v] MYSTERIES AND SYMBOLISM 105 accustoms men to look everywhere and in everything for the veiled yet suggested spiritual element and to regard that as the important, nay, as the real matter. To Christians, far more than to Jews or pagans, the spiritual life, as foretaste and determinant of life eter- nal, was the important and the veritably real. They should be always seeking it and its hidden traces. Material objects spread before the eyes, or narrated facts, were in themselves transient and distracting. Their real interest, indeed their reality, lay in their symbolism, in the allegory which the spiritually minded man might draw. The barren physical thing or fact was as the " letter which killeth " ; it had no salvation in it. That lay in the spiritual significance which the fact shadowed forth. Herein was the veri- table essence, the real fact. Reality lies not in the veil, but in what the eye of the spirit sees beneath the veil. These transcendental interests and assumptions, which are promoted by allegorism, were, in the time of deepening ignorance, to open wide the door to all miracles, — the mysterious work of God and his min- isters. They were intimately connected with the uni- versal desire for miracles, a desire so expectant that to those x>osse8sed by it the miraculous occurrence is the occurrence to be looked for. For the miracle was the fact which directly disclosed the will of God, and 80 was a manifestation of the unseen power which other facts could but suggest symbolically. Alone among facts, the miracle even in itself was not the " letter which killeth," but an instance of the " spirit which maketh to live," a veritable instance of salva- tion. In miracles, the fact, the symbol, was identical
