>> 
 
 tibrar;^ of Che Cheolojical ^eminavjp 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 •a^j> 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John 3. V/iedlnp-er 
 
THE PARABLES AND THEIR 
 
 MAY 26 1948 
 ?/CAL 
 
 THE 
 
 PARABLES BY THE LAKE 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H> THOMSON, M.D., LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOIt OF MATERIA MFDIOA ANI) niBEASES OF TIIIC NRRVOTTS 
 SYSTEM, UNIVEIISITV MEDIOAI. OOLLKOK, N. Y. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 
 1895 
 
Copyright, 1895, by Hakper k Brothers 
 
 All rightt reserved. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The Home of tlie Parables is a land which 
 often affords striking commentaries of its own 
 upon their meaning. To the writer of this 
 volume, as the land of his hirth and residence 
 during youth, such aspects of the Parables 
 naturally would be quite familiar. This fact 
 accounts for the personal style adopted in the 
 composition of these pages, as affording the 
 simplest method in demonstrating the fre- 
 quent relations of the Parables to the scenes 
 and surroundings in which they were first 
 delivered. It was intended to dedicate this 
 volume to the writer's father, the Rev. Will- 
 iam McClure Thomson, D.D., author of " The 
 Land and the Book," a work widely known to 
 the religious public, but before it was com- 
 pleted he was called this year to his rest. 
 
 New York, 7 Fifty-Sixth St. West 
 December, 1894. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 THE SOWER 1 
 
 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY 43 
 
 THE TARES 49 
 
 THE DRAW-NET 73 
 
 THE MUSTARD-SEED 85 
 
 TIIE LEAVEN 101 
 
 THE HID TREASURE 117 
 
 THE PEARL 133 
 
 THE householder's TREASURE 145 
 
 CONCLUSION 151 
 
THE SOWER 
 
 Matt, xiii., 1-23. Mark iv., 1-25. Luke viii., 4-18. 
 
 Tlie same day went Jesus out of tlie Jiouse, and sat by 
 the sea-side. And great multitudes icere gathered together 
 unto Mm, so that he went into a ship, and sat ; and the 
 whole multitude stood on the shore. And he spake many 
 things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower 
 went forth to sow; And wh^n he sowed, some seeds fell by 
 tJie way-side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: 
 Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much 
 earth: and forthwith they sprung tip, because they had no 
 deepness of earth : And when the sun loas uj) [R. V. was 
 risen], they were scorched; and because they had no root, 
 they witliered away. And some fell among thorns ; and 
 the iJiorns sprung iip, and choked tliem : (Mark. Aiul 
 other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that spi'ang 
 up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and 
 some sixty, and some a hundred.) Who hath ears to hear, 
 let him hear. 
 
 And the disciples came, and said unto him. Why speak- 
 est thou unto them in parahlesl He answered and said 
 unto them, Because it is given unto you to know tlie mys- 
 teries of tlie kingdom of Jieaven, but to them it is not given. 
 For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall 
 have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him 
 shall be taken aroay even that he Imth. Therefore speak I 
 to them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and 
 1 
 
heariiuf, they hear not, neither do they uncle rata nd. And 
 unto the/a is fulfilled the propJiccy of Imiah, which saith. 
 
 By lieariiuj ye nhall fiear, and sJmll in no wise 
 understand ; 
 
 And seeing ye shall see, and shall in no zcise perceive : 
 
 For this j)eople's heart is waxed f/ross, 
 
 And their ears are dull of hearing, 
 
 And their eyes they have closed; 
 
 Lest Imply tli<]i s/i mi Id perceive with their eyes, 
 
 And hear irith their ears. 
 
 And understand with their heart, 
 
 And should turn again. 
 
 And I shoidd heal them, 
 (Mark. And witJi many such parables spake he the word 
 unto them, as they were able to hear it.) But blessed are 
 your eyes, for they see : and your ears, for they hear. For 
 verily I say unto you. That many prophets and righteous 
 men have desired to see those tilings wliieh ye see, and 
 luive not seen them, and to hear those things which ye 
 hear, and have not heard them. 
 
 Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower. When any 
 one henreth the word of the kingdom, and undcri^tandeth it 
 not, then cometh tlie wicked one, and catcluili aicay Had 
 ichich teas sown in his heart. This is he which received 
 seed by the icay-side. But he that received the seed into 
 itony 2il<ices, the same is he that heareth the word, and 
 anon with joy received it; Yet hath he not root in him- 
 self, but dureth for a while: for ichen tribulation or per- 
 secution ariseth because of the word, by and by [1{. V. 
 straight ir((y] he is offended. He also that received seed 
 among the thorns is he that heareth the word, and the 
 care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke 
 the word, and he becometh unfruitful. (Jlark. And the 
 cares of this world, and t/ie deceitfulness of riches, and the 
 lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it 
 becometh unfruitful.) (Luke. And that which fell 
 among thorns are they which, iclicn they have heard, go 
 forth, and are choked tcith cares and riches and pleasures 
 of this life, and bring no fruit to jxrfection.) But he 
 that received seed into tlie good ground is he that heareth 
 the word, and understandeth it ; which also beareth fruit, 
 and bringeth forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some 
 thirty. (Luke. But that on the goad grofind are they, 
 which in an honest and good heart, haci)ig heard the word, 
 keep it [ii. V. hold it /«*<], and bring forth fruit with 
 patience. ) 
 
THE SOWER 
 
 There is a form of deafness known to phy- 
 sicians in whicli the person affected is able to 
 hear everything except words. In such a case 
 the ear, as an apparatus for mere hearing, 
 may be so perfect that the tick of a watch or 
 the song of a bird is readily appreciated, but 
 owing to a local injury deeper than the ear, 
 for it is in the brain itself, all spoken words 
 of his mother- tongue are as unintelligible to 
 the sufferer as those of a foreign language. 
 Give him a book, and he may read as under- 
 standingly as ever, but every word addressed 
 to him through his ear reaches his conscious- 
 ness only as a sound, not as a word. 
 
 There is a moral deafness which corresj)onds 
 to this physical infirmity, but which, instead 
 of being rare, is as common as it is harmful 
 and disabling. To all men there is given an 
 inner ear, which has been fashioned to hear 
 wisdom's words, but that car often seems so 
 
4 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 dull of hearing that there appears no sign of 
 response to her utterances. Now it was just 
 such an unreceptive state of soul and of feel- 
 ing in the people which we are told led Jesus 
 to speak to them in parables. But we cannot 
 appreciate as we ought either the parables 
 themselves, or the kind wisdom which led 
 Jesus so to address that multitude by the lake, 
 unless we first reproduce as faithfully as we 
 can the human field on which the Teacher 
 ■worked. In all problems of life the study of 
 the subject of environment is not merely in- 
 structive, but is now recognized as an indis- 
 pensable requisite; and in no case is this bet- 
 ter illustrated than in the mental conditions 
 with which our Saviour had then to deal. 
 
