This spirit actualizes itself in the power and scope of its resultant conviction, by which it makes real to itself the qualities, attributes, and actions of its object, God, and the nature of man’s relationship or union with the divine. In its final energy, when only partly conscious of its intellectual inductions, it discards syllogisms, quite dissatisfied with their devious and hesitating approach. Instead, by the power of love, it springs directly to its God. Nevertheless the soul which feels the inadequacy of reason even to voice the soul’s desires, will seek means of expression wherein reason still will play a submerged part. The soul is seeking to express what is not altogether expressible in direct and rational statement. It seeks adumbrations, partial unveilings of its sentiments, which shall perhaps make up in warmth of colour what they lack in definiteness of line. In fine, it seeks symbols. Such symbolism must be large and elastic, in order to shadow forth the soul’s relations with the Infinite; it must also be capable of carrying passion, that it may satisfy the soul’s craving to give voice to its great love. In Greek thought as well as in the Hellenizing Judaism of a Philo, symbolism, or more specifically speaking, allegorical interpretation, was obviously apologetic, seeking to cloud in naturalistic interpretations the doings of the rather over-human gods of Greece.[495] But it sprang also from the unresting need of man to find expression for that sense of things which will not fit definite statement. This was the need which became creative, and of necessity fancifully creative, with Plato. Though he would have nothing to do with falsifying apologetics, all the more he felt the need of allegories, to suggest what his dialectic could not formulate. In the early times of the Church militant of Christ, allegorical interpretation was exploited to defend the Faith; in the later patristic period, the Faith had so far triumphed, that allegory as a sword of defence and attack might be sheathed, or just allowed to glitter now and then half-drawn. But piety’s other need, with increasing energy, compelled the use of symbols and articulate allegory to express the directly inexpressible. Thereafter through the Middle Ages, while the use of allegory as a defence against the Gentiles slumbered, so much more the other need of it, and the sense of the universal symbolism of material things, filled the minds of men; and in age-long answer to this need, allegory, symbolism, became part of the very spirit of the mediaeval time.