The current teaching in the Church concerning the relationship of the Spiritual or Mystical to the Literal Sense of the Scriptures is based on a synthesis arrived at by the Scholastics, and in particular on St Thomas’s formulations, which all our text-books merely set out to expound. It would seem a great advantage to possess a satisfactory technical solution of this age-long biblical issue. One might have hoped that it would have led to a general understanding and utilisation of the two Senses as being not only not in rivalry, but as being related together in the way that spiritual and literal are related together in the Scriptures; that is to say, in a union as harmonious and essential as that of the soul to the body. But no such general benefit has in fact resulted. These Senses have continued to be treated as rival claimants for consideration; with favour accorded sometimes to the Spiritual, sometimes to the Literal —but mostly, in these last centuries, to the Literal. At the present time there is a strong general tendency to depreciate the Spiritual Sense; to treat it as an extraneous addition to the Literal Sense, of definitely inferior quality. Frequently in practice it is identified with what is known as the Accommodated Sense, and accordingly denied any strict biblical validity. Or at least it is generally regarded as being of secondary importance; the Literal Sense being taken as capable of supplying all the meaning that is required for the purposes of theology and of sound edification, while the Spiritual is regarded as a luxury at the disposal of those who have a taste for deciphering pious symbols.