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the passages of the law in which hands , eyes , a face , &c , are attributed id God , and this he does by shewing that hands are an emblem of power , and that when it was said of himself , pkydKyv % e ? pa £% « b fiatnksvt ' , what was meant was , that he had great power , and that the same principle of interpretation was to be applied , when God is said in the law to have brought up Israel out of Egypt " with a strong hand . " Eusebius , it is true , calls this dhXyyopixq Seupta , but it is evidently nothing more than a figurative
explanation of the anthropomorphic language of Scripture . In another passage ( vii . 13 ) he applies to wisdom what is said of the creation of light ; but the V $ Py phrase fA € T < z < pipaTO d * av rb czvrb Kai iiii tvj s GQ <\> ia . $ > points to an appli * cation rather than an interpretation . Should any one , however , think that from the manner in which Origen , con . Cels , IV . 51 , joins his name with Philo ' s , as an author of allegories of the law , he must have written in the same strain with Philo , we see no objection to the inference ; but the fragments which have been preserved do not supply any positive evidence .
Many circumstances conspired to dispose the Jewish Platonists of Alexandria to the allegorical interpretation of the law . Surrounded by monuments , in which a literal and symbolical meaning are blended in the most extraordinary manner , it was not wonderful that they should acquire a propensity to discover allegories even in literal narratives , and to search for a hidden meaning where a simple one was obvious . As Platonists , the example of their master not only inclined them to whatever was mystical , but
accustomed them to clothe their own thoughts in this imaginative dress , and to seek for allegories in the religious legends of antiquity . Ashamed of the grossness and immorality of their own mythology , and yet unable or unwilling to renounce them openly , the Heathens themselves had endeavoured to bring religion and philosophy into harmony , by the allegorical interpretation of their poetical fables , and especially those of Homer , * whose name stood the highest , and whose influence on the popular mind was the greatest .
What Homer was in point of antiquity to the Greeks , Moses was to the Jews ; and the more they venerated him as the founder of their nation , the more anxious they felt that his writings and his institutions should impress the Heathens , if not with a belief in his divine mission , at least with reverence and admiration . They possessed not the knowledge of their own language and antiquities , which would have been required to explain justly and truly many things by which a heathen would be revolted , nor did they understand
the scope of the Mosaic legislation sufficiently to vindicate it on the true ground , as a wise and beneficent plan for promoting the welfare of the people who lived under it , and making them the instruments of the most important future blessings to mankind at large ; they adopted a course better suited to their powers , and better calculated to obtain their object with their heathen contemporaries , and by an allegorical interpretation contrived at once to explain away that which in a literal sense they could not justify , and
also to engraft upon their sacred books the dogmas of that p hilosophy which they had learnt from the Heathens to admire . The writer whose works remain as an ample specimen of this mode of interpretation , Philo of Alexandria , lived a little before and during the age of the promulgation of the gospel , but the manner in which he speaks of his system shews that it was then no recent invention . It should be observed that , though he sometimes appears to uphold the allegorical as exclusive of the literal sense , he else-* See the seventeenth Lecture of Bishop Marsh , who closely follows a writer in Eichhorn's AUgera . Bibl . V . 222 , seq . ,
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112 Review . ~ The Bampton and Hulsean Lectures .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1828, page 112, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2557/page/40/
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