 Of the many causes of moral deafness, there 
 was one which was especially operative in the 
 first hearers of the parables, and that is, the 
 interference of other ideas previously lodged 
 in their minds. How small, therefore, would 
 be the echo to the voice of spiritual truth in 
 those inner chambers whose walls were hung 
 thick with mistaken traditions, all embellished 
 with the decorations of Oriental imagination, 
 
THE SOWER 5 
 
 may be judged by the following considera- 
 tions : 
 
 First, the multitude gathered to hear the 
 " word of the kingdom " were already filled 
 with thoughts instilled from childhood about 
 the coming king. Any expected one must 
 by so much be an ideal, and men's ideals are 
 faithful reproductions of themselves in their 
 hopes and wishes. Human imagination has 
 no power to make pictures out of new ma- 
 terials, and hence every one of that Galilean 
 throng brought with him an old and clearly 
 defined picture of the promised Messiah, drawn 
 in every detail from Eastern life and manners. 
 The Messiah was to be a king, and to Orientals 
 a king, first of all, must be formidable. To 
 their minds he would not be a king at all if 
 he were not personally dangerous even to 
 friends. In the whole folk-lore of the East 
 the kingly idiom is ever recognizable by its 
 constant allusion to liis power of ready slay- 
 ing. Coupled with this would be a magnifi- 
 cence of state and of imposing retinue in 
 which, for variety and true picturesqueness, 
 the people of western Asia have excelled all 
 
C THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 otlier races. Neither Europeati monarchs nor 
 Chinese emperors, owing to defects in cos- 
 tume, have ever equalled the spectacular ef- 
 fects of royal processions among tlie Shemitic 
 peoples. A Jewish Solomon or an Arab Ha- 
 roun-al-Itaschid could ride arrayed and adorned 
 as no other mode of dress allows for both 
 grace and splendor, and at the same time for 
 suggesting the king's immeasurable elevation 
 above all other men. I have seen Arab dig- 
 nitaries riding, not at the head of, but, better, 
 surrounded by, a great cavalcade of attend- 
 ants, with scarcely two of them arrayed alike, 
 and yet without a single artistic incongruity 
 in the whole company to mar the effect or to 
 lessen the impression of the scene ; so much 
 does the Oriental dress allow of variety with 
 Iiarmony, both in form and color. We may be 
 sure, therefore, that of the thousands at the 
 lake that day, not one, from the rabbi to the 
 peasant, but hoped to live to hail the Messi- 
 ah's coming in just such outward fuliilment of 
 the prophetic psalm, " Gird thy sword upon 
 thy thigh, O Mighty One ! And in thy maj- 
 esty ride on prosperously " (Psalm xlv. 3, 4). 
 
THE SOWER 
 
 Hence came another conception inseparable 
 from such an ideaL A king and a warrior 
 are words anciently coupled everywhere, fa- 
 miliar enough in European literature itself of 
 but a century ago. But no nation could have 
 longed more naturally for a warrior king than 
 the Jews of that day. The heroic figure of 
 Judas Maccabseus rose to every mind as a 
 promise of the mightier Son of David coming 
 fitly against a mightier oppressor than Anti- 
 ochus. A greater than Caesar would be here. 
 Whose heart, indeed, would not burn, even 
 among ourselves now, at the thought of the 
 avenger of that one scene alone, though there 
 were many others like it, which but a few 
 years before was enacted by the proconsul 
 Yarns, when he crucified two thousand of its 
 chosen youths in groups at all the cross-roads 
 of the land as a demonstration of what Eome 
 was to them ? 
 
 The King, indeed, had come, but how could 
 he be recognized in him who was sitting in a 
 poor fisherman's boat? — he who was known as 
 a carpenter and the son of a carpenter, belong- 
 ing, therefore, to the poorest craft in a land 
 
8 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 where carpenters liave less to do than in any 
 settled country. This is not alone from the 
 scarcity and poor quality of its lumber, but 
 because in their stone houses the people Iiave 
 little need for carpenters except to make one 
 rough door and one or two windows. At this 
 day one maj' admire the elegant stone archi- 
 tecture of the houses of the rich in Syrian cit- 
 ies, and yet note in them the cheap rudeness 
 of all carpenter -work. But though his own 
 personality miglit not have been disappoint- 
 ing, the same could not be said of his body 
 attendants. Dress among Orientals is an im- 
 mediate and unmistakable mark of rank, and 
 even of intellectual grade. The scribe and 
 tlie rabbi had their full-dress, just as no one 
 now mistakes the dignified figure of the Mos- 
 lem nlem. But the chosen companions of 
 Jesus belonged to the only class in the coun- 
 try below dress, as they were so commonly 
 seen at their daily labor without it. It is one 
 of those conclusive incidental references which 
 stamp as genuine the last written words of 
 the New Testament,* where, though by that 
 * A chronological arrangement of the New Testament ac- 
 
THE SOWER 
 
 time Christians liad become tbroughont the 
 world, and according to Tacitus even in Rome 
 itself, "a vast multitude," and were found in 
 Caesar's palace, yet John does not shrink from 
 representing Peter, after the Ilesiirrection, re- 
 turning to do his work as of old, naked. (John 
 xxi. 7.) Neither was it repellent to the rich 
 alone that Jesus surrounded himself with pa- 
 riahs. The peasants of Palestine still have a 
 pride in the show of their superiors, and would 
 resent the promotion from their own ranks of 
 such as Salome's two sons, who looked for- 
 ward to the vizier's seats on the right and left 
 
 cordinj^ to the date of composition of its separate books would 
 begin with the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, and would 
 end with the writings of St. John, who, according to the uni- 
 versal tradition, survived its other authors. The general opin- 
 ion of scholars is that Revelation was written some twenty 
 years before the Fourth Gospel, and from the time of Ter- 
 tullian chapter xxi. has been commonly regarded as a post- 
 script to the Gospel, which otherwise would end with the 
 29th verse of chapter xx. It is supposed that the 21st chap- 
 ter was added by the apostle to correct a mistaken report 
 (vs. 23) current in the Cliristian community that our Lord 
 had said that John should not die. From vs. 19 it is plain 
 that St. Peter was already dead. 
 
10 THE PARABLES AXD THEIR HOME 
 
 hand of tlie king when at last he would put 
 off his disguise. 
 
 That such were the conceptions of the mul- 
 titude, as they stood waiting to hear about the 
 kingdom, we know from the apostles them- 
 selves. Whatever else the}' were, sincere and 
 good men they show that they were by their 
 uniformly humble estimate of themselves. In 
 their memoirs of their Master, out of some 
 twenty-eight allusions to something which they 
 either said or did, twenty-six are to their dis- 
 credit. Hence they tell us that not all their 
 close personal intercourse with Jesus himself 
 sufficed to displace from their minds their na- 
 tive ideal of the Messiah's advent. "Whoever, 
 therefore, understands human nature, can dis- 
 cern that one miracle at least occurred at 
 Pentecost, w^hen those same men so suddenly 
 showed that they knew at last what the King- 
 dom of the Parables truly was. Before that day 
 not even the mighty impression of the Resur- 
 rection had kept them from asking, " Lord, dost 
 thou at this time restore the kingdom to 
 Israel'f (Acts i. 6) — a most natural question 
 in the world in their then mental state, while 
 
THE SOWER 11 
 
 it impressively illustrates the words of their 
 Master on the way to Gethsemane, '■ I have 
 yet many things to say nnto you, but ye can- 
 not bear them now. Howbeit when He, the 
 Spirit of Truth is come, he shall guide you 
 into all the truth " (John xvii. 12, 13). 
 
