The like may be said of Honorius’s allegorical interpretation of Greek legends. These ancient stories have the perennial youth of human charm and meaning ever new. They had been good old stories to the Greeks, and then acquired further intendment as later men discerned a broader symbolism in them. Even in classic times, Homer’s stories had been turned to allegories, philosophers and critics sometimes finding in them a spiritual significance not unlike that which the same tales may bear for us. But with this difference: the later Greeks usually were trying to explain away the somewhat untrammelled ways of the Homeric pantheon, and therefore maintained that Homer’s stories were composed as allegories, the wise and mystic poet choosing thus to veil his meaning. To-day we find the clarity of daybreak in Homer’s tales, and if we make symbols of them we know the symbolism is not his but ours. Honorius chooses to think that allegory had always lain in the old story; he will not deem it the invention of himself or other Christian writers. Here his attitude is not unlike that of the apologetic Greek critics. But his interpretations are apt to differ from theirs as well as from our own. For his symbolism tends to abandon the broadly human, and to become, like the mediaeval Biblical interpretations, figurative of the tenets of the Christian Faith. There is an interesting example of this in the sermon for Septuagesima Sunday, which was written on a somewhat blind text from the twenty-eighth chapter of Job. Honorius proceeds expounding it through a number of strained allegories, which he doubtless drew from Gregory’s _Moralia_; for that great pope was the recognized expositor of Job, and the Book of Job was simply Gregory through all the Middle Ages. Perhaps Honorius felt that this sermon was rather soporific. At all events he stops in the middle to give a piece of advice to the supposed preacher: “Often put something of this kind in your sermon; for so you will relieve the tedium.” And he continues thus: “Brethren, on this holy day there is much to say which I must pass over in silence, lest disgusted you should wish to leave the church before the end. For some of you have come far and must go a long way to reach your houses. Or perhaps, some have guests at home, or crying babies; or others are not swift and have to go elsewhere, while to some a bodily infirmity brings uneasiness lest they expose themselves. So I omit much for everybody’s sake, but still would say a few words.