The
religions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages,
in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting side
by side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here the
first necessity was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, the
sentiments, it was proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homer
must be made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the mere
surfaces could never unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one must
go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more
remote meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessu
divinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure of
speech in the books of Moses.
And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if you
will, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weaving
strange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth century
has its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits,
its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in
the local colour of a great age.
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