 Jesus, therefore, spoke now to the multitude 
 in parables because he knew what was in men. 
 Not an idea from outside could penetrate the 
 dense thickets of their mental prepossessions, 
 and therefore only a thought working from 
 within could have any chance of a recognition. 
 That a parable alone could accomplish. For 
 such as he was to utter a parable they all 
 knew meant much. Not only by his own 
 preaching, but by that of John the Baptist, 
 the whole nation had been stirred up with the 
 announcement that the kingdom of heaven was 
 at band. They clearly recognized in Jesus a 
 greater than a rabbi, even a great prophet at 
 least, and great prophets were wont to speak 
 just thus. Simply as Orientals they could ap- 
 preciate a speaker in parables, for Orientals 
 are rarely orators. Their wise men do not 
 rise to speak, but rather sit and deliver their 
 
12 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 message as a father instructs his child. A 
 formal prologue or an eloquent peroration in 
 such case would be wholly out of place. There- 
 fore, soon as they found that Jesus was speak- 
 ing to them in parables, the multitude was 
 awe-struck. So spake the seers of old to their 
 fathers. At once they knew that the responsi- 
 bilit}'^ was on them to divine what he meant 
 about the kingdom. A late distinguished medi- 
 cal teacher (Sir Andrew Clark) said, " The cri- 
 terion of true instruction is not acquiring, but 
 thinking." Judged by that criterion, the wit- 
 ness of the ages is that never man spake as did 
 Jesus then in thought-awakening words, when 
 he spoke to them in parables. 
 
 Some commentators have strangely mis- 
 understood our Lord's answer to the question 
 of the disciples why he spoke thus to the mul- 
 titude, as implying that it was to conceal his 
 teaching from them as a judicial punishment 
 for the state of mind they were in, while pri- 
 vately he explained the truth to his followers 
 because only to. them was the privilege vouch- 
 safed of entering into the mysteries of the 
 kingdom of heaven. But we may be sure that 
 
THE SOWER 13 
 
 Christ never chose such a form of judgment 
 for sin, and that he who said at this time " there 
 is nothing hid that shall not be made mani- 
 fest" (Mark iv. 22), scarcely would himself 
 form a secret order of the initiated among 
 men. On the contrary, our Lord's words, il- 
 lustrated by the apt quotation from Isaiah, 
 are simply descriptive of the mental state of 
 the multitude, a state which precluded any ap- 
 preciation of spiritual truth by them in com- 
 parison with his more enlightened disciples. 
 Hence as one would begin to teach unlettered 
 nomads or savages how to read by pictures 
 or object-lessons, so Jesus chose the parable, 
 first, to fix the attention, and then to awaken 
 inquiry among men, dwelling as they were in 
 the thick shadow of Galilean darkness. Much 
 more favored are those who can learn without 
 pictures, for with them progress in knowledge 
 is both easier and cumulative. His disciples, 
 therefore, could begin to grasp the explana- 
 tion of the parable when he gave it to them, 
 while the man of the multitude knew that it. 
 had a meaning too deep for him then, but of- 
 fered to him to search out as he caught the 
 
14 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 impressive refrain, " He who hath ears to hear, 
 let him hear!" This fact at least about the 
 parable the man of the multitude well knew 
 by his birth, for Orientals peculiarly appreciate 
 metaiDliors, and expect it whenever profound 
 truths are the theme of the teacher. 
 
 A word about the scene. I have heard of 
 travellers being disappointed with their first 
 view of the Lake of Tiberias, but I have al- 
 waj'S regarded it as analogous to the feelings 
 of many persons when they first look upon a 
 picture by one of the old masters. One needs 
 to look upon the Sea of Galilee often and long 
 to appreciate its singular beauty. Accustomed 
 as we are, Americans especially, to heavily 
 wooded landscapes, the rocky, treeless moun- 
 tains all about the lake except where separated 
 from it by the bare plain of Gennesaret, seem 
 a picture of general desolation. Ere long, 
 however, the varied features of steep slopes, 
 gorges, precipices, and successive bold indenta- 
 tions of the shores, are seen to form a splendid 
 setting for the deep blue waters of the lake it- 
 self. But as the sun declines, tints of so many 
 exquisite hues come out in the landscape that 
 
THE SOWEK 15 
 
 the eye grows bewildered with the ceaseless 
 variety of its enjoyments. Among the many 
 visits which I liave made to the lake, there 
 was one which gave ns a sudden view of it as 
 we emerged from the long valley which is 
 given in Joshua xix. as belonging to the tribe 
 of I^aphtali. We had followed this yet olive- 
 planted vale as it runs east from the plain of 
 Acre, and just before sunset found it opening 
 on the basin of Tiberias, with the ruined site 
 of Capernaum far below. A peculiarly serene 
 quiet rested upon the whole scene, every line 
 of which showed through the transparent air, 
 from the flashing snow of Ilermon on the north 
 to the exit of the Jordan on the south, with 
 mountain, plain, and lake bathed in colors 
 which sugo:ested the thouijht that John drew 
 from his native memories the materials for 
 the glorious dream of the jewelled city de- 
 scending from the heaven. 
 
 We must remember, however, that in our 
 Saviour's time all the mountain -sides were 
 green with vineyard terraces, or rose in steps 
 for thousands of feet of olive orchards, with 
 villages embowered amons: fior and almond 
 
16 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 trees on every slope, while turreted castles and 
 walled cities crowned the precipices all around 
 the lake. Of the fertility and popnlonsness 
 of the plain of Gennesaret, Josephus {Bell. iii. 
 10, 7) gives ns a glowing account, and we may 
 be sure that it presented a picture equal to 
 that of the Damascus plain now, with here 
 many a palm grove and tropical beauty that 
 would make the contrast of the whole scene 
 with its present waste as marked as the change 
 would be to the most beautiful face of woman 
 if her hair were completely shorn. 
 
 The soil of Galilee is remarkable for its pos- 
 session of a guarantee for enduring fertility in 
 the nature of its rock, which is a limestone so 
 abounding in shells and animal remains that 
 its disintegration by the heavy winter rains is 
 constantly re-enriching it. The most vigorous 
 growth of wheat may therefore be seen on 
 land which at first sight seems covered with 
 stones. A field in America, with the soil in 
 one part so thin over rock that no seed can 
 mature, could scarcely promise sixty or a hun- 
 dred fold elsewhere in it. But not so here, 
 where the heaviest crops are gathered from 
 
THE SOWER 17 
 
 immediate proximity to bare rock itself. As 
 the table-land on the west breaks down into 
 the volcanic depression of the Jordan vallej, 
 the rich lava loam is mixed with the washings 
 of the limestone hills, with the effect of pro- 
 ducing that exceptional fertility of which 
 Josephns so proudly speaks. 
 
 The first winter rains cause the earth to 
 break forth into a wealth of flowers, which 
 continue to increase until in spring this beau- 
 teous coat of many colors completely covers 
 the surface. Their variety of form and color 
 also baffles description. A French botanist, 
 who had a commission from the Jardin des 
 Plantes of Paris, told me that after five years 
 of collecting in Syria he seemed as far as ever 
 from completing his work ; and that though he 
 had visited Buenos Ayres, the Cape of Good 
 Hope, and the Moluccas, yet he had found no 
 land which could compare with Syria for its 
 flowers. It is here also that the Huleh lily, 
 which surpasses in loveliness all lilies of the 
 field, has its native home. One has but to 
 look at it to see how vain it would be for man 
 to imitate its glory. 
 
