Читать книгу Stories from the Bible онлайн

8 страница из 35

'Worde,' as Wycliffe says, 'worde wynd and mannes mynd is full short, but letter written dwelleth.' So too with the Bible. Its meanings or 'understandings', as St. Thomas Aquinas declared, are fourfold. First the literal, which is 'ground and foundement' of the other three—the allegorical, the moral and the analogical.

These words sound a little formidable, but no word is 'long', when one knows the meaning of it. Thus the word Jerusalem may mean first, literally, the chief city of Palestine—seated beyond the barren hills between it and the sea, and of an age-long, unique and tragic history. Next, allegorically, it may signify also the Jerusalem that is the longed-for Zion, the place of peace, the Church on earth. Next, morally, it may signify the soul of man. And last, analogically, in what by intention it resembles, it is the place of paradise, 'where there shall be bliss in body and soul without end'. The Jerusalem of King David, that is; the Jerusalem of Christ, the Messiah; the Jerusalem mourned and desired in every human heart; the heavenly Jerusalem otherwhere. Or again, the literal refers to things that happen or have happened on earth, the allegorical to what is to be believed, the moral to what is to be done, and the analogical to what is to be hoped for in the life to come.