Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/384

 this case a man, flatters a women by enumerating the beauties of her form, the feet, the joints of her thighs, the navel, the belly, the two breasts so passionately praised by her admirer, are thought in some mystic way to signify the graces of the Church. A passage referring to a young girl not yet fully developed is made out to be a foreshadowing of "the calling of the Gentiles," and the natural and simple appeal to a lover to make haste to come is "the Church praying for Christ's coming."

Equal, or nearly equal, absurdities are found in the Chinese interpretations of certain Odes contained in their classics. These Odes are, like the Song of Songs, mere expressions of human love. But the critics find in them profound historical allusions; history being the staple of the Chinese sacred books, as theology is of the Hebrew ones. Now it happened in China, as it has happened in Europe, that there was a traditional meaning attached to this portion of the sacred books; and the traditional meaning was embodied in a Preface which was generally supposed to have descended from very ancient times, which came to be incorporated with the Odes, and thus appeared to rest on the same authority as the text itself. But a Chinese scholar, named Choo He, who examined the preface in a freer spirit than was usual among the commentators, formed a very different opinion as to its age and its authority, He believed it to be of much more recent date that was commonly supposed, and by no means to form an integral portion of the Odes. The prevailing theory was that the Preface had existed as a separate document in the time of a scholar named Maou, "and that he broke it up, prefixing to each Ode the portion belonging to it. The natural conclusion," observes Choo He, is that the Preface had come down from a remote period, and Hwang" (a scholar who, in one account, is said to have written the Preface) "merely added to it and rounded it off. In accordance with this, scholars generally hold that the first sentences in the introductory notices formed the original Preface which Maou distributed, and that the following portions were subsequently added. This view may appear reasonable, but when we examine those first sentences themselves we find some of them which do not agree with the obvious meaning of the Odes to