fairest of promises that one day "we shall be like to Him, for we shall
see Him as He is"? (St John iii.)

So in literature we have, springing from this principle of comparison,
the forms fable, parable, and allegory; and in language the figures of
speech which we know as simile and metaphor.

Ovid, a Roman poet who lived before the Incarnation, tells the old
Eastern fable thus:

"There is a bird that restores and reproduces itself; the Assyrians call
it the Phoenix. It feeds on no common food, but on the choicest of
gums and spices; and after a life of secular length (_i.e._, a hundred
years) it builds in a high tree with cassia, spikenard, cinnamon, and
myrrh, and on this nest it expires in sweetest odours. A young Phoenix
rises and grows, and when strong enough it takes up the nest with its
deposit and bears it to the City of the Sun, and lays it down there in
front of the sacred portals."

It was a much later and a much longer version of the story that our
English poet was debtor to. It was written in Latin by Lactantius, and
the fable there, Professor Earle says, "is so curiously and, as it
were, significantly elaborated, that we hardly know whether we are
reading a Christian allegory or no."

He goes on to say that Allegory has always been a favourite form with
Christian writers, and finds more than one reason for it. There was a
tendency towards symbolism in literature outside Christianity when the
Christian literature arose. Another reason was that the early Christians
used it to convey what it would probably have endangered their lives to