The Parables of Our Lord. William Arnot
have been brought to light by the gospel. The lessons of the Lord and his apostles teem with types. Almost every doctrine is given in duplicate: the spirit is provided with a body; a body clothes the spirit. Every fruitful vine has a strong elm to which it clings; every strong elm supports a fruitful vine.
One important use of analogy in moral teaching is to fix the lesson on the imagination and the memory, as you might moor a boat to a tree on the river’s brink to prevent it from gliding down during the night with the stream. A just analogy suggested at the moment serves to prevent the more ethereal spiritual conception from sliding out of its place.
In practical morals analogy is employed to surprise and so overcome an adverse will, rather than merely to help a feeble understanding. In this department most of the Lord’s parables lie. When a man is hardened by indulgence in his own sin, so that he cannot perceive the truth which condemns it, the lesson which would have been kept out, if it had approached in a straight line before his face, may be brought home effectually by a circuitous route in the form of a parable. When the conscience stands on its guard against conviction you may sometimes turn the flank of its defences unperceived, and make the culprit a captive ere he is aware. The Pharisees were frequently outwitted in this manner. With complacent self-righteousness they would stand on the outside of the crowd, and, from motives of curiosity, listen to the prophet of Nazareth as he told his stories to the people, until at a sudden turn they perceived that the graphic parable which pleased them so well, was the drawing of the bow that plunged the arrow deep in their own hearts.
A man may be so situated that though his life is in imminent danger, he cannot perceive the danger, and consequently makes no effort to escape. Further, his mind may be so prejudiced that he still counts the beam on which he stands secure, although a neighbour has faithfully given warning that it is about to fall; it may be that because he stands on it he cannot see its frailty. Let some friend who knows his danger, but wishes him well, approach the spot and hold a mirror in such a position that the infatuated man shall see reflected in it the under and ailing side of the beam that lies between him and the abyss. The work is done: the object is gained: the confident fool, made wise at length, leaps for life upon the solid ground.
Although the faculty of perceiving and understanding analogies is inherent in humanity, and consequently co-extensive with the race, it is developed in a higher degree in some persons and in some communities than in others. The common opinion, that the inhabitants of mountainous countries possess this faculty in a higher measure than the inhabitants of the plains, seems to be sustained by facts. Within the borders of our own island it is quite certain that the Scotch and the Welsh employ figures more readily and relish them more intensely than the English. How far the difference may be directly due to the physical configuration of the country cannot perhaps be accurately ascertained; but doubtless the mountains contribute indirectly to the result, by rendering access more difficult, and so producing a greater measure of isolation and simplicity.
It is an acknowledged and well-known fact, moreover, that the inhabitants of eastern countries are more prone to employ figurative language than the peoples of western Europe; but it is difficult to determine how far this characteristic is due to the meteorological and geographical features of the continent, and how far to hereditary peculiarities of race.
Looking merely to the physical features of their country, you might expect that the inhabitants of Palestine would possess in a high degree the faculty of suggesting and appreciating analogical conceptions; the peculiar history and jurisprudence of the people must have tended powerfully in the same direction. Accordingly, as might have been expected from the circumstances of the nation, it appears in point of fact on the whole face of the Scriptures, that as the institutes of the commonwealth were symbolical, the language of the people was figurative. They were at home in metaphor. It was their vernacular. The sudden and bold adoption of physical forms in order to convey spiritual conceptions, did not surprise—did not puzzle them. “Ye are the salt of the earth,” “Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together,” fell upon their ears, not as a foreign dialect, but as the accents of their native tongue.
It might easily be shown that no other characteristic connected with the form of the Scriptures could have done so much to facilitate their diffusion in all climes, and in all ages, as the analogical mould in which a large proportion of their conceptions is cast; but this is scarcely denied by any, and is easily comprehended by all. In another point of view, less obvious, and not so frequently noticed, the prevalence in the Scriptures of analogical forms, attaching spiritual doctrines to natural objects and historic facts, has served a good purpose in the evidences and exposition of revealed religion. The more abstract terms of a language are not so distinctly apprehended as the more concrete, and in the course of ages are more liable to change. The habit, universal among the writers of the Scriptures from the most ancient to the latest, of making abstract moral conceptions fast to pillars of natural objects and current facts, has contributed much to fix the doctrines like fossils for all time, and so to diminish the area of controversy. All the more steadily and safely has revealed truth come down from the earliest time to the present day, that it has in every part of its course run on two distinct but parallel tracks.
II.—PARABLES.
The parable is one of the many forms in which the innate analogy between the material and the moral may be, and has been practically applied.2 The difficulty of constructing a definition which should include every similitude that belongs to this class, and exclude all others, has been well appreciated by expositors and frankly confessed. The parables of the New Testament, after critics have done their utmost to generalize and classify, must in the end be accounted sui generis, and treated apart from all others. The etymology of the name affords us no help, for it is applied without discrimination to widely diverse forms of comparison; it indicates the juxtaposition of two thoughts or things, with the view of exhibiting and employing the analogy which may be found to subsist between them; but several other terms convey precisely the same meaning, and therefore it cannot supply us with the distinguishing characteristic of a class. As far as I have been able to observe, hardly anything has been gained at this point by the application of logical processes. The distinctions which have been successfully made are precisely those which are sufficiently obvious without a critical apparatus; and in regard to those comparisons which bear the closest affinity to the parable, and in which, on account of the rainbow-like blending of the boundaries, logical definitions are most needed, logical definitions have most signally failed. Scholars have, for example, successfully distinguished parables from myths and fables; but this is laboriously to erect a fence between two flocks that in their nature manifest no tendency to intermingle; whereas, from some other forms of analogy, such as the allegory, the parable cannot be separated by a definition expressed in general terms, which shall be at once universally applicable and universally understood.
Into all parables human motives and actions go as constituents, and in most of them the processes of nature are also interwoven. The element of human action is generally introduced in a historic form, as “a certain man had two sons;” but some of the similitudes of Scripture, which by general consent are reckoned parables, lack this feature, as for example, the Lost Sheep.3 “What man of you, having an hundred sheep?” For my own part, while there are some that, on the one hand, I can with confidence include, and some that, on the other, I must with equal confidence keep out, I see not a few lying ambiguous on the border. My judgment inclines to what seems a medium between two extremes—between the decision of some German philosophical expositors who are too critical, and the decision of some English practical preachers who are not critical enough. I would fain eschew, on the one hand, the laborious trifling by which it is proved that the parable of the Sower is not a parable; and, on the other hand, the unfortunate facility which admits into the number almost all similitudes indiscriminately. I shall adopt the list of Dr. Trench,4 thirty in number, as being on the whole a fair and convenient medium; although I could not undertake to demonstrate that these only, and these all possess the qualities which in his judgment go to constitute a parable. Some that are included can scarcely be distinguished by logical definitions from some that are excluded; but