29. If the partly allegorical treatment of the history appears to any one forced, and therefore not to relieve the difficulties, we have obviously been speaking to no purpose, and we must look for some other suitable interpretation; unless, perchance, some reader by further labour may discover a way of putting everything right, explaining both the murder of the man and his evident kindliness, inasmuch as he was unwilling to go to his house and rest, when the people were in camp and |29 struggling against the enemy. But I do not know how they who shun the allegorical interpretation, and think the narrative was written for its own sake, will reconcile themselves to the will of the Holy Spirit, Who thought such things deserving of record as justify the charge not only of licentiousness, but also of savagery and inhumanity being brought against David; for he dared to commit a crime against Uriah which would be extraordinary even in the case of a man of average morality. I should, however, say that as the judgments of God are great and cannot be expressed, and seem to be causes of the erring of unnurtured souls, so also His Scriptures are great and full of meanings, secret, spiritual, and hard to understand. They, too, cannot be expressed, and appear to cause the unnurtured souls of heretics to err by inconsiderately and rashly accusing God on account of the Scriptures which they do not understand, and by therefore falling into the error of inventing another God. The safe course is to wait for the interpretation of an explainer of the Word, and of the wisdom hidden in a mystery, which none of the rulers of this world knoweth, according to the revelation of the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal, but now is manifested to the Apostles and those like them, both through the writings of the Prophets, and by the appearing to them of our Saviour the Word Who in the beginning was with God.