Whoever shall find out the true sense of the Book of _Genesis_ ought to take care not to divulge it. This is a maxim that all our sages repeat to us, and above all respecting the work of the six days. If a person should discover the _true_ meaning of it by himself, or by the aid of another, then he ought to be silent, or if he speaks he ought to speak of it obscurely, in an enigmatical manner, as I do myself, leaving the rest to be guessed by those who can understand me.
The Symbology and Esoterism of the _Old Testament_ being thus confessed by one of the greatest Jewish Philosophers, it is only natural to find Christian Fathers making the same confession with regard to the _New Testament_, and the _Bible_ in general. Thus we find Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen admitting it as plainly as words can do it. Clemens, who had been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries says, that:
The doctrines there taught contained in them _the end of all instructions as they were taken from Moses and the prophets_,
a slight perversion of facts pardonable in the good Father. The words admit, after all, that the Mysteries of the Jews were identical with those of the Pagan Greeks, who took them from the Egyptians, who borrowed them, in their turn, from the Chaldæans, who got them from the Âryans, the Atlanteans and so on—far beyond the days of that Race. The secret meaning of the Gospel is again openly confessed by Clemens when he says that the Mysteries of the Faith are not to be divulged to all.
But since this tradition is not published alone for him who perceives the magnificence of the word; it is requisite, therefore, to hide in a Mystery the wisdom spoken, which the Son of God taught.(80)
Not less explicit is Origen with regard to the _Bible_ and its symbolical fables. He exclaims:
If we hold to the letter, and must understand what stands written in the law after the manner of the Jews and common people, then I should blush to confess aloud that it is God who has given these laws: then the laws of men appear more excellent and reasonable.(81)
And well he might have “blushed,” the sincere and honest Father of early Christianity in its days of relative purity. But the Christians of this highly literary and civilised age of ours do not blush at all; they swallow, on the contrary, the “light” before the formation of the sun, the Garden of Eden, Jonah’s whale and all, notwithstanding that the same Origen asks in a very natural fit of indignation: