These devices of the mind have a history as old as humanity. From inscrutable beginnings, in time they become recognized as makeshifts; yet they remain prone to enter new stages of confusion. The mind seeking to express the transcendental, avails itself of symbols. All religions have teemed with them, in their primitive phases scarcely distinguishing between symbol and fact; then a difference becomes evident to clearer-minded men, while perhaps at the same time others are elaborately maintaining that the symbol magically is, or brings to pass, that which it represents. Such obscuring mysticism existed not merely in confused Egypt and Brahminical India, but everywhere--in antique Greece and Rome, and then afterwards through the times of the Christian Church Fathers and the entire Middle Ages. Fact and symbol are seen constantly closing together and becoming each other like the serpent-souls in the twenty-fifth canto of Dante’s _Inferno_. Allegory properly speaking, which involves a conscious and sustained effort to invest concrete or material statements with more general or spiritual meaning, played an interesting rôle in epochs antecedent to the patristic and mediaeval periods. Even before Plato’s time the personal myths of the gods shocked the Greek ethical intellect, which thereupon proceeded to convert them into allegories. Greek allegorical interpretation of ancient myth was apologetic to both the critical mind and the moral sense. With Philo, the Hellenizing Jew of Alexandria, whose philosophy revolted from the literal text of Genesis, the motive for allegorical interpretation was similar. But the document before him was most unlike the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Genesis contained no palpably immoral stories of Jehovah to be explained away. Its account of divine creation and human beginnings merely needed to be invested with further ethical meaning. So Philo made cardinal virtues of the four rivers of Eden, and through like allegorical conceits transformed the Book of Genesis into a system of Hellenistic ethics. Not cosmogonic myths, but moral meanings, he had discovered in his document. Advancing along the path which Philo found, Christian allegorical interpretation undertook to substantiate the validity of the Gospel. To this end it fixed special symbolical meanings upon the Old Testament narratives, so as to make them into prefigurative testimonies to the truth of Christian teachings.[33] Allegory was also called on to justify, as against educated pagans, certain acts of that heroic but peccant “type” of Christ, David, the son of Jesse. Such special apologetic needs hardly affected the allegorical interpretation of the Gospel itself, which began at an early day, and from the first was spiritual and anagogic, constantly straining on to educe further salutary meaning from the text.