18 THE PARABLES AND TUEIR HOME 
 
 We are thus brought at the outset to one of 
 those spiritual parallels in the life of man 
 which appear with such inexplicable natural- 
 ness whenever the parables make us think, 
 that we seem led to ask, was not this visible 
 world, after all, created from the beginning to 
 be man's great parable? The sower went 
 fortli to sow, but he had been there before ! 
 He does not begin to sow until after he has 
 broken the ground all up. But how many 
 flowers he ruins in doing this ! So many a 
 man and woman can say that their field was 
 once filled witli nature's fairest attractions, 
 until the Sower came and buried all, not ex- 
 cepting, perhaps, that matchless lily, which we 
 would think he could have spared. Certainly 
 at first nothing could seem more desolating 
 work than his, or anything less likely than that 
 the field will ever regain its former jo3'ous 
 face. Even when it will best answer his pur- 
 pose, and wave with his seed-bearing growth, 
 it will not then appear as bright as when it 
 was gay with its former robe. Nevertheless, 
 all experience tells us that it is just when life 
 seems all broken up by upheavals which the 
 
THE SOWEK 19 
 
 man neither caused nor could prevent, and 
 when human consolation, therefore, is impo- 
 tent, because it knows not what to say, that 
 the human heart is oftener ready to receive 
 the seed of the kingdom than ever before. 
 
 The divisions of land are still the same in 
 Palestine as in Bible times. No fences sepa- 
 rate one man's field from another's, the division 
 being the eye line between tall stones erected 
 as landmarks. In comparison with our stjffly 
 enclosed meadows, this much enhances the 
 park-like effect of a plain when green with 
 wheat, while it recalls many a passage of the 
 Old Testament against the wicked who re- 
 move a neighbor's landmark, a form of rob- 
 bery of the weak by the strong still known in 
 this country. The roads, or rather the bridle- 
 paths which go for roads, are so narrow as 
 they pass through the fields that every sower 
 has to cast some of the seed on the wayside 
 for the fowls of the air to pick up. Birds in 
 Syria, and especially about the Lake of Ti- 
 berias, are extraordinarily numerous. Some 
 twelve miles above Tiberias is the first lake 
 of the Jordan, or the Waters of Merom of the 
 
20 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 Bible, at the end of the rich plain now called 
 the Iluleh, but which plain becomes a vast 
 marsh ere it merges into that lake. As Syria 
 is the winter feeding-ground of many migra- 
 tory birds from Northern Europe and Asia, 
 this marsh is then filled with a greater variety 
 and multitude of waterfowl than I have ever 
 seen elsewhere. But towards evening its ex- 
 tensive canebrakes resound with the noise of 
 myriads of crows, which come from all quar- 
 ters of the heavens to its secure resting-place. 
 At early dawn they begin their calls again, 
 and then make long lines of flight for the 
 nearest wheat-fields. As once we were de- 
 scending to the plain of Gennesaret, we passed 
 a hill-side which was black with over a thou- 
 sand of them, who were waiting there for the 
 unhappy ploughmen to move far enough away 
 for them to descend on their fields. In addi- 
 tion to the crows, there are great flocks also 
 of the rock -pigeons who live in the many 
 precipices above the lake. As I tried to shoot 
 some of them, I noticed that when they rose 
 in their powerful flight they never stopped 
 short of their lofty hiding-places ere they lit, 
 
THE SOWER 21 
 
 though in a short time they would swoop 
 down to the plain again. " How say ye to my 
 soul, flee as a bird to your mountain," said 
 the psalmist. 
 
 Modern physiology of the nervous system 
 has its lessons about the application of this 
 part of the parable. According to the laws 
 of reflex association, it is plain that much the 
 greater number of our ideas are not self-gen- 
 erated at all, but are simple reflex responses 
 to the impressions coming to us from the 
 outer world through our senses. Our brain 
 is a thinking machine in which thoughts arise 
 in response to every variety of external sug- 
 gestion, and in numbers as countless as the 
 birds of the air which come from north, south, 
 east, and west on a field in Gennesaret to catch 
 away the seed of the sower. We are not re- 
 sponsible for the thoughts which enter our 
 minds. No man ever was. What we are re- 
 sponsible for is for the thoughts which we 
 allow to stay there, because we have a kingly 
 centric power within us which can compel this 
 mechanically thinking brain to do its think- 
 ing at its behest. The will, by its lawful, 
 
22 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 physiological, inhibitory power, can say to the 
 thinking brain, these thouglits are good and 
 valuable seed-thoughts, therefore keep them ; 
 those thoughts are purposeless and hence un- 
 profitable, therefore dismiss them at once, and 
 a well-disciplined mind will obey. Now each 
 step in the parable of the sower is from the 
 weaker men to the stronger. The weakest of 
 all are those characterized habitually with fly- 
 ing thoughts. It is a feeble, often a diseased, 
 mind whicli thinks hurriedly. Let a man be 
 reduced by a fever or other cause of exhaust- 
 ion, and he has hard work to keej) his mental 
 machine from turning out thoughts that run to 
 the ends of the earth. A rapid flow of ideas, 
 indeed, is often the sign of impending mental 
 ruin, as in the approach of maniacal insanity. 
 Deep thought, on the other hand, implies pro- 
 longed thought, and no mental machine can 
 think long and well on one subject unless it 
 has learned the weary lesson of thinking by 
 will. But in the ordinary world of men, how 
 rare is the man who has that most precious of 
 all possessions — self-possession, so that he can 
 compel his mind to dismiss its many birds of 
 
THE SOWER 23 
 
 the air whenever he chooses. Instead of that 
 with many scarce has a good seed - thought 
 time to fall upon their uncultivated soil ere 
 it is quickly displaced by flitting ideas from 
 the farthest horizon. Our Saviour says that 
 Satan comes quickly to the wayside hearer 
 and catches away the seed ; but Satan, like ev- 
 ery other spiritual agency, has to work through 
 our natural laws of mental suggestion. That 
 he can best do by promoting mental desulto- 
 riness, for those are swayed easiest who have 
 the least control over their own thinking. 
 For seed to germinate into serious or settled 
 purpose it must have more time than the 
 wayside weakling ever gives to anything. 
 
 The shallow soil of the next class receives 
 the seed long enough to have it germinate, 
 and indeed to be greener than the rest of the 
 field for a time. It is a mistake, however, to 
 confound this class with impulsive characters 
 in general. Persons of an impulsive tempera- 
 ment are often so on account of a naturally 
 strong warmth of feeling, and thus they may 
 be among the best and sweetest persons in 
 the world. Their many mishaps, however, 
 
24 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 often cause them to be underrated, as inferior 
 to really smaller natures Avith cooler heads. 
 But it should be remembered that lie who 
 never mistook men, froin the first called the 
 impulsive and oft -stumbling Peter, the Rock 
 (John i. 42). 
 
 Tlie stony -ground hearers, on the other 
 hand, are that numerous class who in any new 
 thing see only its favorable aspects, and san- 
 guinely follow, expecting nothing else. But 
 it takes a deeper nature than theirs to weigh 
 the difficulties which come with all true good 
 in life. Hence they are too weak in soul to 
 encounter difficulties, and with the first expe- 
 rience thereof, as Mark expresses it (E..V.), 
 "having no root in themselves, straightway 
 they stumble and fall before it." 
 
