Septuagint, which was led to give a wrong title to one Psalm lest we should attach importance to the correct title of another. In both cases we must fix our attention not on the afflictions of David, but on the sorrows of Christ. Thus, negatively if not positively, the Septuagint must guide our judgement162. But Hilary often goes even further, and ventures upon a lxi purely subjective interpretation, which sometimes gives useful insight into the modes of thought of Gaul in the fourth century. For instance, he is thoroughly classical in taking it for granted that the Psalmist’s words, ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ cannot refer to the natural feature; that he can never mean the actual mountains bristling with woods, the naked rocks and pathless precipices and frozen snows163. And even Gregory the Great could not surpass the prosaic grotesqueness with which Hilary declares it impious to suppose that God would feed the young ravens, foul carrion birds164; and that the lilies of the Sermon on the Mount must be explained away, because they wear no clothing, and because, as a matter of fact, it is quite possible for men to be more brightly attired than they165. Examples of such reasoning, more or less extravagant, might be multiplied from Hilary’s exegetical writings; passages in which no allowance is made for Oriental imagery, for poetry or for rhetoric166. But though Hilary throughout his whole period of authorship uses the mystical method of interpretation, never doubting that everywhere in Scripture there is a spiritual meaning which can be elicited, and that whatever sense, consistent with truth otherwise ascertained, can be extracted from it, may be extracted, yet there is a manifest increase in sobriety in his later as compared with his earlier writings. From the riotous profusion of mysticisms in the commentary on St. Matthew, where, for instance, every character and detail in the incident of St. John Baptist’s death becomes a symbol, it is a great advance to the almost Athanasian cautiousness in exegesis of the De Trinitate; though even here, especially in the early books which deal with the Old Testament, there is some extravagance and a very liberal employment of the method167. His reasons, when he gives them, are those adduced in his other writings; the inappropriateness of the words to the time when they were written, or the plea that reverence or reason bids us penetrate behind the letter. His increasing caution is due to no distrust of the principle of mysticism. 162 Similar arguments are often used: cf. Tr. in Ps. cxlv. 1. 163 Tr. in Ps. cxx. 4. 164 Ib. cxlvi. 11. 165 Comm. in Matt. v. 11. 166 E.g. Comm. in Matt. xviii. 2; Tr. in Ps. cxix. 20, cxxxiv. 12, cxxxvi. 6, 7; Trin. iv. 38. 167 E.g. Trin. i. 6. 87 The Theology of St. Hilary of Poitiers.