Having hidden spiritual meaning

Usage examples of allegoric.

The creation of Eve out of the side of Adam was either meant by the author as an allegoric illustration that the love of husband and wife is the most powerful of social bonds, or as a pure myth seeking to explain the incomparable cleaving together of husband and wife by the entirely poetic supposition that the first woman was taken out of the first man, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

Old Testament by means of the allegoric exegetic method, is essentially identical with the system of Stoicism, which had been mixed with Platonic elements and had lost its Pantheistic materialistic impress.

The history of his people, though he believed in it literally, was in its main points a didactic allegoric poem for enabling him to inculcate the doctrine that man attains the vision of God by mortification of the flesh.

Old Testament in the religious history of the world, lies just in this, that, in order to be maintained at all, it required the application of the allegoric method, that is, a definite proportion of Greek ideas, and that, on the other hand, it opposed the strongest barrier to the complete hellenising of Christianity.

The Evangelic history as handed down is not the history of Christ, but a collection of allegoric representations of the great history of God and the world.

Wherever traditional religions are united under the badge of philosophy a conservative syncretism is the result, because the allegoric method, that is, the criticism of all religion, veiled and unconscious of itself, is able to blast rocks and bridge over abysses.

A prime minister of real life, however, could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to Sortes Biblicæ is dangerously liable to be turned against those who recommend it.