 No part of the parable of the sower de- 
 rives so much illustration from the land in 
 which it was first uttered as that which tells 
 of the seed and the thorns. These thorns are 
 not brier-bushes or brambles among which the 
 seed falls, but an after-growth of a variety of 
 thistles, as is intimated in the phrase, " the 
 thorns sprang up and choked it." These this- 
 
THE SOWER 28 
 
 ties come up thickly in every wheat -field in 
 Palestine, but the natural time for them to 
 appear is after the wheat is ripened. When, 
 therefore, the wheat is reaped the ground is 
 seen covered with the new green growth of 
 this strong-leaved thistle, which then springs 
 rapidly up to about the same height, and as 
 dense, as the wheat which preceded it. As it 
 dries it becomes very hard, with a metallic 
 ring when struck, and turns white, so that at 
 a distance it resembles a harvest -field with 
 grain, and thus gives point to the words of 
 Jeremiah (xii. 13), " They have sown wheat, 
 but shall reap thorns" — a very painful har- 
 vest, for the spikes on the thistles' leaves are 
 both long and sharp. But as the productive 
 parts of a field in Palestine will sooner or 
 later be covered with these thorns, the lesson 
 of the parable is not that Christians will es- 
 cape thorny days by rich fruit-bearing. Strong 
 and abundant thistles, on the contrary, are 
 signs of naturally good soil. It is Christian 
 to be diligent in business, though the result 
 be increase in the world's goods, with conse- 
 quent cares and responsibilities. But what a 
 
26 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 sower in Palestine knows that he should do 
 is to get his seed in early. If he sows too 
 late, his wheat will then have a hard contest 
 with the inevitable thorns which will be sure 
 to appear in their time. Sometimes, however, 
 late sowing in Palestine cannot be helped, 
 because the "early rain" of Scripture, which 
 ought to fall in the last week of September, 
 has been delayed. After the dry season which 
 follows the " latter rain " in May, the autumn 
 showers are needful to soften the earth enough 
 for the Syrian farmer, with his rude wooden 
 plough, to break the soil up. When this rain 
 is missed, the peasants are often obliged to 
 band together, so that a number of them may 
 be seen following each other in the same fur- 
 row to make it deep enough; a fact which ex- 
 plains the passage in 1 Kings xix. 19, where, 
 after the three years' drought, Elijah first meets 
 Elisha ploughing with twelve yoke of oxen, 
 EHsha being with the twelfth. With such 
 slow ploughing, however, parts of the field 
 are sown much earlier than other parts ; the 
 last, therefore, having a future before it of, at 
 best, mixed wheat and thistles. 
 
THE SOWEK 27 
 
 This portion of the parable, therefore, ad- 
 verts to the grave spiritual dangers of middle 
 life. Get the heavenly seed in early ; for if 
 it be first received in the time that the cares 
 of this life are multiplying, it is the nature of 
 these to grow, after they start, much faster 
 than wheat ever does. This world's posses- 
 sions, when won, can be kept only by being 
 constantly watched ; but the men are few who 
 can be deeply interested at the same time 
 with quite diverse objects. Gradually the 
 earlier and better seed languishes and de- 
 clines, while a change of interest unconscious- 
 ly goes on, which is daily ministered to by 
 family, friends, and associates. I have seen 
 some good stalks of wheat which have man- 
 aged to hold their own against the crowd of 
 thistles all around them ; but in the field of 
 life, those who would approach Christians in 
 such case are apt to feel the prick of the 
 thorns sooner than they can recognize the 
 Sower's fruit, so hedged in are they likely to 
 be with the hard exclusiveness of worldly 
 prosperity. The usual result, however, of a 
 life filled with this world's interests is that 
 
28 THE PARABLES AND THEIR UOME 
 
 nothing is grown for the future. A seed of 
 wheat, though the product of this season, yet 
 contains assurance of next year's growth. If 
 it stopped short of that it would not be fruit. 
 So Christian fruit will be shown to be fruit 
 for the next world when the angels gather the 
 harvest. They, no more than earthly reapers, 
 will take the seed which has no germ for the 
 future, because it has spent itself here. 
 
 The deceptive resemblance at a distance of 
 a thistle-covered field to one of good grain has 
 its counterpart in many a showy but utterly 
 barren, if not cruel, growth of modern civil- 
 ization. The passion for mere material suc- 
 cess is the snare of our time, which threatens 
 to dwarf every kind of good seed in literature 
 and art as well as in religion, for the deceit- 
 fulness of richness may delude an age quite as 
 certainly as an individual. With an individ- 
 ual, however, it is pitiable to see how all the 
 world combines to deceive the rich man about 
 himself by its show of deference to his every 
 word, as if he gave the weight to his gold 
 instead of his gold to him. The effect of this 
 misinterpreted verdict of his fellows is to en- 
 
THE SOWER 29 
 
 gender in tlie man that most complete of all de- 
 ceptions, the self-deception of the self-satisfied. 
 
 Also, in the Church at large, there often 
 come times of spiritual drought, when the 
 whole field seems overrun with earth's this- 
 tles. The oft-given promise of the Old Tes- 
 tament, " I will pour out my Spirit upon you," 
 suggested to Palestinians the anxiously hoped 
 for " early rain," which enables the sower to 
 go forth to sow as soon as the long summer 
 drought is broken. So when in the Church 
 these gracious seasons are much delayed, we 
 need not be surprised at the marked growth 
 of worldliness, with its painful thorns, when 
 only the bread of life should be found. 
 
 It is, however, at the parable's closing words 
 about the seed which fell on good ground that 
 our Lord sought to have each ear fully awak- 
 ened to hear. Instead of those failures whose 
 sadness will be fully known only when the 
 kingdom is come in heaven, we have now the 
 conditions of that success which will be the 
 joy of the Great Harvest. lie explained that 
 the fruit-yielding hearers are those who both 
 " receive " the word into their hearts and then 
 
30 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 " keep " it there. To receive here means to 
 appreciate, and appreciation is a weighty word ! 
 It testifies to a power of estimating vahies or 
 aims in life which is possible only to a richly 
 endowed being like man. Often the posses- 
 sion of this jDower, or the lack of it, at a par- 
 ticular juncture, determines a man's destiny 
 thereafter. How generally, from the lack of 
 it, does sin itself come, because rarely does one 
 commit a sin with any appreciation at the time 
 of what he is doing. Likewise opportunities 
 lost are simply opportunities not appreciated. 
 Wisdom itself may be defined as the timely 
 appreciation of the relative importance of 
 things, and acting accordingly. Hence wis- 
 dom is always selective, but on that very 
 account implies the possession of strength, 
 for amid the many attractions in human life 
 it takes a strong nature so to appreciate the 
 better thoughts when they come that they 
 will be kept until they take deep root, a re- 
 sult which can follow only upon much and 
 prolonged effort, or, as the revised version ex- 
 presses it (Luke viii. 15), they "hold it fast 
 and bring forth fruit with patience." 
 
THE SOWER 31 
 
 Unlike most physical or chemical processes, 
 growth requires much time, and good seed es- 
 pecially must be long retained and carefully 
 cultivated. Hence the failures with the pre- 
 ceding classes were that each in its own way 
 failed to " keep " what the sower gave. The 
 wayside hearer never began to appreciate it ; 
 both the other two received, but failed to 
 keep, thus showing that good thoughts should 
 be reverted to again and again, or they will 
 die out. Scarcely any figure, therefore, could 
 describe so aptly as this parable does the com- 
 mon human experience with good thoughts. 
 We all have our times when good thoughts 
 come into our minds as seed falls gently from 
 a sower's hand. Often their excellence is then 
 recognized, and we feel that a good moment 
 is upon us, with suggestions of a better life to 
 be begun by us anew. Yet how soon we find 
 the appreciation of them grow less and less, 
 until finally the thoughts themselves die out ! 
 But we should remember that no good thoughts 
 ever make us better until they have become 
 habitual. Only when they have become that 
 have they taken root, for thoughts influence 
 
82 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 life and conduct not by their impressiveness, 
 but by their permanence. 
 
