describe it, chiefly perhaps ‘allegory’, which was suggested to them by St. Paul’s statement1 that the story of Abraham’s two sons was an ‘allegory’ of the two covenants. ‘Allegory’, however, is best avoided in this connexion; the word led to confusion even in the patristic age, and its accepted meaning to-day denotes a somewhat different type of exegesis from typology. Since the fathers employed both typology and allegory (in its modern sense), the distinction between the two methods needs to be