Psalms 8:7

So, then, in accordance with the simile of the winepresses, not only the grapes but also the husks are trodden under his feet. This means not only sheep and cattle, that is to say, the holy souls of the faithful, either in the people or among the clergy, but, what is more, beasts of pleasure also and birds of pride and fish of inquisitiveness. All these types of sinners we see here and now in the churches mixed up with the good and the holy. Let God work, then, in his churches and separate wine from grapeskins. Let us cooperate with God so that we may be wine or sheep or cattle, rather than husks or beasts of the field or fish that weave their way through the pathways of the deep. This is not to say that these words can be understood and explained only in this way, but this is what the present context dictates. Somewhere else they may have a different meaning. This rule of thumb is to be upheld in every allegory, that what is expressed through a simile should be judged in the light of the immediate context. Such is the teaching of our Lord and the apostles.

"You have put," he says, "all things in subjection under His feet." When he says, "all things," he excepts nothing. And that he might not be allowed to understand it otherwise, the Apostle enjoins it to be believed thus, when he says, "He being excepted which put all things under Him." [1 Corinthians 15:27] And to the Hebrews he uses this very testimony from this Psalm, when he would have it to be understood that all things are in such sort put under our Lord Jesus Christ, as that nothing should be excepted. [Hebrews 2:8] And yet he does not seem, as it were, to subjoin any great thing, when he says, "All sheep and oxen, yea, moreover, the beasts of the field, birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, which walk through the paths of the sea" [Psalm 8:7]. For, leaving the heavenly excellencies and powers, and all the hosts of Angels, leaving even man himself, he seems to have put under Him the beasts merely; unless by sheep and oxen we understand holy souls, either yielding the fruit of innocence, or even working that the earth may bear fruit, that is, that earthly men may be regenerated unto spiritual richness. By these holy souls then we ought to understand not those of men only, but of all Angels too, if we would gather from hence that all things are put under our Lord Jesus Christ. For there will be no creature that will not be put under Him, under whom the pre-eminent spirits, that I may so speak, are put. But whence shall we prove that sheep can be interpreted even, not of men, but of the blessed spirits of the angelical creatures on high? May we from the Lord's saying that He had left ninety and nine sheep in the mountains, that is, in the higher regions, and had come down for one? For if we take the one lost sheep to be the human soul in Adam, since Eve even was made out of his side, [Genesis 2:21-22] for the spiritual handling and consideration of all which things this is not the time, it remains that, by the ninety and nine left in the mountains, spirits not human, but angelical, should be meant. For as regards the oxen, this sentence is easily dispatched; since men themselves are for no other reason called oxen, but because by preaching the Gospel of the word of God they imitate Angels, as where it is said, "You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the grain." How much more easily then do we take the Angels themselves, the messengers of truth,…