 But scarcely any one can look over his men- 
 tal field without finding it occupied with many 
 an old mental weed M'hich has for long been 
 exhausting its soil. Tiie decision must then 
 be made whetlier the good seed, which can al- 
 ways be had of the Heavenly Sower for the 
 asking, shall be not only sown, but then care- 
 fully attended to. If it be so kept, the weeds 
 will be killed out, for the two are mutually 
 exclusive of each other. The longer the good 
 seed grows the stronger it grows, according 
 to the law of verse 12, " Whosoever hath, to 
 him it shall be given, and he shall have abun- 
 dance." The power of appreciating the rela- 
 tive worth of things grows with its exercise. 
 Good thoughts already retained make the re- 
 tention of others like them easier. More and 
 more seed then will be sown in time, for it is 
 only over poor ground that the sower passes 
 but once, while he returns again and again to 
 the more promising soil to make sure that it 
 gets its full share. 
 
 While some may not agree with Buffon that 
 
THE SOWER 33 
 
 genius is patience, yet none will deny that true 
 patience always implies strength of character. 
 It is far from being mere endurance. There 
 is no such thing as a patient ox ; for, though 
 animals may be passive at labor, they cannot 
 be patient, because patience demands a pur- 
 posive as well as continuous self - restraint. 
 Therefore, instead of being a passive quality, 
 its exercise calls for activity of the highest or- 
 der. It needs power to maintain that mastery 
 which will prevent strength from being wasted 
 by yielding to impulses and inclinations. It 
 is instructive, therefore, to note how physiology 
 abounds with illustrations of the place which 
 the great law of control has in all sentient life. 
 Thus the heart is supplied with two opposing 
 sets of nerves. If one be stimulated by an 
 electrical current it causes the heart to beat 
 rapidly. Stimulation of the other filament 
 causes the heart to beat slowly. Kow if this 
 latter nerve be cut, the heart at once bounds off 
 into a tumultuous rapid action, behaving like 
 a horse which has thrown his rider. Through- 
 out the nervous system, indeed, we have con- 
 stant examples of similar restraining arrange- 
 
84 THE PARABLES AND TIIEIK HOME 
 
 ments of nerves and of nerve-centres which 
 arc technically said to "inhibit" the action of 
 other nerves or nerve-centres, and the view is 
 now held that this inhibiting function is for 
 the special purpose of conserving and of reg- 
 ulating energy. That man has a strong lieart 
 whose pulse remains steady when evil tidings 
 suddenly come ; while he whose heart beats 
 violently at a small provocation not only has 
 his cardiac inhibiting nerve weak, but he is 
 likely to be weak throughout, from lack of 
 that reserve power without which no one can 
 be patient. Therefore as, in the material liv- 
 ing world, fruit-bearing is not only the slowest 
 and the last product of growth, but also that 
 which makes the greatest demand on vitality, 
 so, in the moral world, none but the strong in 
 spirit do so " possess their souls in patience " 
 that they fail not in the long, silent process of 
 bringing forth fruit to perfection. 
 
 In this parable, while the soil corresponds 
 to the human, the seed corresponds to the 
 Divine element in the sowing, Now it is in 
 a seed that the whole mystery of life on earth 
 is enwrapped. This mystery modern science 
 
THE SOWER 35 
 
 has intensified far beyond what men in the age 
 of the parables could have imagined. Then 
 men thought that what they saw in a seed of 
 wheat, or in an acorn, was the first beginning 
 of the great after-growth. We now know that 
 the actually living part of such seeds is won- 
 derfully smaller, and, in fact, at first is to the 
 unaided eye invisibly hid in the mass of the 
 apparent seed, for this consists mainly of a 
 store of food for the true seed within when it 
 shall begin to grow. It is, therefore, at a seed 
 that all who attempt materialistic explanations 
 of life find themselves baffled. Every living 
 thing, be it an oak or a whale, has to begin its 
 individual existence as a unicellular organism, 
 a microscopic speck. To the biologist, there- 
 fore, it is a much greater thing when it exists 
 as a vanishing-point of matter, than when it 
 has attained to the vast bulk of mature devel- 
 opment, for by that time it has outgrown and 
 spent many of the potencies which were in it 
 at the beginning. In that small beginning not 
 only was every after-development already de- 
 termined to a finality, but it also contained the 
 stored -up inheritance of untold generations. 
 
86 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 It is in view of such facts that one of the chief 
 physical pliilosophers of our day, Lord Kelvin, 
 says, " The growth of generation after gen- 
 eration of plants from a single seed is infi- 
 nitely different from any possible results of 
 the fortuitous concourse of atoms. The real 
 phenomena of life infinitely transcend human 
 science." * 
 
 So we may say of the seed of the Word of 
 the Kingdom, there is in it a mystery which 
 the world constantlj'' fails to recognize. Con- 
 stantly it mistakes Christ the Sower as only 
 a great teacher of morals, or, as technically 
 termed, ethics. But Christ did not come to 
 teach ethics. The world did not need hira 
 for that. The world was not then, nor has it 
 ever been, in want of men who could say all 
 that need be said about morals, that is, about 
 how men should behave to each other. Egyp- 
 tian epitaphs show that for more than thirty 
 centuries before Christ men had very clear 
 ideas about good behavior. In Christ's time, 
 
 * Sir William Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, President of the 
 Koyal Society. Article in the Fortnightly Review, March, 
 1892. 
 
THE SOWER 37 
 
 also, the writings of Jewish rabbis and of 
 Greek and Roman philosophers did abound 
 with unexceptionable ethics, and yet their 
 world was perishing from soul starvation all 
 the same. Seneca, the wealthy and cultivated 
 Roman, wrote a book of moral maxims which 
 is admired for its excellence to this day ; but 
 of the effects of his teaching he gave the 
 world two instructive illustrations : first in 
 his favorite pupil JSTero, and secondly in him- 
 self, when, notwithstanding all his ethics, he 
 shocked even Rome by rising in the Senate 
 to justify the revolting murder by J^Tero of 
 his own mother. 
 
 No ; there is a fundamental difference be- 
 tween the seed of the parable and ethics. 
 Ethics speaks only of a perfected earthly 
 life; a life, therefore, which, however ethical, 
 must end, like any other earthly life, in death. 
 Christ here tells of life in the kingdom of 
 heaven. I^ow, ethics is no more religion than 
 geometry is astronomy. It is true that we 
 must begin with accurate geometry before we 
 can begin to estimate the relations to us in 
 space of the heavenly bodies, and so righteous- 
 
38 THK PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 ness in our earthly lives is an indispensable 
 prerequisite for the life beyond. But mere 
 ethics is as much restricted to this life as 
 mere geometry, or earth measuring, is to this 
 earth. Therefore, to regard the sower of this 
 parable as only another teacher of old ethics, 
 is as mistaken as the view that a seed of wheat 
 consists only of certain physical substances 
 which are nutritious ; but were it not for the 
 living thing within it, the seed would not con- 
 tain one of those life - sustaining principles. 
 It is true that the world as naturally demands 
 that the Christian should be an example of 
 good morals, as that wheat should be good 
 for food. There is no such thing as a Chris- 
 tian life without good deeds, any more than a 
 living germ of wheat without its rich enwrap- 
 ping. The one form of life can no more begin 
 to grow without its essential accompaniment 
 than the other. But the true Christian receives 
 from the Prince of Life much more than good 
 morals — nothing less than the gift of life in 
 distinction from death. What, in fact, can 
 mere ethics do against death ? Will moral 
 discourse, for example, bind up the broken 
 
THE SOWER 39 
 
 heart after the entrance of death into one's 
 house ? Death is wliolly impartial on all ques- 
 tions about morals : the good and the evil 
 die alike. How, therefore, can ethics console 
 human grief on account of death? It is in 
 the tidings about the kingdom alone that we 
 hear an3^thing worth hearing about death and 
 life. Christ is our life from now on, because 
 he has changed death into sleep, which there- 
 fore has an awakening, when he shall bring 
 us back to our Father, to see God face to 
 face. He who has this hope will seek, in- 
 deed, to purify himself as his heart is stirred 
 within him by an incentive which no mere 
 ethics, with its earthly limitations, could ever 
 supply. 
 
 No one can conclude his meditations on the 
 lessons of this parable without becoming sen- 
 sible of a certain peculiar elevation in it above 
 human ideals, for which there is no explana- 
 tion on natural or historical principles. His 
 auditors were eager above everything else to 
 hear about the kingdom, and Jesus likens it 
 to what no one, either before or after, likened 
 a kingdom — to seed growing in some Individ- 
 
40 THE TARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 ual liearts until it bears fruit there of its own 
 beavenly kind. But we need not wonder that 
 such a conception would hardly suggest to 
 that Jewish multitude a reference to the 
 kingdom of their expected Son of David. 
 This lesson was equally lost ujDon men who 
 were not Jews, for we find it still far above 
 Christian thought for many centuries after- 
 wards. Strictly parallel to the Jewish idea 
 of the Israel of God, there arose among Chris- 
 tians the conception of the Church of God 
 as the kingdom of heaven on earth. But no 
 sooner did the Church win the sword of the 
 Cfesars, as the Jews had hoped that the Mes- 
 siah would do for them, than all thought of 
 the kingdom as a source of life in the heart 
 gave place to the old ante-Pentecostal dreams 
 of James and John and Salome. To the minds 
 of such good men as St. Augustine and St, Je- 
 rome the earthly king was to be the Church's 
 king also. Augustine urged Count Boniface 
 to hang and every way to persecute the Dona- 
 tists, saying of the text, " Blessed are ye who 
 suffer for righteousness' sake," that they are 
 equally blessed who inflict persecution for the 
 
TUE SOWER 41 
 
 sake of righteousness ! Jerome in similar vein 
 said, " Cruelty in God's cause is not impiety !" 
 Such misconceptions of the kingdom not only 
 silenced the Gospel to unconverted nations for 
 more than a thousand years, but filled Chris- 
 tendom itself with blood, and rent the body 
 of Christ into many hostile divisions. Against 
 fatal perversions like these there can be no 
 better corrective than to revert to this first 
 Word of the Kingdom, which speaks of its 
 being a silent inner principle of life direct 
 from the hand of the Lord from heaven, and 
 which, in contrast with the thoughts of men, 
 is like passing from the desolate shores of the 
 Dead Sea and its bitter waters, to the sweet 
 scenes of the peaceful Lake of Galilee. 
 
THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY 
 
Mark iv., 26-29. 
 
 And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man 
 should cad seed into the ground; And should sleep, and 
 rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grmo 
 up. Tie knoweth not Iww. For tlie earth bringeth forth 
 fruit of herself ; first the blade, then the ear, after that the 
 full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, 
 immediately Tie puttetTi in tTie sickle, because tTie Tiarvest is 
 come. 
 
THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY 
 
 Anothek association by our Lord of the 
 kingdom with the life in a seed is given by 
 St. Mark (iv, 26-29) as following upon the 
 parable of the sower, in the words, " And he 
 said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man 
 should cast seed into the ground ; and should 
 sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed 
 should spring and grow up, he knoweth not 
 how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of 
 herself; first the blade, then the ear, after 
 that the full corn in the ear. But when the 
 fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth 
 in the sickle, because the harvest is come." 
 
 The main instruction of this passage is that 
 the kingdom of God cometh not with obser- 
 vation, because it is essentially a life within, 
 and life's manifestations can only be seen, not 
 known. Thus, as we have already noted, all 
 the watchful observation and experiment of 
 modern science have failed to find the slight- 
 
4G THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 est explanation of what the life in a seed is. 
 Still it grows, while no man knoweth either 
 how it begins to grow, or how it grows from 
 the blade to the ear, and then on till it is ready 
 for the sickle. In like manner the kingdom 
 has appeared in the story of the world and in 
 the experience of individuals. The philoso- 
 phy of history is a sounding term, applied to 
 attempts to trace the laws and the causes of 
 historical developments according to certain 
 natural principles. Climate, geographical po- 
 sition, race, customs, institutions, and, finally, 
 events and persons, are thus supposed both to 
 make and to explain history. But the Church 
 of Christ in history refuses to be explained 
 by any or by all of these things, for time 
 shows that she has been wholly independent 
 of them. While in secular history the suc- 
 cessive steps may be observed, just as in the 
 erection of a building we can watch each 
 stone as it is added to the rest, the story of 
 the Church is that of a living growth which 
 develops by the hidden power within itself 
 operating unceasingly day and night. Each 
 age, as it has been occupied with its own pass- 
 
THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY 47 
 
 ing concerns, has been as little conscious of 
 the silent progress of the kingdom as the hus- 
 bandman is able to note by the honi^how his 
 grain is growing. But as we look back over 
 the centuries, and see through how many dif- 
 ferent phases of inner conflict and of external 
 danger the Church of Christ has passed, and 
 has left them all behind, we may well say that 
 the "how" of that marvellous continuity 
 through so many changes we know not. What 
 ■we can see is that it means life. 
 
 This parable was given for our encourage- 
 ment as well as for our instruction. The de- 
 pression of many Christians in face of the op- 
 posing forces of their times, or on account of 
 what they imagine to be the slow progress of 
 the kingdom in the world, is largely due to 
 the difficulty of watching a living growth at 
 all. Growth often goes on even more rapidly 
 in the silent night than by day. The times 
 of one generation as little suffice to measure 
 the advance of the kingdom as the hours of 
 one day suffice to show how rapidly the crop 
 is growing which takes a whole season to ma- 
 ture. On some cold and overcast days it may 
 
48 THE TAEABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 appear scarcely to grow at all. So it seeriied 
 througliont Christendom at the close of the 
 last century. But the seed still lives through 
 cold and dark days, and in due time it will 
 yield its golden harvest. 
 
 With many individual Christians also the 
 subject of their spiritual growth is too often 
 one of anxiety, because they cannot recognize 
 its daily increase. The best cure for tliis mor- 
 bid introspection is for the man to go about 
 his Master's business, as the man in the para- 
 ble did about his, and let the seed alone, for 
 he cannot tell either how it grows or when it 
 is growing most. To be constantly inspect- 
 ino; the seed to discover whether it be takinor 
 deep root or not, is as poor husbandry in the 
 spiritual as in the material field. He who 
 gave the seed at the beginning is not only the 
 Author, but the Finisher of our faith. 
 
