner facts of life are linked to infinity. But two modern beliefs militate against it. 1. The one belief affects all literature, religious and secular alike. It is that the thoughts of the past are relative to the past, and must be interpreted by it. The glamour of writing has passed away. A written word is no more than a spoken word; and a spoken word is taken in the sense in which the speaker used it, at the time at which he used it. There have been writers of enigmas and painters of emblems, but they have formed an infinitesimal minority. There have been those who, as Cicero says of himself in writing to Atticus, have written allegorically lest open speech should betray them; but such cryptograms have only a temporary and transient use. The idea that ancient literature consists of riddles which it is the business of modern literature to solve, has passed for ever away.