Whoever shall find out the true sense of the Book of Genesis ought to take care not to divulge it. This is a maxim that all our sages repeat to us, and above all respecting the work of the six days. If a person should discover the true meaning of it by himself, or by the aid of another, then he ought to be silent, or if he speaks he ought to speak of it obscurely, in an enigmatical manner, as I do myself, leaving the rest to be guessed by those who can understand me.
The Symbology and Esoterism of the Old Testament being thus confessed by one of the greatest Jewish Philosophers, it is only natural to find Christian Fathers making the same confession with regard to the New Testament, and the Bible in general. Thus we find Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen admitting it as plainly as words can do it. Clemens, who had been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries says, that:
The doctrines there taught contained in them the end of all instructions as they were taken from Moses and the prophets,
a slight perversion of facts pardonable in the good Father. The words admit, after all, that the Mysteries of the Jews were identical with those of the Pagan Greeks, who took them from the Egyptians, who borrowed them, in their turn, from the Chaldæans, who got them from the Âryans, the Atlanteans and so on—far beyond the days of that Race. The secret meaning of the Gospel is again openly confessed by Clemens when he says that the Mysteries of the Faith are not to be divulged to all.
But since this tradition is not published alone for him who perceives the magnificence of the word; it is requisite, therefore, to hide in a Mystery the wisdom spoken, which the Son of God taught.[80]
Not less explicit is Origen with regard to the Bible and its symbolical fables. He exclaims:
If we hold to the letter, and must understand what stands written in the law after the manner of the Jews and common people, then I should blush to confess aloud that it is God who has given these laws: then the laws of men appear more excellent and reasonable.[81]
And well he might have “blushed,” the sincere and honest Father of early Christianity in its days of relative purity. But the Christians of this highly literary and civilised age of ours do not blush at all; they swallow, on the contrary, the “light” before the formation of the sun, the Garden of Eden, Jonah's whale and all, notwithstanding that the same Origen asks in a very natural fit of indignation:
What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon, and stars, and the first day without a heaven? What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in Paradise, in Eden, like a husbandman, etc.? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which a hidden sense lies concealed?[82]
Yet millions of “such idiots” are found in our age of enlightenment and not only in the third century. When Paul's unequivocal statement in Galatians, iv. 22-25, that the story of Abraham and his two sons is all “an allegory,” and that “Agar is Mount Sinai” is added to this, then little blame, indeed, can be attached to either Christian or Heathen who declines to accept the Bible in any other light than that of a very ingenious allegory.