i 5 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



soon surpassed him. At the very outset this occult power was 

 used in ascertaining the canonical books of Scripture. Josephus 

 argued that, since there were twenty-two letters in the Hebrew 

 alphabet, there must be twenty-two sacred books in the Old Tes- 

 tament ; other Jewish authorities thought that there should be 

 twenty-four books, on account of the twenty-four watches in the 

 temple. St. Jerome wavered between the argument based upon 

 the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet and that suggested 

 by the twenty-four elders in the Apocalypse. Hilary of Poitiers 

 argued that there must be twenty-four books, on account of the 

 twenty -four letters in the Greek alphabet. Origen found an argu- 

 ment for the existence of exactly four gospels in the existence of 

 just four elements. Irenseus insisted that there could be neither 

 more nor fewer than four gospels, since the earth has four quar- 

 ters, the air four winds, and the cherubim four faces ; and he de- 

 nounced those who declined to accept this reasoning as "vain, 

 ignorant, and audacious." * 



But during the first half of the third century came one who 

 exercised a still stronger influence in this direction a great man 

 who, while rendering precious services, did more than any other 

 to fasten upon the Church a system which has been one of its 

 heaviest burdens for more than sixteen hundred years : this was 

 Origen. Yet his purpose was noble and his work based on pro- 

 found thought. He had to meet the leading philosophers of the 

 pagan world and to reply to their arguments against the Old 

 Testament, and especially to their taunts against its imputation 

 of human form, limitations, passions, weaknesses, and even im- 

 moralities to the Almighty. 



Starting with a mistaken translation of a verse in the book of 

 Proverbs, Origen presented as a basis for his main structure the 

 idea of a threefold sense of Scripture : the literal, the moral, and 

 the mystic corresponding to the Platonic conception of the three- 

 fold nature of man. As results of this we have such masterpieces 

 as his proof, from the fifth verse of chapter xxv of Job, that the 

 stars are living beings, and from the well-known passage in the 

 nineteenth chapter of St. Matthew his warrant for self-mutilation. 

 But his great triumphs were in the allegorical method. By its 

 use the Bible was speedily made an oracle indeed, or, rather, a 

 book of riddles. A list of kings in the Old Testament thus be- 



* For Jerome and Origen, see notes on pages following. For Irenaeus, see Irenanis 

 adversus Heres., lib. iii, cap. xi, 8. For the general subject, see Sanday on Inspiration! 

 p. 115 ; also Farrar and H. P. Smith as above. For a recent very full and very curious 

 statement from a Roman Catholic authority regarding views cherished in the older Church 

 as to the symbolism of numbers, see Detzel, Christliche Iconographie, Freiburg im Breisgau, 

 1894, Band i, Einleitung, p. 4. 



