FOOTNOTES:But in order to employ analogy with effect more is needful than to make sure that the two objects or acts compared are similar without being identical: the design for which a comparison is made enters as an essential element, and decisively determines its value. Between two given objects an analogy may exist, good for one purpose but worthless for another. Given two balls, spherical in form and equal in size, the one of wood and the other of iron; and let the question be, Do these two objects bear any analogy to each other, real in itself and capable of being usefully employed? The question cannot yet be answered: we must first ascertain for what purpose the comparison is instituted. The two balls are like each other in form, but unlike in material; whether is it in respect of their form or their material that you propose to compare them? If one of them rolls along a gently inclined plane, you may safely infer that the other, when placed in the same position, will follow the same course; for although different in other features they are similar in form. But you cannot infer that because one floats when thrown into the water the other will float too, for in respect to specific gravity there is no similarity between them. Again, let two pieces of wood, cut from the same tree, be brought together, the one a cube, the other a sphere; you may safely conclude, if one swim in water that the other will swim too, because though of diverse forms they are of the same specific gravity; but you cannot conclude, if the one roll on an inclined plane, that the other will roll also, because though of the same specific gravity they are diverse forms. Two objects may be compared for the purpose of inferential analogy, although in nine of their qualities they are wholly dissimilar, if they resemble each other in one, and that the quality with respect to which the comparison is instituted. Again, although two objects be similar in nine of their properties, and dissimilar only in one, no useful analogy can be instituted between them if the object for which the comparison is made save with respect to the one point in which they are dissimilar. An acquaintance with such simple rudiments would go far to correct blunders both in the construction and the exposition of analogies.[1]Christ made it his business to speak in parables; and, indeed, one may say, the whole visible world is only a parable of the invisible world. The parable is not only something intermediate between history and doctrine; it is both history and doctrine—at once historical doctrine and doctrinal history. Hence its enchaining, ever fresher, and younger charm. Yes, parable is nature’s own language in the human heart; hence its universal intelligibility, its, so to speak, permanent sweet scent, its healing balsam, its mighty power to win one to come again and again to hear. In short, the parable is the voice of the people, and hence also the voice of God.—Die Gleichniss-reden Jesu Christi, vonFred. Arndt,vol. i.2.[2]It is not, however, by the universal consent of critics that even this is admitted as a genuine parable. Schultze boldly excludes it; but he excludes also all the group inMatt. xiii.except the Tares. By one arbitrary rule after another, he cuts down the whole number of our Lord’s parables to eleven.—A. H. A. Schultze,de parabolarumJ. C.indole poetica com.Men have good cause to suspect the accuracy of their artificial rules, when the application of them works such havoc. Better that we should have no critical rules, than adopt such as separate on superficial literal grounds, things that the judgment of the Church and the common sense of men have in all ages joined together as substantially of the same class.[3]Notes on the Parables.[4]In reference to Bauer’s classification, Limbourg Brower (de parabol. Jesu.) observes that the distinction between parables that are dogmatic and parables that are moral cannot successfully be maintained, because of the intimate union maintained in the discourses of Jesus between the revelation of truth and the inculcation of duty. This remark, in connection with its ground, is decisive not only against the particular division to which it is applied, but to all divisions, in as far as they pretend to be logically distinct and complete.[5]Gerlach in Lange.[6]In Matthew (xiii. 13) he speaks in parables, “because (ὅτι), they seeing, see not:” and in Mark (iv. 12), and Luke (viii. 10), “that (ἵνα) seeing they might not see.” Two different objects were effected at the same time, and by the same act, corresponding to those two terms; it is true that the Lord employed parables, as one employs pictures to teach a child,becausehis auditors were children in understanding; and it is also true that he veiled his doctrines under metaphorin order thatthose who were children in understanding but in malice men, might not perceive his drift, and so might not violently interfere to suppress his ministry. Thus according to the explanation which he gave at the moment, “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” (Matt. xiii. 12).[7]The Parables of the Kingdom are, as it were, a picture gallery, and we walk up and down it, examining each picture by itself. We must not forget, however, that these are heavenly pictures that hang around us,—that heavenly things are here exposed to view. A heavenly interpreter walks by our side: we must have a heavenly sense if we would grasp the meaning of what we hear and see. If our study quicken this sense within us, so that it shall grow clearer and sharper before every picture, a rich treat awaits us, for the heavenly Gallery is great.—Dräseke, vom Reich Gottes,i., 270.[8]Ζῶν γὰρ ὁ λόγος τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ ἐνεργὴς.—Heb.iv. 12.[9]It is not intimated by the parable that our Father the Husbandman finds any of the good ground in us: the ground, like the tree in another analogical lesson of the Lord, is not good until it ismadegood. It is beyond the scope of this parable to explain how the ground is rendered soft and kept free from thorns. The Teacher was content in this lesson to tell us what the good ground produces; we must discover elsewhere in the Scriptures whence its goodness is derived. “...The similitude from nature is no longer applicable to the mystery of the kingdom of heaven; as a parable, it has already reached its limits, when the truth goes beyond the similitude. There is amiraculousseed superior indeed to all natural seed, so powerful that by its growth it can and will choke all thorns. Nay more, it can also break through the rock in striking its root down into the earth, and can make that to be again a field of God which was a way for the feet of the prince of this world.”—Stier in loc.Among the many incidental and collateral applications of which this parable is susceptible, one of the most interesting and instructive is—That every man has within himself the elements of all the four kinds of ground. The conception is thus presented byFred. Arndt: “At the outset, the word of God finds all in the first unreceptive condition; we go away without experiencing its power, and remain in a state of nature, unconverted. Next, the word begins to take effect upon us, and we are awakened. Oh now the word of the Lord burns with a holy glow in our hearts! We give ourselves over with our whole souls in those first days of love. We have found heaven; we have seen it opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of man. But this condition does not endure. The fightings begin from within and from without, and the flame is quenched. The heart becomes cold and empty. The life of faith becomes silent and slow in its course. We become languid in watching and prayer; the love of the world and its sinful pleasures awakes again; and before we are aware, we are trying to serve both God and the world. Then the war bursts out: this moment God is above us, the next beneath us, and we get no rest until we have renounced the world, and surrendered our heart and life to God wholly, and to God alone. Thus we pass, in the faith-school of the Holy Spirit, through all the four classes, deceiving ourselves and being deceived, until at last, after many a bitter experience, we strike upon the narrow way, and through the strait gate.”—Die Gleichniss-redenJes. Chr.[10]“The Land and the Book,” by Dr. Thomson. T. Nelson & Sons.[11]“The Land and the Book.” Note by Principal Fairbairn in translation of “Lisco on the Parables.”[12]Die Parabeln des Herrn, für Kirche, Schule, und Haus, erklärt von Dr.De Valenti. Basel, 1841.[13]It is quite possible that the separatists whomDe Valentiscolds, with more warmth than elegance, may deserve his censure; for severe restrictive measures adopted by governments to suppress religious dissent have frequently the effect of deteriorating its character, on the principle that oppression makes a wise man mad.[14]Lange (in loc.), having quoted Gerlach to the effect that this prohibition refers to extremes of ecclesiastical discipline, for the purpose of excluding all unbelievers and hypocrites, and constituting a perfectly pure Church, timidly replies: “We can scarcely agree with him that it contains no allusion to the punishment of death for heresy.... It is well known that Novatianism, on the one hand, and the Papal hierarchy, on the other, have addressed themselves to this work of uprooting despite the prohibition of the Lord, and that the Romish Church has at last ended by condemning to the flames only the best wheat.... Theauto da fésof the middle ages were only a humble caricature and anticipation of that fiery judgment.”[15]Die Gleichniss-reden Jesu Christi,vonFried.Arndt.[16]The Land and the Book,p. 64.[17]“Good is like the mustard-seed; from small it becomes great: evil resembles it not less. Here, too, the great springs from the small. An evil thought, when once it has made its way into a poor soul, may become mighty enough to cast it into hell.”—Dräseke vom Reich Gottes,ii.238.[18]To the question what the woman specially represents in the parable,Dräsekeanswers, “The grace of God.”—ii. 263.[19]“Thus in different passages the lion is used as a figure of Satan, but also of Christ; the serpent as a figure of the enemy, but also of the wisdom needful to the apostles; birds as a figure of believing trustfulness, but also of the devil catching away the word.”—Langein loc.[20]It is otherwise, of course, in those that are directly moral, as the Good Samaritan; they are not metaphors to be translated, but examples to be imitated.[21]For the sake of its bearing on the divine authority of the Scriptures, and the questions that are agitated at the present time, I subjoin a similar example, extracted from a lecture which I contributed to the Exeter Hall series of 1860–61:—“A very remarkable expression occurs in the Apocalypse (xvi.18) bearing on the work of preparing the earth for man, before man was made: ‘And there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great.’ There the advent of man, as an inhabitant of the earth, is formally given as an epoch after which great earthquakes did not occur. It is well known now that earthquakes must have rent this globe before the birth of man, which make all that have occurred since sink into insignificance; but how was John, the fisherman of Galilee, led to employ, eighteen hundred years ago, a phraseology which the researches of our own day have now for the first time shown to be philosophically exact? Speaking of this verse, and quoting it freely, John Bunyan (“Reign of Antichrist,”) says, ‘For the earthquake, it is said to besuch as never was, so mighty an earthquake and so great.’ He thought the phrase, ‘since men were upon the earth,’ was equivalent to ‘never:’ so he wrote and fell into the blunder. Who led John the Apostle safely past the mistake into which John Bunyan fell?”[22]I have been informed by a British merchant who, under license from the government of India, conducts the pearl fishing in the Bay of Kuratchee, that the method pursued is to bring the shells to shore as they are brought up from the bottom of the sea until a considerable quantity has been accumulated, disposed in a series of small contiguous heaps, and that then the men stand round the heaps, open the shells, and search for the pearls. So much loss accrues from the dishonesty of the men and the facility of secreting a treasure that lies in such a small bulk, that the proprietor of the fishing has had under consideration a suggestion to sell the heaps of shells by auction to the natives, and permit them then to make the best of their bargain. Whether this method of preventing peculation has been actually adopted, I have not learned.Our own Scottish rivers are frequented by a large bivalve mollusc, which produces true pearls, although their size and number have never been sufficient to attract capitalists or sustain a steady trade. I do not know how others operate in other localities, but here is a method which I either invented for myself or borrowed from a neighbour, and practised with considerable success on the river Earn in Perthshire when I was a boy:—Provide a long straight rod, thin and broad and rounded at the point after the manner of a paper-cutter. Jump into a light fishing-boat, and bring it right over the oyster bed when the sun shines brightly and no ripple disturbs the surface of the water. Bring the boat into such a position with respect to the sun that your own body, bending over the gunwale, will throw a shadow on the immediately subjacent surface. Through that shaded spot you see the bottom with great distinctness, and can distinguish there the objects of your search lying invitingly still, and open, and unconscious. The depth may be from six to twelve feet. The molluscs lie bedded in the mud, with one edge above the ground, and that edge slightly open. Push your rod now gently down in a perpendicular direction,—for if you permit an angle the different degrees of refraction in the air and water will make your straight rod crooked, and you will egregiously miss your object at every stroke,—until its point is within an inch or two of the opening between the shells of the mollusc, and then quickly plunge it in. Hold it still there for a few seconds until the creature has time to close and bite the rod, you may then pull it up at your leisure. Throw your capture into the bottom of the boat, and proceed in the same manner with the next. When you have collected a sufficient store, sit down and open them one by one with a knife, feeling carefully with your thumbs for the little hard round knots among the velvet folds. These knots, when extricated from the fleshy lobes that cover them, turn out to be pearls, in form more or less globular, and in sheen more or less bright. You rejoice more or less, accordingly, in your capture. The day on which a good pearl was found became a day to be remembered in the family group. The price of the finest never rose above a shilling or two; but as riches are relative, and must be estimated by comparison, these were treasures to us, and the sight of a large bright pearl suddenly shining out of the shell was enough to set a boy’s heart a-beating in those early days.During a drought in the summer of 1863 the small river Doon, in Ayr shire, fell so low that some pearl-beds in pools, that had not been noticed in other seasons, were exposed to view, and placed within reach: the consequence was that the people in the neighbourhood, old and young, betook themselves to pearl fishing, and that with considerable success. Among other facts circumstantially related in the local papers at the time, it was stated that one poor woman, during the sickness of her husband, gained as much by the sale of her pearls as made good the loss of her husband’s wages for a whole month. In the course of this summer (1864), and since the preceding notes were written, a considerable amount of pearl fishing has been carried on in certain rivers in the northern districts of Scotland, and efforts have been made to organize a regular trade.[23]Although their place is not the highest now, yet pearls even in our own day are sometimes found of a value so great that the history of an individual is recorded and its praises published through the world. The following, for example, are the terms of a paragraph taken from a British journal of last year:—“One of the finest pearls in the world has been found in the bay of Panama. It is of a perfect pear shape, and of the finest water.”[24]Das ist Philippus element,Er übt sein Predigtamt,Lebendig wird das Pergament,Des Mohrenfürsten Herze brennt,Sein dunkles Auge flammt.Denn was er im JuwelenschreinKandaces nimmer sah,Die eine Perle, himmlischreinDie köstlicher als Edelstein,Er fand am Weg sie da.Kari Gerok.[25]“They [this and the parable of the tares] convey, too, the same further lesson, that this fact [the actual intermixture of evil in the visible Church] does not justify self-willed departure from the fellowship of the Church, and impatient leaping over or breaking through the nets, as here it has often been called; but the Lord’s separation is patiently to be waited for, which shall surely arrive at the end of the present age.”—Dr. Trench, Notes on the Parables,p. 133. This is a style far too loose for a critical exposition of Scripture. If the actual presence of tolerated impurity within the Church does not justify a “self-willed” departure from her communion, does it justify a departure that is not self-willed, but a solemn separation in order to carry out the will of the Lord? The assumption that the separation of the English Nonconformists was “self-willed,” of course begs the whole question.[26]While Stier and Trench seem to start with the same principle of interpretation on this subject, they are led ultimately to opposite practical results. Trench, as we have seen, gathers from the parable that the pure, or those who consider themselves pure, are not justified in leaping out of the net at their own pleasure; that is, the Nonconformists should not go and constitute conventicles beyond the pale of the Establishment. Stier, on the contrary, represents the evil as endeavouring to break out of the net, but unable to accomplish their purpose: “Many a leviathan is caught, and although he would fain get out, yet cannot break the net.”