of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders
of Greek theology,' we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as
clearly as we see the Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of
Dante.

Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon
succumbed before the destructive effects of the A PRIORI ethical
criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom,
found immediately a convenient shelter under the aegis of the
doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings.

To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls
of Troy was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden
certain moral and physical truths. The contest between Athena and
Ares was that eternal contest between rational thought and the
brute force of ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of
the 'Far Darter' were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot
from the golden bow of the child of God, but the common rays of the
sun, which was itself nothing but a mere inert mass of burning
metal.

Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis,
has ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn.
There were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced] a mere metaphor for atmospheric
power.

Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings
must be ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it
was essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly