instruction has ever been so general as was the symbolic in former ages.
"The first learning in the world," says the great antiquary, Dr. Stukely,
"consisted chiefly of symbols. The wisdom of the Chaldeans, Phoenicians,
Egyptians, Jews, of Zoroaster, Sanchoniathon, Pherecydes, Syrus,
Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, of all the ancients that is come to our hand,
is symbolic." And the learned Faber remarks, that "allegory and
personification were peculiarly agreeable to the genius of antiquity, and
the simplicity of truth was continually sacrificed at the shrine of
poetical decoration."

In fact, man's earliest instruction was by symbols.[39] The objective
character of a symbol is best calculated to be grasped by the infant mind,
whether the infancy of that mind be considered _nationally_ or
_individually_. And hence, in the first ages of the world, in its infancy,
all propositions, theological, political, or scientific, were expressed in
the form of symbols. Thus the first religions were eminently symbolical,
because, as that great philosophical historian, Grote, has remarked, "At a
time when language was yet in its infancy, visible symbols were the most
vivid means of acting upon the minds of ignorant hearers."

Again: children receive their elementary teaching in symbols. "A was an
Archer;" what is this but symbolism? The archer becomes to the infant mind
the symbol of the letter A, just as, in after life, the letter becomes, to
the more advanced mind, the symbol of a certain sound of the human
voice.[40] The first lesson received by a child in acquiring his alphabet
is thus conveyed by symbolism. Even in the very formation of language, the
medium of communication between man and man, and which must hence have
been an elementary step in the progress of human improvement, it was found
necessary to have recourse to symbols, for words are only and truly
certain arbitrary symbols by which and through which we give an utterance