—Stierin loc.[27]The argument on this point is well stated by Limburg Brouwer. His conclusion is: “Accedit quodπρομυθιονillud, (ὡμοιωθη ἡ Βασιλεια, κ.τ.λ.) saepe ita comparatum est, ut proprie non conferendum sit cum solo illo subjecto, quocum ab auctore connectatur, sed potius cum universa re narrata.”—De Parabolis Jesu Christi, 153.[28]Arndtcloses his exposition of this parable with a hymn, which I subjoin, not only for the sake of the doctrinal statement regarding the ground of a sinner’s hope contained in the first verse, but also, and still more, for the union of simplicity and solemnity in the conception of future punishment contained in the second:—Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit,Das ist mein Schmuck und Ehrenkleid;Damit will ich vor Gott besteh’nUnd zu der Himmelsfreud’ eingeh’n.Hilf, Gott, dass yeder kommen mag,Wo tausend Yahr’ ist wie ein Tag:Vor dem Ort uns, O Gott, bewahr’,Wo ein Tag ist wie tausend Yahr’!Christ’s blood and righteousnessShall be the marriage-dress,In which I’ll standAt God’s right handForgiven,And enter restAmong the blestIn heaven.Help, Lord, that we may comeTo thy saints’ happy home,Where a thousand yearsAs one day appears,Nor go,Where one day appearsAs a thousand yearsFor woe.[29]Die am meisten geschont sind erweisen sich als die Schonungslosesten. Unter den Flügeln der Zärtlichkeit wird die Grausamkeit ausgebrütet.(Those who get most mercy give least; and cruelty is hatched under the wings of tenderness).—Dräseke vom Reich Gottes,ii.141.[30]Dräsekeexpresses the same conception in his own peculiarly terse and antithetic way:—So gewiss kein Gottesreich ohne die Schulderlassung die wir empfangen; so gewiss kein Gottesreich ohne die Schulderlassung die wir leisten.(As certainly as there is no kingdom of God without the forgiveness which we receive, so certainly there is no kingdom of God without the forgiveness which we bestow.)—ii.147.[31]Fred. Arndtputs the lesson warmly and well; his appeal is in substance this:—“A man without compassion has all against him, God and the world; and meets as many adversaries in judgment as he had associates in life. Woe to him who is arraigned in secret by the tears of the feeble and oppressed! The sighs which he has pressed out, the plaints which he has generated, cry up to heaven against him, and their echo clangs horrid from heaven down again upon the life of the loveless and revengeful.... And can we sleep in peace another hour, as long as there are men upon the earth with whom we live in unpeace and enmity? Cannot be written the happiness, the inward bliss of the peaceful and peace-making. Revenge, indeed, seems often sweet to men; but, oh, it is only sugared poison, only sweetened gall, and its after taste is bitter as hell. Forgiving, enduring love alone is sweet and blissful; it enjoys peace and the consciousness of God’s favour. By forgiving, it gives away and annihilates the injury. It treats the injurer as if he had not injured, and therefore feels no more the smart and sting that he had inflicted. Forgiveness is a shield from which all the fiery darts of the wicked one harmless rebound. Forgiveness brings heaven to earth, and heaven’s peace into the sinful heart. Forgiveness is the image of God, the forgiving Father, and an advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. Your unalterable duty is clear: as surely as we are Christians, men who have experienced great compassion, who see in every man a brother in Christ, and are going forward to God’s righteous judgment, so surely we must forgive. Of no commandment will the fulfilment be demanded of us with such stringency, no divine rule so strictly enforced as this, without the slightest exception to leave a loop-hole of hope to the transgressor. If we forgive not those who injure us, neither will our heavenly Father forgive us; and this would be the greatest calamity that could befall us in time and in eternity.”—Die vergebende Liebe; oder Gleichniss vom Schalksknecht.[32]The name of a great trysting place for selling cattle and hiring men and women on the eastern outskirts of the city of Glasgow, where the two operations resemble each other too closely for the credit of our institutions or the safety of society.[33]By law, wages for the work of the day must be paid the same evening (Deut. xxiv. 15).[34]These two are thus united and distinguished byDräseke,—“Although the kingdom of God is God’s gift in the souls of men, yet without a worthiness in men it can neither begin nor continue, neither reveal nor develop itself. And again, although our worthiness is necessary, we nevertheless obtain the kingdom, not through the merit of works, but from the fulness of grace, yea, from that alone. In short, the kingdom demands workers; hirelings it disdains (das Reich verlangt Arbeiter; Söldlinge verschmäht es).... Thus it stands shut against the hireling, open to the worker. Not as though the kingdom needed thy labour. He who makes the winds his messengers and the flames his servants, can do without thy hand-work, O little man. Thy labour avails not; but that thou shouldest be a labourer, that thou shouldest have a mind for God, and through that mind shouldest elevate thy life into a free and joyful service of him—that avails.”—Vom Reich Gottes,ii.40, 42.Remarkable is the construction of the chain by which this writer connects the poor unemployed men who were standing idle in the market-place with the ever-during, ever-increasing satisfaction of their souls in eternity.So verlangt das Reich Arbeiter, nicht Söldlinge. Es beruft die Arbeitlosen. Es stellt die Bernfenen an. Es beschäftigt die Angestelleten. Es übt die Beschäftigten. Es belohnt die Geübten. Es genügt den Belohnten. Und Gnüge währt ewig; wächst ewig.—ii.51.[35]On the other hand the text,Luke xiii. 30, although precisely similar to this in form, distinguishes, as may be seen from the context, between those who are within and those who are without.[36]While in some cases the application of the parable which the Lord himself makes at the moment is full and perspicuous, it is in other cases like the parables themselves, and doubtless for good reasons, short, sententious, and partially veiled. In some cases the subjoined doctrine must be read in the light of the parable itself ere it can be understood. “Majus vero et certius auxilium interpreti paratur in illis locis, in quibus ipse Jesus sensum parabolarum explicat, quod quidem modo luculentius, ut in orationibusMat. XIII.modo paucis tantum verbis fit. Saepe enim praemittitur vel subjungitur ab eo doctrina per parabolam prolata, quae tamen ipsa interdum paulo obscurius exprimitur, ita ut nisi per parabolam ipsam intelligi non possit.”—Schultze de par.86.[37]In the transaction with the young man from which this parable remotely springs, an analogous expression is employed to indicate a chosen or choice disciple; “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast,”&c. (xix. 21.) The term “perfect” in that text seems to be entirely parallel with “chosen.” The meaning of both is determined by the main drift of the parable; and the meaning thus given accords with the analogy of faith.Another remarkable confirmation of this exposition is found in the use of the same term,εκλεκτοι, inRev. xvii. 14. The word in that passage must have the same meaning that we have attributed to it in the parable. Two reasons, a supreme and subordinate, are given to account for the victory of the Lamb,—his own omnipotence, and the trustworthy character of the instruments whom he employs. “The Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful;”κλητοὶ καὶ ἐκλεκτοὶ καὶ πιστοί. If you understand here byἐκλεκτοὶ, chosen by God in the eternal covenant, the logical arrangement becomes obscure. It would be strange if, in enumerating the qualifications of soldiers, one should represent first that they were summoned to the warfare, next that they were chosen for that purpose before, and last that they were stanch in the battlefield. If this had been the meaning ofἐκλεκτοὶit must have stood first in order. The fact that it stands second suggests another explanation. Take it, in the sense which it readily assumes and frequently bears, and the order of the series becomes at once transparent. The soldiers were “called, and choice, and faithful.” They were enlisted in the cause, excellent in character, and found unflinching when the fight began.[38]“He now constrains them, in the first parable, to declare their own guilt; and, in the second, to declare their own punishment; and as they had now decided to put Him to death, He describes to them, in the third parable, the consequences of their great violation of the covenant and ingratitude,—the destruction of their ancient priesthood, and the triumphant establishment of his new kingdom of heaven among the Gentiles.”—Langein loc.[39]At an earlier stage of the same interview, when a question regarding the ministry of the Baptist was addressed to them, fearing the consequences which an answer might involve, they had sought shelter under the plea of ignorance. As they gained nothing by their duplicity on that occasion, they may have been unwilling to try the same policy again; and, accordingly, they give frankly the obvious answers to the questions that resulted both from this and the succeeding parable.[40]What wise one of this world,—what human reason would have conceived, under the cross, that this man suspended between two malefactors, and despised by all, would one day receive the worship of the whole world? This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.—Heubner in Lange.[41]The expression is chosen with reference to the mysterious stone inDaniel ii. 34, 35, which grinds to powder the image of the monarchies; that is, to Christ who unfolds his life in the kingdom of God and grinds the kingdom of this world to powder.—Lange.[42]No. XXI.of this series.[43]I have witnessed a process closely analogous, in a small detached island of the Shetland group in which the message sent was an invitation, not figurative but literal, to come and hear the word of the kingdom. It had been previously intimated to the islanders that a minister of the Gospel from the south would preach to them on the occasion of his visit to the neighbouring mainland, as the largest island of the group is styled. When the minister and his friends succeeded at length in crossing the Channel, several children were dispatched as messengers in different directions to inform the people that public worship would immediately begin. In a very short time a congregation was assembled consisting of the whole population of the island.[44]A melancholy interest adheres to the contrast between man’s heedlessness of God as expressed in this parable,ἀμελήσαντες, made light of it, did not care for it; and God’s regard for men as expressed in1 Peter v. 7,αὐτῷ μέλεὶ περι ὑμων, he careth for you.[45]These three different methods of treating the message were all exhibited simultaneously at Athens when Paul preached there: “Some mocked, others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.... Howbeit, certain men clave unto him and believed” (Acts xvii. 32–34).[46]“It should be assumed that the guests were not instantly hurried into the festal hall, but that an opportunity was afforded to them of changing their dress. This, however, is not expressly asserted in the narrative, but may be gathered from the termεφιμωθη(he was speechless) inver. 12; and must be understood on this account also, that, otherwise the sentence inver. 13would stand exposed to the charge of injustice.”—Storr, de parabolis Christi,p. 113.[47]A custom connected with funerals, which prevails in some districts of England, if not in all, approaches closely in some of its essential features to that which occupies the most conspicuous place in this parable. A scarf of black silk, large, conspicuous, and expensive, yet constituting no part of the proper garments of the wearer, is given by the person who invites, and worn by every one who accepts the invitation. A single person without the badge in the procession would be instantly detected, and the omission would, in the circumstances, be taken as proof of disrespect.[48]I do not attach much value to the question which has been much canvassed here, whether the wedding garment specifically signifies Faith or Charity,—whether it points to what the saved get from God, or what they do in his service. To wear the garment at the feast means that the wearer takes God’s way of salvation and not his own; to want it, means that the wanter takes his own way of salvation and not God’s. This is the conclusion of the whole matter. If you suppose that the garment means evangelical obedience, you must assume that faith in Christ is the root on which obedience grows; if, on the other hand, you suppose that the garment means faith in Christ, you must assume that it is a living not a dead faith,—a faith that will work by love and overcome the world.[49]The closest analogue that I know of the fact which plays so great a part in the structure of this scriptural lesson may be found in a custom which prevails at funerals in the rural districts of Scotland. When the distance between the house of the deceased and the cemetery is considerable, a common, perhaps I should say a uniform, practice is, that those friends of the mourning family who reside in the neighbourhood of the burying place assemble in a group at a convenient turning of the road, and wait till the funeral procession reaches the spot; they then silently fall into their places and follow the corpse to the grave. I like the analogy none the less that it is taken, not from a time of mirth, but from a time of weeping. The two cases coincide in all their features except one. In either example we have an occasion of absorbing interest to one family, and the sympathy of neighbours expressed by means of large assemblies and public processions. In a minor but characteristic feature there is an exact coincidence,—a portion of the sympathizing neighbours wait for the main body at a point on the path and fall into the line of march from that spot to the terminus. That the one is a joyful and the other a mournful group enhances rather than diminishes the value of the comparison.[50]Lange’s view on this point seems sound and consistent; while both Olshausen and Stier endeavour with much pain but little fruit, to prove that the foolish represent true but defective disciples. “One part of the Church is living, while the other lives onlyinappearance, because it lives onlytoappearance.”—Lange.[51]They turn themselves to the wise, whom, perhaps, they had lately laughed at, with the prayer: “Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out.” They betake themselves, if they are Catholics, to the dead saints, if they are Protestants, to the living, whom they have been accustomed to revere as their guides on account of their wisdom and grace, and plead, Help us, comfort us, pray for us, that we may be brought into a state of grace. In vain. They answer: Not so, lest there be not enough for us and you. What you desire is impossible. None of us has any surplus merit out of which he could give a portion to another.—Arndt,ii.177.[52]The concluding application is well expressed byArndt:—“Perhaps the breaking heart grasps at the Bible; it has only spikes and nails, but no balm of consolation. Perhaps the dying man calls in those who have the care of souls; the words of comfort slide over the ears, while the Holy Spirit seals none of them upon the heart. Perhaps he partakes of the Holy Supper: ah, the feast is to him not a feast of blessings, but an eating of judgment. Perhaps he prays to the Lord himself: the Lord answers, I know you not.“Oh, it is sad to be so near heaven, and yet to be lost—to be almost saved, and yet altogether lost. Were it not the Lord who speaks here, Jesus Christ, the Life Eternal, the Judge of the living and the dead, our feeling would be mightily to resist the terrible conclusion of this parable, which cuts all and every hope clean away, and leaves not an If or a But behind, nor any other possible interpretation. But he speaks; and before his words every mouth is silent in fear and adoration. He writes into our breast, with a glowing iron pen, the warning word—therefore watch,&c.“Short is life; fleeting is time; quick is death; long is eternity. Therefore what thou desirest to do, do it quickly.”—Gleichnisse.[53]For the relation between the talents and the pounds, see the exposition of the latter parable,—the last of the series.[54]Dr. Trench takes for granted, without a word of proof, or any evidence that he has even considered the question, that the reaping is the consummation of all things, the exclusive prerogative of the Lord.[55]Bengel’s suggestion is ingenious and interesting, but contributes nothing towards the solution. “Sermo concisus. Mittet falce preditos, namαποστελλεσθαιest viventis cujuspiam.” He would understand the phrase “he putteth in the sickle” as a curt form of expression, intended to intimate that he sends out reapers with sickles to reap the grain; fortifying his opinion by the remark that the term “putteth in,” (αποστελλει, “sends out,”) refers to a living person, and not an inanimate instrument. Countenance for this view might be found inMatt. ix. 37whereεκβαλεινequivalent toαποστελλεσθαιis employed to indicate the sending forth of reapers. On the other hand, however, the passage,Rev. xiv. 15, 16, goes decidedly against it; for there bothπεμμτεινandβαλλειν, “thrust in” (the sickle) are certainly applied to the instrument itself, and not to the men who wield it.