To interpret such metaphors in their purely natural sense would therefore land us in gross error. Unfortunately, modern students of the religious history of the past have not always been careful to avoid doing so. Misled by the fact that language often enshrines old beliefs and customs which have otherwise passed out of memory, they have forgotten that a metaphor is not necessarily a survival, or a survival a metaphor. In the hieroglyphic texts discovered in the Pyramids of the sixth Egyptian dynasty, Sahu or Orion, the huntsman of the skies, is said to eat the great gods in the morning, the lesser gods at noon and the smaller ones at night, roasting their flesh in the vast ovens of the heavens; and it has been hastily concluded that this points to a time when the ancestors of the historical Egyptians actually did eat human flesh. It would be just as reasonable to conclude from the language of the Eucharistic Office that the members of the Christian Church were once addicted to cannibalism. Eating and drinking are very obvious metaphors, and there are even languages in which the word “to eat” has acquired the meaning “to exist”.(3) I remember hearing of a tribe who believed that we worshipped a lamb because of the literal translation into their language of the phrase, “O Lamb of God.” Theology is full of instances in which the language it uses has been metaphorical from the outset, and the endeavour to interpret it with bald literality, and to see in it the fossilised ideas and practices of the past, would end in nothing but failure. Christianity is not the only religion which has consciously employed parable for inculcating the truths it professes to teach. Buddhism has done the same, and the “Parables of Buddhagosha” have had a wider influence than all the other volumes of the Buddhist Canon.