The common error of both parties is that they seek in religion the plain, unvarnished, literal truth. But the plain, unvarnished, literal truth is striven for only in philosophy: religion possesses only a truth suitable to the people, an indirect, a symbolic, allegorical truth. Christianity is an allegory reflecting a true idea; but the allegory itself is not what is true. To take the allegory for the truth is the error which supranaturalists and Rationalists agree in making. The former will assert that the allegory is in itself true; the latter will twist and bend its meaning until they have,
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