[56]Here, as in the case of the tares, the sleep of the husbandman implies no culpable negligence either in the natural or spiritual sphere. “Sind wir am Tage recht wach; dann, mögen wir Nachts ruhig schlafen.”—Dräseke, vom ReichG.[57]Like the seed, is the Word himself. He became flesh and dwelt among us; but he has ascended out of our sight. At the beginning he came into the world; and at the close he will return;—a spring and a harvest, but all the space between, he is out of sight.[58]“She was forgiven much; therefore she loved much. As soon as she had learned that Jesus was at table in Simon the Pharisee’s house, her heart drew her thither to him, that she might offer him the expression of her gratitude and love,—of her adoration and her joy. She took with her a phial of ointment, the costliest that she possessed, found an entrance into the Pharisee’s house, and walked behind backs to the feet of Jesus, as he reclined at table on an elevated cushion. Arrived there, she is incapable of accomplishing her purpose. The thought of the greatness of her sin, and the greatness of the compassion of Jesus, broke her heart. She wept, and so unwittingly wet the feet of Jesus with her tears. Oh, salt, salutary tears! They are tears at once of repentance and gratitude. Now, she must first dry the Lord’s feet again. But for this she had not prepared herself; for this she had nothing but her hair. So she wiped them with her hair; and kissed the feet of Jesus, and then anointed them with ointment. All this was the manifestation of her inward burning love to the Lord.”—Arndt, ii, 85, 86.[59]The dilemma is well put by Dr. Trench.[60]“How eagerly would the critics seize on this passage, and pronounce the question of a certain lawyer to be identical with the narrative contained inMatt. xix. 16, only differently reported—if St. Luke had not himself subsequently narrated that second incident (xviii. 18)! This once more shows that many things could naturally, and would necessarily, occur more than once in the life of Jesus.”—Stier.[61]The analogy between the meetings exhibited in this parable and the meeting of Philip with the Ethiopian (Acts viii.) is interesting and instructive. In both cases the place is a desert, in both a man in great need and a man who has the means of supplying that need meet each other there. Here the want and its supply are material and temporal, there they are moral and spiritual. The man who fell among thieves on the way to Jericho suffered from bodily wounds, and the Samaritan who came to his relief appropriately applied material remedies: the Ethiopian treasurer, in that way towards Gaza which is desert, suffered in his soul, and the name of Christ was the ointment which Philip the evangelist poured into his wound. These two cases are indeed diverse, but as we learn from the Scriptures throughout, they proceed, both as to disease and cure, upon analogous principles, so that the knowledge of the one throws light upon the meaning of the other. The meeting in the desert near Gaza did not happen by chance, it was a tryst duly made and exactly kept, for “the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise and go toward the south,”&c. (Acts viii. 26). The appointment for the meetings in the valley between Jerusalem and Jericho was as certainly made, although it has not been as expressly recorded.[62]In the case of the ten lepers (Luke xvii. 16), which is not a parable, but a history, we learn that the one who experienced and expressed gratitude to God for his recovery was a Samaritan. Whether their low and despised condition had been to some extent blessed in making them more humble and receptive than their Jewish neighbours, we do not know; but, in point of fact, in the historical incident a Samaritan was more ready than the Jew to give praise to God; and in the construction of the parable a Samaritan is represented as also more beneficent to men.In connection with this case a striking example may be seen of the divine impartiality of the Scriptures. Some persons, with a view to objects of their own, take pleasure in representing ministers of religion as more self-seeking and less generous than those who make no religious profession. The contrast between the Levite and the Samaritan, if this case stood alone, might seem to support their theory. But there is no respect of persons or classes with God; you may learn from the Scriptures—and that, too, from the writings of the same apostle—that the Samaritans were not all kind, and the Levites not all hard-hearted. They were Samaritans (Luke ix. 53) who would not permit Jesus and his disciples, when they were weary, to pass the night in their village; and he was a Levite (Acts iv. 36) who was named Son of Consolation, and sold his property that he might distribute the proceeds among the poor.[63]The Samaritan was riding; for he set the wounded man “on his own beast.” What of the priest and the Levite?—were they riding, or performing the journey on foot? If they were both pedestrians, while the Samaritan had a mule or an ass, it is obvious that the two parties were not on equal terms, and that consequently no fair test of their benevolence could in that transaction be obtained. On that very ground I think it is certain that they were riding as well as he. The parable is not a history, containing the simple facts of any given case, without respect to the lessons which the facts may contain; it is a picture, constructed according to its Author’s mind, and constructed for the purpose of expressing a particular lesson which the Author already had in his mind, and desired to teach. The doctrine which the Teacher intended to declare obviously requires that the two parties whose compassion is compared and contrasted should be on equal terms. The lesson which he meant to convey would slip through and be lost, like water through a leaky vessel, if the priest and Levite were walking when they found the wounded man: we must, therefore, if we would not do violence to the parable, assume that both were mounted. With this conclusion, resulting from the nature of the case, the expressions in their minutest details correspond. The journey of the priest is narrated in the same terms as that of the Samaritan: “A certain priest came down that way,” and “A certain Samaritan as he journeyed came where he was:” we never learn that the Samaritan had a beast of burden until he sets the half-dead traveller upon its back. There was no occasion for mentioning the priest’s mule, for he made no special or remarkable use of it.[64]Dräsekehas happily expressed the conception that to love is truly to live: “Wir finden hier demnach die Lehre: Willst du leben, liebe.”—Vom ReichG.,ii.130.[65]“If the robbers had seized the Samaritan before he was able to accomplish his design, his work would have been accomplished in the sight of God;—and if the priest and Levite had given help on account of approaching spectators, it would have been of no value.”—Stier.[66]This seems, however, not to have been the first occasion on which he gave “The Lord’s Prayer” to the disciples; it is embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, which belongs to an earlier date. The learners were defective both in understanding and memory; and the Master gave them “line upon line.”[67]Der Heiland—the Healer—is the ordinary epithet applied to the Lord Jesus in the religious phraseology of the Germans. The term is suggestive and comforting.[68]In the valley of the Rhine where the vine is cultivated as the material of a great manufacture, and the staple of a foreign trade, fruit trees of other species are not admitted within the vineyard; but at Botzen in the Tyrol, where the habits of society are more simple and primitive, I have repeatedly seen fig-trees growing within the lofty wall of the carefully cultured vineyard, rewarding the possessor for his care with abundant fruit.[69]I cannot see any force in the argument by which Stier endeavours to show that the interceding vine-dresser represents primarily the human ministry in the Church.[70]I do not set much value on the elaborate and minute discussions which some expositors have raised regarding the distinct and specific significance of the several excuses. It is enough for me that they point to the possessions and the pleasures of life,—the possessions being distinguished into two kinds, the field and oxen, corresponding to the farm and the merchandise of the cognate parable.[71]While the evidence that the main division is twofold, not threefold, lies chiefly in the nature of the several representations, the minute formulae by which the transitions of the narrative are effected, point in the same direction. The parable of the lost sheep is introduced by the phrase, “And he spake this parable,” (ειπε δε την παραβολην), and that of the prodigal by the corresponding, “And he said,” (ειπε δε). These two are thus balanced over against each other; but the only link between the lost sheep and the lost silver is, Either (η), indicating that the second does not introduce a new subject, but gives another illustration of that which was already expressed in the first.[72]Bengel, in his usual pointed way, expresses the specific varieties which characterize the three successive views of men’s sin, as stupidity, want of self-consciousness, and the positive choice of evil by an intelligent but depraved being. “Ovis, drachma, filius perditus: peccator stupidus, sui plane nescius, sciens et voluntarius.”[73]It is interesting to notice that the same twin doctrines which the Master here exhibited in parables were afterwards taught in the same relation by his servants. Take two examples, one a brief bold allegory, and the other an autobiographic fragment, both from the fervent heart and through the fruitful pen of the apostle Paul. (1.) “Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his; and, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Tim. ii. 19). The engraving on the upper side of this seal represents God’s part in a sinner’s salvation, and corresponds to the shepherd’s generous act; the engraving on its under side represents man’s part, and corresponds to the repenting and returning of the prodigal. (2.) “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect; but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus” (Phil. iii. 12). The obscurity which adheres to the sentence as it stands in the English Bible is removed when, instead of “that for which,” you substitute the more direct and literal rendering, “for that,” meaning “because” or “inasmuch as.” The sentence should be read, “I follow after, if that I may (if so be that I may) apprehend, inasmuch as I also have been apprehended by, Christ Jesus,” (διωκω δε ει και καταλαβω, εφ ᾧ και κατεληφθην ὑπο του Χρίστοι Ιησου). The apostle intends to state two connected facts; and to intimate that the one is the cause of the other. He is striving to grasp the Saviour; and what impels or encourages him to make the effort? His own experience that his Saviour has already in sovereign love laid hold of him. Christ has already come to this sinful man, in loving saving power, as the good shepherd came to the lost sheep; therefore the sinful man will arise and go to the Father like the repenting prodigal. The consciousness that like the lost sheep he has been grasped in the Redeemer’s arms does not induce him to abstain from effort as unnecessary; on the contrary, by inspiring hope, it nerves his arm and spurs him on. Because he feels that the Shepherd is bearing him, therefore he will arise and go.[74]In the nature of the case a great and incurable defect adheres to the method of employing a hired servant to keep a flock of sheep, without giving him a material interest in the prosperity of his charge. Such is the nature of the occupation, and such its sphere, that the servant is necessarily far and long removed from the master’s inspection, and if suspicion should arise, proof of unfaithfulness could hardly be brought home to the accused. It is the interest of the owner to contrive some method of linking the profit of the shepherd to the prosperity of the flock. It was by attempting to accomplish this object by a defective plan, that Laban afforded to Jacob the opportunity of prosecuting his subtle policy. While conversing lately with some shepherds on the Scottish Cheviots, I learned that masters and servants in that district arrange the matter easily to their mutual profit and satisfaction. The wages of the shepherd are not paid in money; a certain number of the sheep, between forty and fifty according to circumstances, are his own property, and their produce constitutes his hire. Thus his own interest is an ever present motive pressing the man to do his best for the flock, and so to do his best for the master.[75]“Should not that great and glorious Shepherd, whose millions of bright sheep fill the universe, leave these millions in order to seek the slightest, poorest, most infirm of those who need his care, and without that care would utterly perish; does not his boundless love require him to go after it?” Stier, after quoting this sentence in reference to the parable from Kurz,Bibel und Astronomie, remarks, “This is a thought quite permissible in itself, but as an exposition of what Eternal Wisdom has spoken, it is not valid.” Here, however, the learned critic has incorrectly apprehended the state of the question. A secondary relation is as real in its own place as a primary. It is quite true that the parable, under the picture of the one sheep that strayed and the ninety-nine that remained on the pasture, points directly and immediately to two distinct classes of human kind; but it brings up as legitimately, although more remotely, the distinction, governed by the same principle, which has in God’s universal sovereignty been made between the human race on the one hand, and angelic spirits on the other. One expositor may legitimately confine his view to the more immediate and narrower sphere; but another may as legitimately take a wider range, provided he make and mark the necessary distinctions as he proceeds; as one inquirer in physics may limit his speculation to the solid body of this globe, while another, under the same general designation, may, with perfect logical exactness, include also the atmosphere that surrounds it.[76]You may measure a square surface and find it to contain so many feet of superficial area: suppose you discover afterwards that it has depth as well as length and breadth; to take in also this new measurement does not diminish the old. If we discover that, for his own sake, the Redeemer accomplished his saving work, it was not on that account less for our sakes.[77]“In the centre of all lies the profound thought, that in God and Christ love is one with self-interest, and self-interest one with love; no such contrariety existing between them as is found in the case of man.”—Stier, Words of the Lord.[78]Made or adopted by Dr. Trench.[79]Recognising in the lost coin mainly a repetition of the same lesson which the lost sheep contained, but justly anticipating from the mere fact of a repetition, that the second will present some features which were not contained in the first, Dr. Trench finds the expected difference in this,—that “if the shepherd in the last parable was Christ, the woman in this may, perhaps, be the Church.” After suggesting as an alternative that the woman may represent the Holy Spirit, he remarks that these two are in effect substantially identical, and finally rests in the conclusion that it is “the Church because and in so far as it is dwelt in by the Spirit, which appears as the woman seeking her lost.” This able expositor speaks with evident hesitation when he represents the Church as the seeker here; and accordingly we find him with a happy inconsistency affirming in a subsequent paragraph that “as the woman, having lost her drachm, will light a candle and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it, even so the Lord, through the ministrations of his Church, gives diligence to recover the lost sinner,”&c. I am willing to accept the phraseology of this sentence, but it is obviously at variance with the view which he had previously presented, and to which he recurs in the close, that in this parable it is the Church which seeks the lost, while in the preceding parable it is the Saviour. Further, if he maintain that the woman seeking the lost coin represents the Lord seeking sinners through the ministrations of the Church, he must also maintain that the shepherd seeking the lost sheep represents the Lord seeking sinners through the ministrations of the Church. If the Lord himself is in both cases equally the seeker, there is no reason in the text of Scripture, and Dr. Trench suggests none from any other quarter, why he should be represented as seeking through the ministrations of the Church in one case and not in the other. The letter of the word and the nature of the case peremptorily demand that the qualification regarding the instrumentality of the Church should be attached to both or to neither. In either case it remains that, in respect to the person who seeks the lost, these two parables teach precisely the same lesson.The house in which the coin is lost means, according to Dr. Trench, the visible Church: the result is that the Church (invisible) searches in the Church (visible) for sinners that have been lost there, and restores them when found to the Church, but whether the visible or invisible I cannot discover. The Church then calls upon the angels to rejoice with her over the recovery of the lost. This exposition seems confused and inconsistent; and it is a dim mysterious conception of “the Church” that constitutes the disturbing element.[80]Nor do I see any force in the minute criticism by which Dr. Trench endeavours to make out that while the sheep were the shepherd’s property, the money did not belong to the woman. He says, “I have found my sheep which was lost;” while she says, “I have found the piece which I had lost;” but these are nothing more than varieties of expression. The absolute identity of the terms in which the two cases are introduced, proves that these seemly and slight variations of phraseology at the close, do not indicate a substantial difference. “What man of you having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them?” and “What woman, having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece?”—these questions, so carefully and completely parallel, conclusively show that, after making allowance for the necessary difference in the nature of the subjects, the two cases, in relation to possession, loss, and finding, are precisely the same.[81]A curious illustration of the bondage to which an indurated Erastianism has reduced many of the Protestant Churches of the Continent, is incidentally afforded in a remark made by Stier regarding the peculiar fulness and preciousness of this parable:—“That this parable, which Lange beautifully terms a gospel within a gospel, this universal text for preaching about the lost and recovered sons of our heavenly Father (and the hopelessly lost first-born to the rich possessions of the house), should be wanting in the pericopæ of the Sunday Kalendar, is an omission which is utterly unjustifiable on any ground whatever, which is not compensated by the insertion of the previous similitudes, and which of itself is ample reason for that reformation of the Kalendar which Palmer desires.”—Words of the Lord Jesus, in loc. The successors of Luther must, it seems, tread the mill from year to year on the same limited curriculum of texts which their Kalendar contains; and those of them who are weary of the restraint long in vain for an opportunity to preach on such a subject as the prodigal, for it is not set down in the bond. That Church surely is greatly defective both in godliness and manliness, that cannot or will not throw open all the Word of God alike, at all times, to its ministers and congregations in their Sabbath solemnities.[82]The paraphrase of this Scripture, in a selection employed in most of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, stumbles at this point, and misses the meaning of the text. Overlooking the mighty step of progress which the prodigal had made between the time when hisaccumulatingconvictions turned the balance first in favour of repentance, and the time when the last fragment of distrust melted away in the flood of a full reconciliation, the hymn represents the son as still pleading specifically to be sent away into the place of a servant, after the embrace, and the kiss, and the tears of his father had bestowed and triply sealed his sonship.“He ran and fell upon his neck,Embraced and kissed his son:The grieving prodigal bewailedThe follies he had done.”“No more, my father, can I hopeTo find paternal grace;My utmost wish is to obtainA servant’s humble place.”No; after the meeting the youth did indeed say that he was not worthy to be called a son, but he did not say he had abandoned the hope or the desire of being reinstated. Yet, notwithstanding this and other errors that have crept into the collection, and the superior character of many that are excluded from it, no vigorous effort has been made to obtain a revision in order to exclude the faulty and introduce better in their stead. Conservative inertia—an instinct to keep unchanged what has descended to us from our fathers—is a great and curious power in human nature, operating both on Church and State. Although not creditable to the wisdom and courage of men, it is doubtless overruled for good by the providence of God.[83]Stier’s observations on this point are excellent:—“The well-meaning efforts which are made to explain the absence of reference to the mediatingpropitiationof the Son of God in this instant exhibition of theFather’s mercy, are altogether needless; they rest fundamentally on false dogmatic views of this propitiation, as if there were not existing in the Father’s being the same love which is expressed in the Son,—as if the Father needed abstractly to be propitiated in order to entertain this love! We are not to seekChrist himselfas mediator in the person of this father; nor (though Melancthon has strangely ventured to affirm it), afterwards in the fatted calf, as sacrificially slain.Hisplace here is rather to be sought in his thus authoritatively testifying of the Father’s mercy. As Nitzsch excellently says:—‘If he seems to conceal himself here, he is all the more manifest there, where the Shepherd seeks the lost sheep. FortheSon—who is neither an elder nor ayounger, theeternalSon of the Father, one with him, his eye and his heart towards the lost—is come into this world, although invisible and unnamed in the parable, to reveal the Father where he had been ever invisible, and where no man knew him: and he is to the children of the law and the curse, not only a living herald of the propitiable—we shall rather say of the already propitiated—Father, but the (that isour) propitiation itself, and the way whereby every one of us may come back to God.’ The mediation of Christ is no more denied by this silence than the seduction of Satan was denied in the sinner’s apostasy at the beginning of the parable. We may also say with Von Gerlach that the ‘coming out of the father to meet his son, here figuratively exhibits the sending of the Son.’”—Stier in loc.[84]This law may be illustrated by ananalogousfact in the material department of creation. Lay a ball, such as a boy’s marble, on an extended sheet of thin paper, and the paper, though fixed at the edges and unsupported in the midst, will bear easily the weight: take now another ball of the same shape and weight, and let it drop upon the sheet of paper from a height, it will go sheer through. The two balls are of the same weight and figure; but the motion gave to one a momentum tenfold greater than that of the other at rest. It is in a similar way that the return of a lost son goes through a loving father’s heart, and makes all its affections thrill; while the continued possession of another son, equally valuable and equally valued, produces no such commotion either in the heart of the father or his home.[85]A case came up lately in an English court of justice, in which a certain duke prosecuted his butler for malversation in his charge. It appeared in evidence that the defalcation on the account for wine alone amounted toL. 1500. This fact incidentally reveals two things:—How great is the wealth of these British princes; and how little that wealth is under their own control.[86]Probably the rents were paid in kind, and these were the arrears which the tenants acknowledged.[87]Of the same nature were the long leases of ecclesiastical property in England at low rents, granted by the living incumbents, in consideration of a sum of money in name of fine paid to themselves.[88]A case emerged lately in the courts of this country, in which a proprietor, who had lost very large sums by the unfaithfulness of his agent, prosecuted the parties for restitution, on the ground of the agent’s bad faith in the transactions. The case was protracted, and I lost sight of it before the solution was reached; but it is enough for my present purpose that a plea was actually raised to obtain from one debtor the price of a hundred measures of oil instead of fifty, which he acknowledged, on the alleged ground that the absconded steward had corruptly and for his own interest sacrificed the rights of his employer.[89]The Emperor Julian adduced this parable in order to prove that the doctrines of Christ were adverse to good morals. This is precisely the place where the apostate, seeking reasons to justify his apostasy, will most readily find what he seeks.[90]For example, their competence and the comforts which it brings shield women of the higher and middle classes in this country, in a great measure, from certain snares of the devil in which multitudes of their poorer sisters miserably fall. If those who enjoy this protection throw away their advantage by turning that which is a protection on one side into a temptation on the other, and so bring themselves to an equality over all with the less favoured classes, the fault is their own. It is proved by obvious facts that worldly possessions may be placed between you and temptation, as cotton bales and sand bags may be employed to ward off cannon shot from stone walls. They are capable of being turned to some account in advancing our eternal interests; for our inheritance in heaven, the world is useful, if it is rightly used.[91]From the introduction of a new subject abruptly in the 18th verse—the much agitated question regarding a man’s right to put away his wife—I think it probable that the interruption had been repeated and continued; that it took the form of a dialogue, the Pharisees throwing in what they considered a damaging question, and Jesus giving an answer by turns—a scene which is frequently repeated in modern missions among the heathen.[92]Dr. Trench’s disquisition regarding the latent union between covetousness and prodigality, involving a proof that the discourse about the rich man was applicable to the Pharisees who were not of prodigal habits, although very good in itself, is scarcely relevant; inasmuch as it is not the parable of the rich man, but the reproofs intervening between it and the unjust steward that are expressly addressed to the Pharisees.[93]It is true a figurative meaning has been applied to it, as to all the rest, both in ancient and modern times. In this case the lesson, when metaphorically rendered, possesses a remarkable measure of beauty, truth, and appropriateness. The rich man is the Jewish nation, by God’s gift rich in position and privilege, but selfishly keeping all to itself, despising and neglecting others. Lazarus represents the Gentiles, spiritually poor, naked, hungry, homeless, within reach of the privileged people, yet by them left destitute. Both die: the old dispensation runs out, and Jews and Gentiles are together launched into “the last times.” By apostolic messengers, the poor outcasts are now led unto the blessed privileges of the Gospel; these stones become children of Abraham; while the Jews, who enjoyed so good a portion in the former dispensation, are cast out. In this case, as in that of the Samaritan, it is easy so to turn the polished instrument in the light, that it shall throw off bright glimpses of great evangelic facts and doctrines. Perhaps the Lord, in constructing it, kept this capability in view; but we must take the parable as in the first instance and mainly a direct moral lesson, accounting its allegorical capabilities secondary, and to us uncertain.[94]The name of the poor man is given, while the rich man is left nameless. Generally, Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, and, in particular, it does not imitate this world’s kingdoms in throwing the common people into anonymous heaps, and recording the names of only the great. I saw in an extension of the parish churchyard the graves of the two hundred men who perished in the pit accident at Hartley a few years ago. They were grouped in families of two, three, four, or five, and these family groups were arranged in extended rows; but all were nameless. Near them slept the dust of the hereditary owners of the soil under monumental marble, loaded with statuary and inscriptions. Subjects of Christ’s kingdom, “it shall not be so among you.” Nor is the law which obtains in the heavenly the direct reverse of that which obtains in the earthly kingdom; it is not the poor, but the “poor in spirit,” to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs. The names that are recorded in the Lamb’s book of life are neither those who have nor those who lack this world’s wealth, but those who are poor in spirit and rich in grace.[95]There is a strong resemblance between this pair and the two sons who were severally asked by their father to work in his vineyard.—ParableX.[96]This question has begun of late to attract a considerable measure of attention in the Presbyterian Churches of this country. It needs a wise treatment, and, alas! we lack wisdom. For convenience and order, all the members of a worshipping assembly ought evidently to adopt the same method; but this is not a matter for arbitrary ecclesiastical enactment. The Pharisee and the publican both stood while they prayed; but their prayers seem to have been short. To enact that the congregation must stand during prayer, and then to keep them praying for twenty minutes or half-an-hour, which is sometimes done, seems to be in effect turning prayer into penance.[97]Σταθεις προς ἐαυτον, standing by himself, as if it wereκαθ’ ἐαυτον. Thus the relation is preserved with the position of the publican,μακροθεν ἐστως. Either stood alone, but for opposite reasons: the Pharisee stood forward alone, because he thought other worshippers were not fit to be in his company; the publican stood back alone, because he considered himself unworthy to mingle with other worshippers. It may be worth while to mention, for the sake of the English reader, the order of the words in the original is, “The Pharisee standing with himself, thus prayed.” You must be guided entirely by the sense in determining whether to read it, Standing with himself, thus prayed; or standing, with himself thus prayed.[98]He obtained this self-confidence by comparing himself not with the law of God, but with others who seemed worse than himself. When a man compares himself with robbers and adulterers, for whom the sword and the prison are prepared, he may easily seem to himself like an angel.—Arndt.[99]He brought with him, what the Pharisee left at home, the book of his own guilt, and exhibited all that stood against him there.—Arndt.[100]The man who cannot perceive, or will not own that these are two distinct cases, charged with different, though cognate lessons, is not fit to be an expositor of any writing, either sacred or profane. Enough for the critics who persist in the theory, that these two parables are different, and consequently incorrect, reports of one discourse spoken only once by the Lord; the conceit is not worthy of more minute refutation.[101]Herod and his son Archelaus had both in succession repaired personally to Rome to obtain their authority. Precisely similar scenes are enacted between the British government and the protected potentates of India; the agents for rival princes contend for regal rights in London, where the government of India is in the last resort controlled.[102]It is altogether a mistake to conclude from the allusions made here and elsewhere in the Scriptures to the actually existing servitude of the times and places, that any modern system of slavery may claim the sanction of divine approval. It was the custom of Jesus to seize existing facts on the right and on the left as they lay around, and employ them as vehicles for conveying his meaning. Sometimes he so employed a good thing, and sometimes a bad thing, but by the mere fact of using a human act or habit as a metaphor, he pronounced no judgment regarding its moral character. It was enough for him that the thing was well known, and that it served as a letter with which he might indicate his mind. Printers make their types of any material that may be most suitable for the purpose, and most readily obtained; and with these types they multiply the Scriptures. They use a cheap mixture of lead and tin; and this base alloy serves their purpose better than more precious metals. Their only question in determining the choice of material is, Will it print our meaning clearly? Thus the Lord Jesus dealt with the habits which he found in society, and the events that were passing at the time. He selected and employed them with a regard not to their own intrinsic moral worth but to their fitness for expressing the idea which he meant to convey. No matter whether it be lead or gold; what he wanted was material suitable for types. A steward has no Scriptural warrant for cheating his master, because the trick of an astute agent is employed to print one of the parables; neither have men-stealers, men-sellers, and men-buyers any authority from the Bible to treat their fellow-men like cattle, because the relation of master and slave was employed by the Lord to express a conception in the course of his teaching.[103]For fuller notice of the methods adopted, see the exposition of the corresponding parableNo. XIV.[104]
But in order to employ analogy with effect more is needful than to make sure that the two objects or acts compared are similar without being identical: the design for which a comparison is made enters as an essential element, and decisively determines its value. Between two given objects an analogy may exist, good for one purpose but worthless for another. Given two balls, spherical in form and equal in size, the one of wood and the other of iron; and let the question be, Do these two objects bear any analogy to each other, real in itself and capable of being usefully employed? The question cannot yet be answered: we must first ascertain for what purpose the comparison is instituted. The two balls are like each other in form, but unlike in material; whether is it in respect of their form or their material that you propose to compare them? If one of them rolls along a gently inclined plane, you may safely infer that the other, when placed in the same position, will follow the same course; for although different in other features they are similar in form. But you cannot infer that because one floats when thrown into the water the other will float too, for in respect to specific gravity there is no similarity between them. Again, let two pieces of wood, cut from the same tree, be brought together, the one a cube, the other a sphere; you may safely conclude, if one swim in water that the other will swim too, because though of diverse forms they are of the same specific gravity; but you cannot conclude, if the one roll on an inclined plane, that the other will roll also, because though of the same specific gravity they are diverse forms. Two objects may be compared for the purpose of inferential analogy, although in nine of their qualities they are wholly dissimilar, if they resemble each other in one, and that the quality with respect to which the comparison is instituted. Again, although two objects be similar in nine of their properties, and dissimilar only in one, no useful analogy can be instituted between them if the object for which the comparison is made save with respect to the one point in which they are dissimilar. An acquaintance with such simple rudiments would go far to correct blunders both in the construction and the exposition of analogies.[1]
Christ made it his business to speak in parables; and, indeed, one may say, the whole visible world is only a parable of the invisible world. The parable is not only something intermediate between history and doctrine; it is both history and doctrine—at once historical doctrine and doctrinal history. Hence its enchaining, ever fresher, and younger charm. Yes, parable is nature’s own language in the human heart; hence its universal intelligibility, its, so to speak, permanent sweet scent, its healing balsam, its mighty power to win one to come again and again to hear. In short, the parable is the voice of the people, and hence also the voice of God.—Die Gleichniss-reden Jesu Christi, vonFred. Arndt,vol. i.2.[2]
It is not, however, by the universal consent of critics that even this is admitted as a genuine parable. Schultze boldly excludes it; but he excludes also all the group inMatt. xiii.except the Tares. By one arbitrary rule after another, he cuts down the whole number of our Lord’s parables to eleven.—A. H. A. Schultze,de parabolarumJ. C.indole poetica com.Men have good cause to suspect the accuracy of their artificial rules, when the application of them works such havoc. Better that we should have no critical rules, than adopt such as separate on superficial literal grounds, things that the judgment of the Church and the common sense of men have in all ages joined together as substantially of the same class.[3]
Notes on the Parables.[4]
In reference to Bauer’s classification, Limbourg Brower (de parabol. Jesu.) observes that the distinction between parables that are dogmatic and parables that are moral cannot successfully be maintained, because of the intimate union maintained in the discourses of Jesus between the revelation of truth and the inculcation of duty. This remark, in connection with its ground, is decisive not only against the particular division to which it is applied, but to all divisions, in as far as they pretend to be logically distinct and complete.[5]
Gerlach in Lange.[6]
In Matthew (xiii. 13) he speaks in parables, “because (ὅτι), they seeing, see not:” and in Mark (iv. 12), and Luke (viii. 10), “that (ἵνα) seeing they might not see.” Two different objects were effected at the same time, and by the same act, corresponding to those two terms; it is true that the Lord employed parables, as one employs pictures to teach a child,becausehis auditors were children in understanding; and it is also true that he veiled his doctrines under metaphorin order thatthose who were children in understanding but in malice men, might not perceive his drift, and so might not violently interfere to suppress his ministry. Thus according to the explanation which he gave at the moment, “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” (Matt. xiii. 12).[7]
The Parables of the Kingdom are, as it were, a picture gallery, and we walk up and down it, examining each picture by itself. We must not forget, however, that these are heavenly pictures that hang around us,—that heavenly things are here exposed to view. A heavenly interpreter walks by our side: we must have a heavenly sense if we would grasp the meaning of what we hear and see. If our study quicken this sense within us, so that it shall grow clearer and sharper before every picture, a rich treat awaits us, for the heavenly Gallery is great.—Dräseke, vom Reich Gottes,i., 270.[8]
Ζῶν γὰρ ὁ λόγος τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ ἐνεργὴς.—Heb.iv. 12.[9]
It is not intimated by the parable that our Father the Husbandman finds any of the good ground in us: the ground, like the tree in another analogical lesson of the Lord, is not good until it ismadegood. It is beyond the scope of this parable to explain how the ground is rendered soft and kept free from thorns. The Teacher was content in this lesson to tell us what the good ground produces; we must discover elsewhere in the Scriptures whence its goodness is derived. “...The similitude from nature is no longer applicable to the mystery of the kingdom of heaven; as a parable, it has already reached its limits, when the truth goes beyond the similitude. There is amiraculousseed superior indeed to all natural seed, so powerful that by its growth it can and will choke all thorns. Nay more, it can also break through the rock in striking its root down into the earth, and can make that to be again a field of God which was a way for the feet of the prince of this world.”—Stier in loc.
Among the many incidental and collateral applications of which this parable is susceptible, one of the most interesting and instructive is—That every man has within himself the elements of all the four kinds of ground. The conception is thus presented byFred. Arndt: “At the outset, the word of God finds all in the first unreceptive condition; we go away without experiencing its power, and remain in a state of nature, unconverted. Next, the word begins to take effect upon us, and we are awakened. Oh now the word of the Lord burns with a holy glow in our hearts! We give ourselves over with our whole souls in those first days of love. We have found heaven; we have seen it opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of man. But this condition does not endure. The fightings begin from within and from without, and the flame is quenched. The heart becomes cold and empty. The life of faith becomes silent and slow in its course. We become languid in watching and prayer; the love of the world and its sinful pleasures awakes again; and before we are aware, we are trying to serve both God and the world. Then the war bursts out: this moment God is above us, the next beneath us, and we get no rest until we have renounced the world, and surrendered our heart and life to God wholly, and to God alone. Thus we pass, in the faith-school of the Holy Spirit, through all the four classes, deceiving ourselves and being deceived, until at last, after many a bitter experience, we strike upon the narrow way, and through the strait gate.”—Die Gleichniss-redenJes. Chr.[10]
“The Land and the Book,” by Dr. Thomson. T. Nelson & Sons.[11]
“The Land and the Book.” Note by Principal Fairbairn in translation of “Lisco on the Parables.”[12]
Die Parabeln des Herrn, für Kirche, Schule, und Haus, erklärt von Dr.De Valenti. Basel, 1841.[13]
It is quite possible that the separatists whomDe Valentiscolds, with more warmth than elegance, may deserve his censure; for severe restrictive measures adopted by governments to suppress religious dissent have frequently the effect of deteriorating its character, on the principle that oppression makes a wise man mad.[14]
Lange (in loc.), having quoted Gerlach to the effect that this prohibition refers to extremes of ecclesiastical discipline, for the purpose of excluding all unbelievers and hypocrites, and constituting a perfectly pure Church, timidly replies: “We can scarcely agree with him that it contains no allusion to the punishment of death for heresy.... It is well known that Novatianism, on the one hand, and the Papal hierarchy, on the other, have addressed themselves to this work of uprooting despite the prohibition of the Lord, and that the Romish Church has at last ended by condemning to the flames only the best wheat.... Theauto da fésof the middle ages were only a humble caricature and anticipation of that fiery judgment.”[15]
Die Gleichniss-reden Jesu Christi,vonFried.Arndt.[16]
The Land and the Book,p. 64.[17]
“Good is like the mustard-seed; from small it becomes great: evil resembles it not less. Here, too, the great springs from the small. An evil thought, when once it has made its way into a poor soul, may become mighty enough to cast it into hell.”—Dräseke vom Reich Gottes,ii.238.[18]
To the question what the woman specially represents in the parable,Dräsekeanswers, “The grace of God.”—ii. 263.[19]
“Thus in different passages the lion is used as a figure of Satan, but also of Christ; the serpent as a figure of the enemy, but also of the wisdom needful to the apostles; birds as a figure of believing trustfulness, but also of the devil catching away the word.”—Langein loc.[20]
It is otherwise, of course, in those that are directly moral, as the Good Samaritan; they are not metaphors to be translated, but examples to be imitated.[21]
For the sake of its bearing on the divine authority of the Scriptures, and the questions that are agitated at the present time, I subjoin a similar example, extracted from a lecture which I contributed to the Exeter Hall series of 1860–61:—
“A very remarkable expression occurs in the Apocalypse (xvi.18) bearing on the work of preparing the earth for man, before man was made: ‘And there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great.’ There the advent of man, as an inhabitant of the earth, is formally given as an epoch after which great earthquakes did not occur. It is well known now that earthquakes must have rent this globe before the birth of man, which make all that have occurred since sink into insignificance; but how was John, the fisherman of Galilee, led to employ, eighteen hundred years ago, a phraseology which the researches of our own day have now for the first time shown to be philosophically exact? Speaking of this verse, and quoting it freely, John Bunyan (“Reign of Antichrist,”) says, ‘For the earthquake, it is said to besuch as never was, so mighty an earthquake and so great.’ He thought the phrase, ‘since men were upon the earth,’ was equivalent to ‘never:’ so he wrote and fell into the blunder. Who led John the Apostle safely past the mistake into which John Bunyan fell?”[22]
I have been informed by a British merchant who, under license from the government of India, conducts the pearl fishing in the Bay of Kuratchee, that the method pursued is to bring the shells to shore as they are brought up from the bottom of the sea until a considerable quantity has been accumulated, disposed in a series of small contiguous heaps, and that then the men stand round the heaps, open the shells, and search for the pearls. So much loss accrues from the dishonesty of the men and the facility of secreting a treasure that lies in such a small bulk, that the proprietor of the fishing has had under consideration a suggestion to sell the heaps of shells by auction to the natives, and permit them then to make the best of their bargain. Whether this method of preventing peculation has been actually adopted, I have not learned.
Our own Scottish rivers are frequented by a large bivalve mollusc, which produces true pearls, although their size and number have never been sufficient to attract capitalists or sustain a steady trade. I do not know how others operate in other localities, but here is a method which I either invented for myself or borrowed from a neighbour, and practised with considerable success on the river Earn in Perthshire when I was a boy:—Provide a long straight rod, thin and broad and rounded at the point after the manner of a paper-cutter. Jump into a light fishing-boat, and bring it right over the oyster bed when the sun shines brightly and no ripple disturbs the surface of the water. Bring the boat into such a position with respect to the sun that your own body, bending over the gunwale, will throw a shadow on the immediately subjacent surface. Through that shaded spot you see the bottom with great distinctness, and can distinguish there the objects of your search lying invitingly still, and open, and unconscious. The depth may be from six to twelve feet. The molluscs lie bedded in the mud, with one edge above the ground, and that edge slightly open. Push your rod now gently down in a perpendicular direction,—for if you permit an angle the different degrees of refraction in the air and water will make your straight rod crooked, and you will egregiously miss your object at every stroke,—until its point is within an inch or two of the opening between the shells of the mollusc, and then quickly plunge it in. Hold it still there for a few seconds until the creature has time to close and bite the rod, you may then pull it up at your leisure. Throw your capture into the bottom of the boat, and proceed in the same manner with the next. When you have collected a sufficient store, sit down and open them one by one with a knife, feeling carefully with your thumbs for the little hard round knots among the velvet folds. These knots, when extricated from the fleshy lobes that cover them, turn out to be pearls, in form more or less globular, and in sheen more or less bright. You rejoice more or less, accordingly, in your capture. The day on which a good pearl was found became a day to be remembered in the family group. The price of the finest never rose above a shilling or two; but as riches are relative, and must be estimated by comparison, these were treasures to us, and the sight of a large bright pearl suddenly shining out of the shell was enough to set a boy’s heart a-beating in those early days.
During a drought in the summer of 1863 the small river Doon, in Ayr shire, fell so low that some pearl-beds in pools, that had not been noticed in other seasons, were exposed to view, and placed within reach: the consequence was that the people in the neighbourhood, old and young, betook themselves to pearl fishing, and that with considerable success. Among other facts circumstantially related in the local papers at the time, it was stated that one poor woman, during the sickness of her husband, gained as much by the sale of her pearls as made good the loss of her husband’s wages for a whole month. In the course of this summer (1864), and since the preceding notes were written, a considerable amount of pearl fishing has been carried on in certain rivers in the northern districts of Scotland, and efforts have been made to organize a regular trade.[23]
Although their place is not the highest now, yet pearls even in our own day are sometimes found of a value so great that the history of an individual is recorded and its praises published through the world. The following, for example, are the terms of a paragraph taken from a British journal of last year:—“One of the finest pearls in the world has been found in the bay of Panama. It is of a perfect pear shape, and of the finest water.”[24]
Das ist Philippus element,Er übt sein Predigtamt,Lebendig wird das Pergament,Des Mohrenfürsten Herze brennt,Sein dunkles Auge flammt.Denn was er im JuwelenschreinKandaces nimmer sah,Die eine Perle, himmlischreinDie köstlicher als Edelstein,Er fand am Weg sie da.Kari Gerok.[25]
Das ist Philippus element,Er übt sein Predigtamt,Lebendig wird das Pergament,Des Mohrenfürsten Herze brennt,Sein dunkles Auge flammt.
Denn was er im JuwelenschreinKandaces nimmer sah,Die eine Perle, himmlischreinDie köstlicher als Edelstein,Er fand am Weg sie da.
Kari Gerok.[25]
“They [this and the parable of the tares] convey, too, the same further lesson, that this fact [the actual intermixture of evil in the visible Church] does not justify self-willed departure from the fellowship of the Church, and impatient leaping over or breaking through the nets, as here it has often been called; but the Lord’s separation is patiently to be waited for, which shall surely arrive at the end of the present age.”—Dr. Trench, Notes on the Parables,p. 133. This is a style far too loose for a critical exposition of Scripture. If the actual presence of tolerated impurity within the Church does not justify a “self-willed” departure from her communion, does it justify a departure that is not self-willed, but a solemn separation in order to carry out the will of the Lord? The assumption that the separation of the English Nonconformists was “self-willed,” of course begs the whole question.[26]
While Stier and Trench seem to start with the same principle of interpretation on this subject, they are led ultimately to opposite practical results. Trench, as we have seen, gathers from the parable that the pure, or those who consider themselves pure, are not justified in leaping out of the net at their own pleasure; that is, the Nonconformists should not go and constitute conventicles beyond the pale of the Establishment. Stier, on the contrary, represents the evil as endeavouring to break out of the net, but unable to accomplish their purpose: “Many a leviathan is caught, and although he would fain get out, yet cannot break the net.”—Stierin loc.[27]
The argument on this point is well stated by Limburg Brouwer. His conclusion is: “Accedit quodπρομυθιονillud, (ὡμοιωθη ἡ Βασιλεια, κ.τ.λ.) saepe ita comparatum est, ut proprie non conferendum sit cum solo illo subjecto, quocum ab auctore connectatur, sed potius cum universa re narrata.”—De Parabolis Jesu Christi, 153.[28]
Arndtcloses his exposition of this parable with a hymn, which I subjoin, not only for the sake of the doctrinal statement regarding the ground of a sinner’s hope contained in the first verse, but also, and still more, for the union of simplicity and solemnity in the conception of future punishment contained in the second:—
Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit,Das ist mein Schmuck und Ehrenkleid;Damit will ich vor Gott besteh’nUnd zu der Himmelsfreud’ eingeh’n.Hilf, Gott, dass yeder kommen mag,Wo tausend Yahr’ ist wie ein Tag:Vor dem Ort uns, O Gott, bewahr’,Wo ein Tag ist wie tausend Yahr’!
Christi Blut und Gerechtigkeit,Das ist mein Schmuck und Ehrenkleid;Damit will ich vor Gott besteh’nUnd zu der Himmelsfreud’ eingeh’n.
Hilf, Gott, dass yeder kommen mag,Wo tausend Yahr’ ist wie ein Tag:Vor dem Ort uns, O Gott, bewahr’,Wo ein Tag ist wie tausend Yahr’!
Christ’s blood and righteousnessShall be the marriage-dress,In which I’ll standAt God’s right handForgiven,And enter restAmong the blestIn heaven.Help, Lord, that we may comeTo thy saints’ happy home,Where a thousand yearsAs one day appears,Nor go,Where one day appearsAs a thousand yearsFor woe.
Christ’s blood and righteousnessShall be the marriage-dress,In which I’ll standAt God’s right handForgiven,And enter restAmong the blestIn heaven.
Help, Lord, that we may comeTo thy saints’ happy home,Where a thousand yearsAs one day appears,Nor go,Where one day appearsAs a thousand yearsFor woe.
Die am meisten geschont sind erweisen sich als die Schonungslosesten. Unter den Flügeln der Zärtlichkeit wird die Grausamkeit ausgebrütet.(Those who get most mercy give least; and cruelty is hatched under the wings of tenderness).—Dräseke vom Reich Gottes,ii.141.[30]
Dräsekeexpresses the same conception in his own peculiarly terse and antithetic way:—So gewiss kein Gottesreich ohne die Schulderlassung die wir empfangen; so gewiss kein Gottesreich ohne die Schulderlassung die wir leisten.(As certainly as there is no kingdom of God without the forgiveness which we receive, so certainly there is no kingdom of God without the forgiveness which we bestow.)—ii.147.[31]
Fred. Arndtputs the lesson warmly and well; his appeal is in substance this:—“A man without compassion has all against him, God and the world; and meets as many adversaries in judgment as he had associates in life. Woe to him who is arraigned in secret by the tears of the feeble and oppressed! The sighs which he has pressed out, the plaints which he has generated, cry up to heaven against him, and their echo clangs horrid from heaven down again upon the life of the loveless and revengeful.... And can we sleep in peace another hour, as long as there are men upon the earth with whom we live in unpeace and enmity? Cannot be written the happiness, the inward bliss of the peaceful and peace-making. Revenge, indeed, seems often sweet to men; but, oh, it is only sugared poison, only sweetened gall, and its after taste is bitter as hell. Forgiving, enduring love alone is sweet and blissful; it enjoys peace and the consciousness of God’s favour. By forgiving, it gives away and annihilates the injury. It treats the injurer as if he had not injured, and therefore feels no more the smart and sting that he had inflicted. Forgiveness is a shield from which all the fiery darts of the wicked one harmless rebound. Forgiveness brings heaven to earth, and heaven’s peace into the sinful heart. Forgiveness is the image of God, the forgiving Father, and an advancement of Christ’s kingdom in the world. Your unalterable duty is clear: as surely as we are Christians, men who have experienced great compassion, who see in every man a brother in Christ, and are going forward to God’s righteous judgment, so surely we must forgive. Of no commandment will the fulfilment be demanded of us with such stringency, no divine rule so strictly enforced as this, without the slightest exception to leave a loop-hole of hope to the transgressor. If we forgive not those who injure us, neither will our heavenly Father forgive us; and this would be the greatest calamity that could befall us in time and in eternity.”—Die vergebende Liebe; oder Gleichniss vom Schalksknecht.[32]
The name of a great trysting place for selling cattle and hiring men and women on the eastern outskirts of the city of Glasgow, where the two operations resemble each other too closely for the credit of our institutions or the safety of society.[33]
By law, wages for the work of the day must be paid the same evening (Deut. xxiv. 15).[34]
These two are thus united and distinguished byDräseke,—“Although the kingdom of God is God’s gift in the souls of men, yet without a worthiness in men it can neither begin nor continue, neither reveal nor develop itself. And again, although our worthiness is necessary, we nevertheless obtain the kingdom, not through the merit of works, but from the fulness of grace, yea, from that alone. In short, the kingdom demands workers; hirelings it disdains (das Reich verlangt Arbeiter; Söldlinge verschmäht es).... Thus it stands shut against the hireling, open to the worker. Not as though the kingdom needed thy labour. He who makes the winds his messengers and the flames his servants, can do without thy hand-work, O little man. Thy labour avails not; but that thou shouldest be a labourer, that thou shouldest have a mind for God, and through that mind shouldest elevate thy life into a free and joyful service of him—that avails.”—Vom Reich Gottes,ii.40, 42.
Remarkable is the construction of the chain by which this writer connects the poor unemployed men who were standing idle in the market-place with the ever-during, ever-increasing satisfaction of their souls in eternity.So verlangt das Reich Arbeiter, nicht Söldlinge. Es beruft die Arbeitlosen. Es stellt die Bernfenen an. Es beschäftigt die Angestelleten. Es übt die Beschäftigten. Es belohnt die Geübten. Es genügt den Belohnten. Und Gnüge währt ewig; wächst ewig.—ii.51.[35]
On the other hand the text,Luke xiii. 30, although precisely similar to this in form, distinguishes, as may be seen from the context, between those who are within and those who are without.[36]
While in some cases the application of the parable which the Lord himself makes at the moment is full and perspicuous, it is in other cases like the parables themselves, and doubtless for good reasons, short, sententious, and partially veiled. In some cases the subjoined doctrine must be read in the light of the parable itself ere it can be understood. “Majus vero et certius auxilium interpreti paratur in illis locis, in quibus ipse Jesus sensum parabolarum explicat, quod quidem modo luculentius, ut in orationibusMat. XIII.modo paucis tantum verbis fit. Saepe enim praemittitur vel subjungitur ab eo doctrina per parabolam prolata, quae tamen ipsa interdum paulo obscurius exprimitur, ita ut nisi per parabolam ipsam intelligi non possit.”—Schultze de par.86.[37]
In the transaction with the young man from which this parable remotely springs, an analogous expression is employed to indicate a chosen or choice disciple; “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast,”&c. (xix. 21.) The term “perfect” in that text seems to be entirely parallel with “chosen.” The meaning of both is determined by the main drift of the parable; and the meaning thus given accords with the analogy of faith.
Another remarkable confirmation of this exposition is found in the use of the same term,εκλεκτοι, inRev. xvii. 14. The word in that passage must have the same meaning that we have attributed to it in the parable. Two reasons, a supreme and subordinate, are given to account for the victory of the Lamb,—his own omnipotence, and the trustworthy character of the instruments whom he employs. “The Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful;”κλητοὶ καὶ ἐκλεκτοὶ καὶ πιστοί. If you understand here byἐκλεκτοὶ, chosen by God in the eternal covenant, the logical arrangement becomes obscure. It would be strange if, in enumerating the qualifications of soldiers, one should represent first that they were summoned to the warfare, next that they were chosen for that purpose before, and last that they were stanch in the battlefield. If this had been the meaning ofἐκλεκτοὶit must have stood first in order. The fact that it stands second suggests another explanation. Take it, in the sense which it readily assumes and frequently bears, and the order of the series becomes at once transparent. The soldiers were “called, and choice, and faithful.” They were enlisted in the cause, excellent in character, and found unflinching when the fight began.[38]
“He now constrains them, in the first parable, to declare their own guilt; and, in the second, to declare their own punishment; and as they had now decided to put Him to death, He describes to them, in the third parable, the consequences of their great violation of the covenant and ingratitude,—the destruction of their ancient priesthood, and the triumphant establishment of his new kingdom of heaven among the Gentiles.”—Langein loc.[39]
At an earlier stage of the same interview, when a question regarding the ministry of the Baptist was addressed to them, fearing the consequences which an answer might involve, they had sought shelter under the plea of ignorance. As they gained nothing by their duplicity on that occasion, they may have been unwilling to try the same policy again; and, accordingly, they give frankly the obvious answers to the questions that resulted both from this and the succeeding parable.[40]
What wise one of this world,—what human reason would have conceived, under the cross, that this man suspended between two malefactors, and despised by all, would one day receive the worship of the whole world? This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.—Heubner in Lange.[41]
The expression is chosen with reference to the mysterious stone inDaniel ii. 34, 35, which grinds to powder the image of the monarchies; that is, to Christ who unfolds his life in the kingdom of God and grinds the kingdom of this world to powder.—Lange.[42]
No. XXI.of this series.[43]
I have witnessed a process closely analogous, in a small detached island of the Shetland group in which the message sent was an invitation, not figurative but literal, to come and hear the word of the kingdom. It had been previously intimated to the islanders that a minister of the Gospel from the south would preach to them on the occasion of his visit to the neighbouring mainland, as the largest island of the group is styled. When the minister and his friends succeeded at length in crossing the Channel, several children were dispatched as messengers in different directions to inform the people that public worship would immediately begin. In a very short time a congregation was assembled consisting of the whole population of the island.[44]
A melancholy interest adheres to the contrast between man’s heedlessness of God as expressed in this parable,ἀμελήσαντες, made light of it, did not care for it; and God’s regard for men as expressed in1 Peter v. 7,αὐτῷ μέλεὶ περι ὑμων, he careth for you.[45]
These three different methods of treating the message were all exhibited simultaneously at Athens when Paul preached there: “Some mocked, others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.... Howbeit, certain men clave unto him and believed” (Acts xvii. 32–34).[46]
“It should be assumed that the guests were not instantly hurried into the festal hall, but that an opportunity was afforded to them of changing their dress. This, however, is not expressly asserted in the narrative, but may be gathered from the termεφιμωθη(he was speechless) inver. 12; and must be understood on this account also, that, otherwise the sentence inver. 13would stand exposed to the charge of injustice.”—Storr, de parabolis Christi,p. 113.[47]
A custom connected with funerals, which prevails in some districts of England, if not in all, approaches closely in some of its essential features to that which occupies the most conspicuous place in this parable. A scarf of black silk, large, conspicuous, and expensive, yet constituting no part of the proper garments of the wearer, is given by the person who invites, and worn by every one who accepts the invitation. A single person without the badge in the procession would be instantly detected, and the omission would, in the circumstances, be taken as proof of disrespect.[48]
I do not attach much value to the question which has been much canvassed here, whether the wedding garment specifically signifies Faith or Charity,—whether it points to what the saved get from God, or what they do in his service. To wear the garment at the feast means that the wearer takes God’s way of salvation and not his own; to want it, means that the wanter takes his own way of salvation and not God’s. This is the conclusion of the whole matter. If you suppose that the garment means evangelical obedience, you must assume that faith in Christ is the root on which obedience grows; if, on the other hand, you suppose that the garment means faith in Christ, you must assume that it is a living not a dead faith,—a faith that will work by love and overcome the world.[49]
The closest analogue that I know of the fact which plays so great a part in the structure of this scriptural lesson may be found in a custom which prevails at funerals in the rural districts of Scotland. When the distance between the house of the deceased and the cemetery is considerable, a common, perhaps I should say a uniform, practice is, that those friends of the mourning family who reside in the neighbourhood of the burying place assemble in a group at a convenient turning of the road, and wait till the funeral procession reaches the spot; they then silently fall into their places and follow the corpse to the grave. I like the analogy none the less that it is taken, not from a time of mirth, but from a time of weeping. The two cases coincide in all their features except one. In either example we have an occasion of absorbing interest to one family, and the sympathy of neighbours expressed by means of large assemblies and public processions. In a minor but characteristic feature there is an exact coincidence,—a portion of the sympathizing neighbours wait for the main body at a point on the path and fall into the line of march from that spot to the terminus. That the one is a joyful and the other a mournful group enhances rather than diminishes the value of the comparison.[50]
Lange’s view on this point seems sound and consistent; while both Olshausen and Stier endeavour with much pain but little fruit, to prove that the foolish represent true but defective disciples. “One part of the Church is living, while the other lives onlyinappearance, because it lives onlytoappearance.”—Lange.[51]
They turn themselves to the wise, whom, perhaps, they had lately laughed at, with the prayer: “Give us of your oil, for our lamps are gone out.” They betake themselves, if they are Catholics, to the dead saints, if they are Protestants, to the living, whom they have been accustomed to revere as their guides on account of their wisdom and grace, and plead, Help us, comfort us, pray for us, that we may be brought into a state of grace. In vain. They answer: Not so, lest there be not enough for us and you. What you desire is impossible. None of us has any surplus merit out of which he could give a portion to another.—Arndt,ii.177.[52]
The concluding application is well expressed byArndt:—“Perhaps the breaking heart grasps at the Bible; it has only spikes and nails, but no balm of consolation. Perhaps the dying man calls in those who have the care of souls; the words of comfort slide over the ears, while the Holy Spirit seals none of them upon the heart. Perhaps he partakes of the Holy Supper: ah, the feast is to him not a feast of blessings, but an eating of judgment. Perhaps he prays to the Lord himself: the Lord answers, I know you not.
“Oh, it is sad to be so near heaven, and yet to be lost—to be almost saved, and yet altogether lost. Were it not the Lord who speaks here, Jesus Christ, the Life Eternal, the Judge of the living and the dead, our feeling would be mightily to resist the terrible conclusion of this parable, which cuts all and every hope clean away, and leaves not an If or a But behind, nor any other possible interpretation. But he speaks; and before his words every mouth is silent in fear and adoration. He writes into our breast, with a glowing iron pen, the warning word—therefore watch,&c.
“Short is life; fleeting is time; quick is death; long is eternity. Therefore what thou desirest to do, do it quickly.”—Gleichnisse.[53]
For the relation between the talents and the pounds, see the exposition of the latter parable,—the last of the series.[54]
Dr. Trench takes for granted, without a word of proof, or any evidence that he has even considered the question, that the reaping is the consummation of all things, the exclusive prerogative of the Lord.[55]
Bengel’s suggestion is ingenious and interesting, but contributes nothing towards the solution. “Sermo concisus. Mittet falce preditos, namαποστελλεσθαιest viventis cujuspiam.” He would understand the phrase “he putteth in the sickle” as a curt form of expression, intended to intimate that he sends out reapers with sickles to reap the grain; fortifying his opinion by the remark that the term “putteth in,” (αποστελλει, “sends out,”) refers to a living person, and not an inanimate instrument. Countenance for this view might be found inMatt. ix. 37whereεκβαλεινequivalent toαποστελλεσθαιis employed to indicate the sending forth of reapers. On the other hand, however, the passage,Rev. xiv. 15, 16, goes decidedly against it; for there bothπεμμτεινandβαλλειν, “thrust in” (the sickle) are certainly applied to the instrument itself, and not to the men who wield it.[56]
Here, as in the case of the tares, the sleep of the husbandman implies no culpable negligence either in the natural or spiritual sphere. “Sind wir am Tage recht wach; dann, mögen wir Nachts ruhig schlafen.”—Dräseke, vom ReichG.[57]
Like the seed, is the Word himself. He became flesh and dwelt among us; but he has ascended out of our sight. At the beginning he came into the world; and at the close he will return;—a spring and a harvest, but all the space between, he is out of sight.[58]
“She was forgiven much; therefore she loved much. As soon as she had learned that Jesus was at table in Simon the Pharisee’s house, her heart drew her thither to him, that she might offer him the expression of her gratitude and love,—of her adoration and her joy. She took with her a phial of ointment, the costliest that she possessed, found an entrance into the Pharisee’s house, and walked behind backs to the feet of Jesus, as he reclined at table on an elevated cushion. Arrived there, she is incapable of accomplishing her purpose. The thought of the greatness of her sin, and the greatness of the compassion of Jesus, broke her heart. She wept, and so unwittingly wet the feet of Jesus with her tears. Oh, salt, salutary tears! They are tears at once of repentance and gratitude. Now, she must first dry the Lord’s feet again. But for this she had not prepared herself; for this she had nothing but her hair. So she wiped them with her hair; and kissed the feet of Jesus, and then anointed them with ointment. All this was the manifestation of her inward burning love to the Lord.”—Arndt, ii, 85, 86.[59]
The dilemma is well put by Dr. Trench.[60]
“How eagerly would the critics seize on this passage, and pronounce the question of a certain lawyer to be identical with the narrative contained inMatt. xix. 16, only differently reported—if St. Luke had not himself subsequently narrated that second incident (xviii. 18)! This once more shows that many things could naturally, and would necessarily, occur more than once in the life of Jesus.”—Stier.[61]
The analogy between the meetings exhibited in this parable and the meeting of Philip with the Ethiopian (Acts viii.) is interesting and instructive. In both cases the place is a desert, in both a man in great need and a man who has the means of supplying that need meet each other there. Here the want and its supply are material and temporal, there they are moral and spiritual. The man who fell among thieves on the way to Jericho suffered from bodily wounds, and the Samaritan who came to his relief appropriately applied material remedies: the Ethiopian treasurer, in that way towards Gaza which is desert, suffered in his soul, and the name of Christ was the ointment which Philip the evangelist poured into his wound. These two cases are indeed diverse, but as we learn from the Scriptures throughout, they proceed, both as to disease and cure, upon analogous principles, so that the knowledge of the one throws light upon the meaning of the other. The meeting in the desert near Gaza did not happen by chance, it was a tryst duly made and exactly kept, for “the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise and go toward the south,”&c. (Acts viii. 26). The appointment for the meetings in the valley between Jerusalem and Jericho was as certainly made, although it has not been as expressly recorded.[62]
In the case of the ten lepers (Luke xvii. 16), which is not a parable, but a history, we learn that the one who experienced and expressed gratitude to God for his recovery was a Samaritan. Whether their low and despised condition had been to some extent blessed in making them more humble and receptive than their Jewish neighbours, we do not know; but, in point of fact, in the historical incident a Samaritan was more ready than the Jew to give praise to God; and in the construction of the parable a Samaritan is represented as also more beneficent to men.
In connection with this case a striking example may be seen of the divine impartiality of the Scriptures. Some persons, with a view to objects of their own, take pleasure in representing ministers of religion as more self-seeking and less generous than those who make no religious profession. The contrast between the Levite and the Samaritan, if this case stood alone, might seem to support their theory. But there is no respect of persons or classes with God; you may learn from the Scriptures—and that, too, from the writings of the same apostle—that the Samaritans were not all kind, and the Levites not all hard-hearted. They were Samaritans (Luke ix. 53) who would not permit Jesus and his disciples, when they were weary, to pass the night in their village; and he was a Levite (Acts iv. 36) who was named Son of Consolation, and sold his property that he might distribute the proceeds among the poor.[63]
The Samaritan was riding; for he set the wounded man “on his own beast.” What of the priest and the Levite?—were they riding, or performing the journey on foot? If they were both pedestrians, while the Samaritan had a mule or an ass, it is obvious that the two parties were not on equal terms, and that consequently no fair test of their benevolence could in that transaction be obtained. On that very ground I think it is certain that they were riding as well as he. The parable is not a history, containing the simple facts of any given case, without respect to the lessons which the facts may contain; it is a picture, constructed according to its Author’s mind, and constructed for the purpose of expressing a particular lesson which the Author already had in his mind, and desired to teach. The doctrine which the Teacher intended to declare obviously requires that the two parties whose compassion is compared and contrasted should be on equal terms. The lesson which he meant to convey would slip through and be lost, like water through a leaky vessel, if the priest and Levite were walking when they found the wounded man: we must, therefore, if we would not do violence to the parable, assume that both were mounted. With this conclusion, resulting from the nature of the case, the expressions in their minutest details correspond. The journey of the priest is narrated in the same terms as that of the Samaritan: “A certain priest came down that way,” and “A certain Samaritan as he journeyed came where he was:” we never learn that the Samaritan had a beast of burden until he sets the half-dead traveller upon its back. There was no occasion for mentioning the priest’s mule, for he made no special or remarkable use of it.[64]
Dräsekehas happily expressed the conception that to love is truly to live: “Wir finden hier demnach die Lehre: Willst du leben, liebe.”—Vom ReichG.,ii.130.[65]
“If the robbers had seized the Samaritan before he was able to accomplish his design, his work would have been accomplished in the sight of God;—and if the priest and Levite had given help on account of approaching spectators, it would have been of no value.”—Stier.[66]
This seems, however, not to have been the first occasion on which he gave “The Lord’s Prayer” to the disciples; it is embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, which belongs to an earlier date. The learners were defective both in understanding and memory; and the Master gave them “line upon line.”[67]
Der Heiland—the Healer—is the ordinary epithet applied to the Lord Jesus in the religious phraseology of the Germans. The term is suggestive and comforting.[68]
In the valley of the Rhine where the vine is cultivated as the material of a great manufacture, and the staple of a foreign trade, fruit trees of other species are not admitted within the vineyard; but at Botzen in the Tyrol, where the habits of society are more simple and primitive, I have repeatedly seen fig-trees growing within the lofty wall of the carefully cultured vineyard, rewarding the possessor for his care with abundant fruit.[69]
I cannot see any force in the argument by which Stier endeavours to show that the interceding vine-dresser represents primarily the human ministry in the Church.[70]
I do not set much value on the elaborate and minute discussions which some expositors have raised regarding the distinct and specific significance of the several excuses. It is enough for me that they point to the possessions and the pleasures of life,—the possessions being distinguished into two kinds, the field and oxen, corresponding to the farm and the merchandise of the cognate parable.[71]
While the evidence that the main division is twofold, not threefold, lies chiefly in the nature of the several representations, the minute formulae by which the transitions of the narrative are effected, point in the same direction. The parable of the lost sheep is introduced by the phrase, “And he spake this parable,” (ειπε δε την παραβολην), and that of the prodigal by the corresponding, “And he said,” (ειπε δε). These two are thus balanced over against each other; but the only link between the lost sheep and the lost silver is, Either (η), indicating that the second does not introduce a new subject, but gives another illustration of that which was already expressed in the first.[72]
Bengel, in his usual pointed way, expresses the specific varieties which characterize the three successive views of men’s sin, as stupidity, want of self-consciousness, and the positive choice of evil by an intelligent but depraved being. “Ovis, drachma, filius perditus: peccator stupidus, sui plane nescius, sciens et voluntarius.”[73]
It is interesting to notice that the same twin doctrines which the Master here exhibited in parables were afterwards taught in the same relation by his servants. Take two examples, one a brief bold allegory, and the other an autobiographic fragment, both from the fervent heart and through the fruitful pen of the apostle Paul. (1.) “Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his; and, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity” (2 Tim. ii. 19). The engraving on the upper side of this seal represents God’s part in a sinner’s salvation, and corresponds to the shepherd’s generous act; the engraving on its under side represents man’s part, and corresponds to the repenting and returning of the prodigal. (2.) “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect; but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus” (Phil. iii. 12). The obscurity which adheres to the sentence as it stands in the English Bible is removed when, instead of “that for which,” you substitute the more direct and literal rendering, “for that,” meaning “because” or “inasmuch as.” The sentence should be read, “I follow after, if that I may (if so be that I may) apprehend, inasmuch as I also have been apprehended by, Christ Jesus,” (διωκω δε ει και καταλαβω, εφ ᾧ και κατεληφθην ὑπο του Χρίστοι Ιησου). The apostle intends to state two connected facts; and to intimate that the one is the cause of the other. He is striving to grasp the Saviour; and what impels or encourages him to make the effort? His own experience that his Saviour has already in sovereign love laid hold of him. Christ has already come to this sinful man, in loving saving power, as the good shepherd came to the lost sheep; therefore the sinful man will arise and go to the Father like the repenting prodigal. The consciousness that like the lost sheep he has been grasped in the Redeemer’s arms does not induce him to abstain from effort as unnecessary; on the contrary, by inspiring hope, it nerves his arm and spurs him on. Because he feels that the Shepherd is bearing him, therefore he will arise and go.[74]
In the nature of the case a great and incurable defect adheres to the method of employing a hired servant to keep a flock of sheep, without giving him a material interest in the prosperity of his charge. Such is the nature of the occupation, and such its sphere, that the servant is necessarily far and long removed from the master’s inspection, and if suspicion should arise, proof of unfaithfulness could hardly be brought home to the accused. It is the interest of the owner to contrive some method of linking the profit of the shepherd to the prosperity of the flock. It was by attempting to accomplish this object by a defective plan, that Laban afforded to Jacob the opportunity of prosecuting his subtle policy. While conversing lately with some shepherds on the Scottish Cheviots, I learned that masters and servants in that district arrange the matter easily to their mutual profit and satisfaction. The wages of the shepherd are not paid in money; a certain number of the sheep, between forty and fifty according to circumstances, are his own property, and their produce constitutes his hire. Thus his own interest is an ever present motive pressing the man to do his best for the flock, and so to do his best for the master.[75]
“Should not that great and glorious Shepherd, whose millions of bright sheep fill the universe, leave these millions in order to seek the slightest, poorest, most infirm of those who need his care, and without that care would utterly perish; does not his boundless love require him to go after it?” Stier, after quoting this sentence in reference to the parable from Kurz,Bibel und Astronomie, remarks, “This is a thought quite permissible in itself, but as an exposition of what Eternal Wisdom has spoken, it is not valid.” Here, however, the learned critic has incorrectly apprehended the state of the question. A secondary relation is as real in its own place as a primary. It is quite true that the parable, under the picture of the one sheep that strayed and the ninety-nine that remained on the pasture, points directly and immediately to two distinct classes of human kind; but it brings up as legitimately, although more remotely, the distinction, governed by the same principle, which has in God’s universal sovereignty been made between the human race on the one hand, and angelic spirits on the other. One expositor may legitimately confine his view to the more immediate and narrower sphere; but another may as legitimately take a wider range, provided he make and mark the necessary distinctions as he proceeds; as one inquirer in physics may limit his speculation to the solid body of this globe, while another, under the same general designation, may, with perfect logical exactness, include also the atmosphere that surrounds it.[76]
You may measure a square surface and find it to contain so many feet of superficial area: suppose you discover afterwards that it has depth as well as length and breadth; to take in also this new measurement does not diminish the old. If we discover that, for his own sake, the Redeemer accomplished his saving work, it was not on that account less for our sakes.[77]
“In the centre of all lies the profound thought, that in God and Christ love is one with self-interest, and self-interest one with love; no such contrariety existing between them as is found in the case of man.”—Stier, Words of the Lord.[78]
Made or adopted by Dr. Trench.[79]
Recognising in the lost coin mainly a repetition of the same lesson which the lost sheep contained, but justly anticipating from the mere fact of a repetition, that the second will present some features which were not contained in the first, Dr. Trench finds the expected difference in this,—that “if the shepherd in the last parable was Christ, the woman in this may, perhaps, be the Church.” After suggesting as an alternative that the woman may represent the Holy Spirit, he remarks that these two are in effect substantially identical, and finally rests in the conclusion that it is “the Church because and in so far as it is dwelt in by the Spirit, which appears as the woman seeking her lost.” This able expositor speaks with evident hesitation when he represents the Church as the seeker here; and accordingly we find him with a happy inconsistency affirming in a subsequent paragraph that “as the woman, having lost her drachm, will light a candle and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it, even so the Lord, through the ministrations of his Church, gives diligence to recover the lost sinner,”&c. I am willing to accept the phraseology of this sentence, but it is obviously at variance with the view which he had previously presented, and to which he recurs in the close, that in this parable it is the Church which seeks the lost, while in the preceding parable it is the Saviour. Further, if he maintain that the woman seeking the lost coin represents the Lord seeking sinners through the ministrations of the Church, he must also maintain that the shepherd seeking the lost sheep represents the Lord seeking sinners through the ministrations of the Church. If the Lord himself is in both cases equally the seeker, there is no reason in the text of Scripture, and Dr. Trench suggests none from any other quarter, why he should be represented as seeking through the ministrations of the Church in one case and not in the other. The letter of the word and the nature of the case peremptorily demand that the qualification regarding the instrumentality of the Church should be attached to both or to neither. In either case it remains that, in respect to the person who seeks the lost, these two parables teach precisely the same lesson.
The house in which the coin is lost means, according to Dr. Trench, the visible Church: the result is that the Church (invisible) searches in the Church (visible) for sinners that have been lost there, and restores them when found to the Church, but whether the visible or invisible I cannot discover. The Church then calls upon the angels to rejoice with her over the recovery of the lost. This exposition seems confused and inconsistent; and it is a dim mysterious conception of “the Church” that constitutes the disturbing element.[80]
Nor do I see any force in the minute criticism by which Dr. Trench endeavours to make out that while the sheep were the shepherd’s property, the money did not belong to the woman. He says, “I have found my sheep which was lost;” while she says, “I have found the piece which I had lost;” but these are nothing more than varieties of expression. The absolute identity of the terms in which the two cases are introduced, proves that these seemly and slight variations of phraseology at the close, do not indicate a substantial difference. “What man of you having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them?” and “What woman, having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece?”—these questions, so carefully and completely parallel, conclusively show that, after making allowance for the necessary difference in the nature of the subjects, the two cases, in relation to possession, loss, and finding, are precisely the same.[81]
A curious illustration of the bondage to which an indurated Erastianism has reduced many of the Protestant Churches of the Continent, is incidentally afforded in a remark made by Stier regarding the peculiar fulness and preciousness of this parable:—“That this parable, which Lange beautifully terms a gospel within a gospel, this universal text for preaching about the lost and recovered sons of our heavenly Father (and the hopelessly lost first-born to the rich possessions of the house), should be wanting in the pericopæ of the Sunday Kalendar, is an omission which is utterly unjustifiable on any ground whatever, which is not compensated by the insertion of the previous similitudes, and which of itself is ample reason for that reformation of the Kalendar which Palmer desires.”—Words of the Lord Jesus, in loc. The successors of Luther must, it seems, tread the mill from year to year on the same limited curriculum of texts which their Kalendar contains; and those of them who are weary of the restraint long in vain for an opportunity to preach on such a subject as the prodigal, for it is not set down in the bond. That Church surely is greatly defective both in godliness and manliness, that cannot or will not throw open all the Word of God alike, at all times, to its ministers and congregations in their Sabbath solemnities.[82]
The paraphrase of this Scripture, in a selection employed in most of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, stumbles at this point, and misses the meaning of the text. Overlooking the mighty step of progress which the prodigal had made between the time when hisaccumulatingconvictions turned the balance first in favour of repentance, and the time when the last fragment of distrust melted away in the flood of a full reconciliation, the hymn represents the son as still pleading specifically to be sent away into the place of a servant, after the embrace, and the kiss, and the tears of his father had bestowed and triply sealed his sonship.
“He ran and fell upon his neck,Embraced and kissed his son:The grieving prodigal bewailedThe follies he had done.”“No more, my father, can I hopeTo find paternal grace;My utmost wish is to obtainA servant’s humble place.”
“He ran and fell upon his neck,Embraced and kissed his son:The grieving prodigal bewailedThe follies he had done.”
“No more, my father, can I hopeTo find paternal grace;My utmost wish is to obtainA servant’s humble place.”
No; after the meeting the youth did indeed say that he was not worthy to be called a son, but he did not say he had abandoned the hope or the desire of being reinstated. Yet, notwithstanding this and other errors that have crept into the collection, and the superior character of many that are excluded from it, no vigorous effort has been made to obtain a revision in order to exclude the faulty and introduce better in their stead. Conservative inertia—an instinct to keep unchanged what has descended to us from our fathers—is a great and curious power in human nature, operating both on Church and State. Although not creditable to the wisdom and courage of men, it is doubtless overruled for good by the providence of God.[83]
Stier’s observations on this point are excellent:—“The well-meaning efforts which are made to explain the absence of reference to the mediatingpropitiationof the Son of God in this instant exhibition of theFather’s mercy, are altogether needless; they rest fundamentally on false dogmatic views of this propitiation, as if there were not existing in the Father’s being the same love which is expressed in the Son,—as if the Father needed abstractly to be propitiated in order to entertain this love! We are not to seekChrist himselfas mediator in the person of this father; nor (though Melancthon has strangely ventured to affirm it), afterwards in the fatted calf, as sacrificially slain.Hisplace here is rather to be sought in his thus authoritatively testifying of the Father’s mercy. As Nitzsch excellently says:—‘If he seems to conceal himself here, he is all the more manifest there, where the Shepherd seeks the lost sheep. FortheSon—who is neither an elder nor ayounger, theeternalSon of the Father, one with him, his eye and his heart towards the lost—is come into this world, although invisible and unnamed in the parable, to reveal the Father where he had been ever invisible, and where no man knew him: and he is to the children of the law and the curse, not only a living herald of the propitiable—we shall rather say of the already propitiated—Father, but the (that isour) propitiation itself, and the way whereby every one of us may come back to God.’ The mediation of Christ is no more denied by this silence than the seduction of Satan was denied in the sinner’s apostasy at the beginning of the parable. We may also say with Von Gerlach that the ‘coming out of the father to meet his son, here figuratively exhibits the sending of the Son.’”—Stier in loc.[84]
This law may be illustrated by ananalogousfact in the material department of creation. Lay a ball, such as a boy’s marble, on an extended sheet of thin paper, and the paper, though fixed at the edges and unsupported in the midst, will bear easily the weight: take now another ball of the same shape and weight, and let it drop upon the sheet of paper from a height, it will go sheer through. The two balls are of the same weight and figure; but the motion gave to one a momentum tenfold greater than that of the other at rest. It is in a similar way that the return of a lost son goes through a loving father’s heart, and makes all its affections thrill; while the continued possession of another son, equally valuable and equally valued, produces no such commotion either in the heart of the father or his home.[85]
A case came up lately in an English court of justice, in which a certain duke prosecuted his butler for malversation in his charge. It appeared in evidence that the defalcation on the account for wine alone amounted toL. 1500. This fact incidentally reveals two things:—How great is the wealth of these British princes; and how little that wealth is under their own control.[86]
Probably the rents were paid in kind, and these were the arrears which the tenants acknowledged.[87]
Of the same nature were the long leases of ecclesiastical property in England at low rents, granted by the living incumbents, in consideration of a sum of money in name of fine paid to themselves.[88]
A case emerged lately in the courts of this country, in which a proprietor, who had lost very large sums by the unfaithfulness of his agent, prosecuted the parties for restitution, on the ground of the agent’s bad faith in the transactions. The case was protracted, and I lost sight of it before the solution was reached; but it is enough for my present purpose that a plea was actually raised to obtain from one debtor the price of a hundred measures of oil instead of fifty, which he acknowledged, on the alleged ground that the absconded steward had corruptly and for his own interest sacrificed the rights of his employer.[89]
The Emperor Julian adduced this parable in order to prove that the doctrines of Christ were adverse to good morals. This is precisely the place where the apostate, seeking reasons to justify his apostasy, will most readily find what he seeks.[90]
For example, their competence and the comforts which it brings shield women of the higher and middle classes in this country, in a great measure, from certain snares of the devil in which multitudes of their poorer sisters miserably fall. If those who enjoy this protection throw away their advantage by turning that which is a protection on one side into a temptation on the other, and so bring themselves to an equality over all with the less favoured classes, the fault is their own. It is proved by obvious facts that worldly possessions may be placed between you and temptation, as cotton bales and sand bags may be employed to ward off cannon shot from stone walls. They are capable of being turned to some account in advancing our eternal interests; for our inheritance in heaven, the world is useful, if it is rightly used.[91]
From the introduction of a new subject abruptly in the 18th verse—the much agitated question regarding a man’s right to put away his wife—I think it probable that the interruption had been repeated and continued; that it took the form of a dialogue, the Pharisees throwing in what they considered a damaging question, and Jesus giving an answer by turns—a scene which is frequently repeated in modern missions among the heathen.[92]
Dr. Trench’s disquisition regarding the latent union between covetousness and prodigality, involving a proof that the discourse about the rich man was applicable to the Pharisees who were not of prodigal habits, although very good in itself, is scarcely relevant; inasmuch as it is not the parable of the rich man, but the reproofs intervening between it and the unjust steward that are expressly addressed to the Pharisees.[93]
It is true a figurative meaning has been applied to it, as to all the rest, both in ancient and modern times. In this case the lesson, when metaphorically rendered, possesses a remarkable measure of beauty, truth, and appropriateness. The rich man is the Jewish nation, by God’s gift rich in position and privilege, but selfishly keeping all to itself, despising and neglecting others. Lazarus represents the Gentiles, spiritually poor, naked, hungry, homeless, within reach of the privileged people, yet by them left destitute. Both die: the old dispensation runs out, and Jews and Gentiles are together launched into “the last times.” By apostolic messengers, the poor outcasts are now led unto the blessed privileges of the Gospel; these stones become children of Abraham; while the Jews, who enjoyed so good a portion in the former dispensation, are cast out. In this case, as in that of the Samaritan, it is easy so to turn the polished instrument in the light, that it shall throw off bright glimpses of great evangelic facts and doctrines. Perhaps the Lord, in constructing it, kept this capability in view; but we must take the parable as in the first instance and mainly a direct moral lesson, accounting its allegorical capabilities secondary, and to us uncertain.[94]
The name of the poor man is given, while the rich man is left nameless. Generally, Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, and, in particular, it does not imitate this world’s kingdoms in throwing the common people into anonymous heaps, and recording the names of only the great. I saw in an extension of the parish churchyard the graves of the two hundred men who perished in the pit accident at Hartley a few years ago. They were grouped in families of two, three, four, or five, and these family groups were arranged in extended rows; but all were nameless. Near them slept the dust of the hereditary owners of the soil under monumental marble, loaded with statuary and inscriptions. Subjects of Christ’s kingdom, “it shall not be so among you.” Nor is the law which obtains in the heavenly the direct reverse of that which obtains in the earthly kingdom; it is not the poor, but the “poor in spirit,” to whom the kingdom of heaven belongs. The names that are recorded in the Lamb’s book of life are neither those who have nor those who lack this world’s wealth, but those who are poor in spirit and rich in grace.[95]
There is a strong resemblance between this pair and the two sons who were severally asked by their father to work in his vineyard.—ParableX.[96]
This question has begun of late to attract a considerable measure of attention in the Presbyterian Churches of this country. It needs a wise treatment, and, alas! we lack wisdom. For convenience and order, all the members of a worshipping assembly ought evidently to adopt the same method; but this is not a matter for arbitrary ecclesiastical enactment. The Pharisee and the publican both stood while they prayed; but their prayers seem to have been short. To enact that the congregation must stand during prayer, and then to keep them praying for twenty minutes or half-an-hour, which is sometimes done, seems to be in effect turning prayer into penance.[97]
Σταθεις προς ἐαυτον, standing by himself, as if it wereκαθ’ ἐαυτον. Thus the relation is preserved with the position of the publican,μακροθεν ἐστως. Either stood alone, but for opposite reasons: the Pharisee stood forward alone, because he thought other worshippers were not fit to be in his company; the publican stood back alone, because he considered himself unworthy to mingle with other worshippers. It may be worth while to mention, for the sake of the English reader, the order of the words in the original is, “The Pharisee standing with himself, thus prayed.” You must be guided entirely by the sense in determining whether to read it, Standing with himself, thus prayed; or standing, with himself thus prayed.[98]
He obtained this self-confidence by comparing himself not with the law of God, but with others who seemed worse than himself. When a man compares himself with robbers and adulterers, for whom the sword and the prison are prepared, he may easily seem to himself like an angel.—Arndt.[99]
He brought with him, what the Pharisee left at home, the book of his own guilt, and exhibited all that stood against him there.—Arndt.[100]
The man who cannot perceive, or will not own that these are two distinct cases, charged with different, though cognate lessons, is not fit to be an expositor of any writing, either sacred or profane. Enough for the critics who persist in the theory, that these two parables are different, and consequently incorrect, reports of one discourse spoken only once by the Lord; the conceit is not worthy of more minute refutation.[101]
Herod and his son Archelaus had both in succession repaired personally to Rome to obtain their authority. Precisely similar scenes are enacted between the British government and the protected potentates of India; the agents for rival princes contend for regal rights in London, where the government of India is in the last resort controlled.[102]
It is altogether a mistake to conclude from the allusions made here and elsewhere in the Scriptures to the actually existing servitude of the times and places, that any modern system of slavery may claim the sanction of divine approval. It was the custom of Jesus to seize existing facts on the right and on the left as they lay around, and employ them as vehicles for conveying his meaning. Sometimes he so employed a good thing, and sometimes a bad thing, but by the mere fact of using a human act or habit as a metaphor, he pronounced no judgment regarding its moral character. It was enough for him that the thing was well known, and that it served as a letter with which he might indicate his mind. Printers make their types of any material that may be most suitable for the purpose, and most readily obtained; and with these types they multiply the Scriptures. They use a cheap mixture of lead and tin; and this base alloy serves their purpose better than more precious metals. Their only question in determining the choice of material is, Will it print our meaning clearly? Thus the Lord Jesus dealt with the habits which he found in society, and the events that were passing at the time. He selected and employed them with a regard not to their own intrinsic moral worth but to their fitness for expressing the idea which he meant to convey. No matter whether it be lead or gold; what he wanted was material suitable for types. A steward has no Scriptural warrant for cheating his master, because the trick of an astute agent is employed to print one of the parables; neither have men-stealers, men-sellers, and men-buyers any authority from the Bible to treat their fellow-men like cattle, because the relation of master and slave was employed by the Lord to express a conception in the course of his teaching.[103]
For fuller notice of the methods adopted, see the exposition of the corresponding parableNo. XIV.[104]