THE TAKES 
 
Matt, xiii., 24-30 ; 36-43. 
 
 Another parable put he forth unto them, mying. The 
 kinf/dom ofheaeen is likened unto d man icliich ko wed good 
 seed in hin field : But while men slept, his enemy came and 
 sowed tares [ii. V. also'] among the xcheat^ and went his 
 way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought 
 forth fruit, tlien appeared the tares also. So the servants 
 of the householder came and said imto him. Sir, didst not 
 thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it 
 tares? lie said unto them, An enemy hath done this. 
 The servant said unto him. Wilt thou then that we go and 
 gather them up? But he said. Nay ; lest while ye gather 
 up the tares, ye root up also the wheat icith them. Let 
 both grow together imtil the harvest; and in the time of 
 harvest I will say to the reapers. Gather ye together first 
 the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but 
 gather the wheat into my barn. 
 
 Tlien Jesus sent the multitude aicay, and went into the 
 house : and his disciples came unto him, saying. Declare 
 unto us the parable of the tares of the field. lie answered 
 and said unto them. He that soweth Vie good seed is the Son 
 of man ; The field is the icorld ; the good seed are the chil- 
 dren of the kingdom; but, the tares are the children of the 
 icicked one ; The enemy that sowed them is the devil ; the 
 harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the 
 angels. As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in 
 tliefire ; so shall it be in the end of litis world. The Son 
 of man. shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather 
 out of his kingdom all things tJuit offend, and them wliieh 
 do i)tiquity ; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire : 
 there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then shall 
 the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their 
 Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear. 
 
THE TARES 
 
 Fully as familiar to the people's ears as the 
 mention of a sower going" forth to sow, would 
 be the reference to. the tares of the field. So 
 well did they know jnst what tares are for 
 trouble, annoyance, and injury, that to hear of 
 something parallel to them as inseparably as- 
 sociated with their expected kingdom must 
 have bewildered them with surprise and disap- 
 pointment. They could not possibly give a 
 pleasant interpretation to such a presage of the 
 future, nor could they minimize its unwelcome 
 import. When the wheat first clothes the field 
 with its green mantle, there is little to suggest 
 to the Palestinian farmer any fear that his toil 
 will fail of the reward of a good harvest. The 
 mildew and the insect enemies which so com- 
 monl}' ruin wheat in America are there com- 
 paratively rare, and he simply prays that the 
 "latter rain" will fall in its due season to bring 
 out the ears of wheat to their rich, full size. 
 
52 THE PARABLES AXD THEIR HOME 
 
 But as the time for the heading out of the 
 wheat approaches, he watches anxiously to see 
 whether a disguised enemy has not been all 
 along growing in the midst of the wheat, un- 
 perceived on account of a close resemblance 
 to it whilst in the blade. By the fruit he 
 soon recognizes whether this be so or not. 
 There can be no mistake then. As once I 
 heard it remarked in that country, " the ears 
 which God has blessed bow their heads, but 
 these accursed tares stick theirs above the 
 whole field !" For the tare then carries a tall 
 light head of small dark grains which in every 
 respect contrast with the weighty golden ear 
 of the good seed. To try to weed them out 
 is impracticable from the treading down of 
 the wheat and the uprooting of the precious 
 seed-bearers in the attempt. Both must be 
 left together and reaped and threshed togeth- 
 er. Then -comes the necessary separation. For 
 the ultimate use of the good seed for bread, 
 all the tare grains must be carefully picked 
 out, because they are poisonous. Flour of 
 mixed wheat and tares cannot be given even 
 to animals. Hence all the baskets of wheat 
 
THE TARES 53 
 
 are carried from the threshing-floor to the 
 flat roofs of their houses, where they are emp- 
 tied out on mats, and tlie tedious separation 
 of grain from grain is carried on, sometimes 
 for days, until the wheat is finally rid of this 
 unhappy admixture. In the rainless summer 
 months of that country the house-tops, which 
 are reached by a flight of steps from the out- 
 side, are in constant use for this purpose, as 
 well as for drying their figs, raisins, etc., 
 which fact explains the passage in Matthew 
 xxiv. 17, where he who happens to be on his 
 house-top at the time is enjoined from com- 
 ing down to take anything from his house. 
 On one occasion, after an early start from a 
 village in Mount Ilermon, I felt a dizzy head- 
 ache coming on which made me uncertain on 
 my liorse. My two Arab companions soon 
 complained of the same trouble, till one of 
 them said that he knew by experience what 
 the matter was. " The women of that vil- 
 lage where we got our bread this morning 
 were too lazy to get all the zotoan [tares] out 
 of the wheat. May their days be shortened !" 
 The tare grain, in fact, is in Palestine both a 
 
54 THE I'ARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 narcotic and an emetic, and much more active 
 in these properties than its congener, the dar- 
 nel of Europe. It is not a degenerated kind 
 of wheat, as both the natives and many com- 
 mentators, both ancient and modern, have 
 imagined, but a distinct species, wliich has no 
 original relationship to wheat or barley. 
 
 It is no wonder that the disciples asked to 
 have this parable explained. To their dismay it 
 opened up the prospect of an injury to befall 
 the cominor kincrdom at its very becjinninaf. 
 and which would last to the end. Men's ideals 
 take no account of imperfections, but here, in 
 equal participation of the field, were to be the 
 good and the radically bad, not in mere pro- 
 pinquity or juxtaposition, but so closely re- 
 lated that no remedy was to be tried. For 
 the command was not to let them he together, 
 but a very different matter, to let them groio 
 together. We may well ask whether a more 
 inextricable condition of things could be im- 
 agined. But however much it perplexed the 
 apostles then, no one now can deny that its 
 representation of our human world is in exact 
 keeping with undeniable fact. Human story 
 
THE TABES 55 
 
 is but one long illustration of the strangely 
 intimate relations in this world of its wheat 
 and of its tares. How often do we wonder 
 that so many good men have identified them- 
 selves with the worst institutions of history ; 
 while, on the other hand, wherever in any age 
 or country a conflict has raged between good 
 and evil, there have been reprobates in plenty 
 among the adherents of the better cause. 
 
 More than one purpose of Satan has thus 
 been accomplished. The first is thereby to 
 cast discredit on the whole body of Christ's 
 people. So the saints of the Old Testament 
 are often held up to scorn because they did 
 not grow up in tlie field of the nineteenth 
 Christian century. But this aspersion ignores 
 altogether the intertwining conditions of life 
 at its very roots, and therefore what it is to 
 grow, as well as to be, in this world. 
 
 The second result is to give color to the 
 assertions of a false liberalism. We are told 
 that good men are to be found the world 
 over, w^iether among Mohammedans, Hindus, 
 Buddhists, or Confucians. The excellent of 
 the earth are not monopolized by one religion. 
 
56 THE TARABLES AND TUEIR HOME 
 
 Hence men can be good without being Chris- 
 tians ; why then should Christianity advance 
 sucli exchisive claims ? Then again w'e arc 
 reminded how nuicli true devotion and feel- 
 ing after God have been discovered the world 
 over by the great modern science of Compar- 
 ative Religion. 
 
 To all such utterances this parable gives a 
 stern and startling answer. The field it speaks 
 of is the world. Not Christian lands, but ev- 
 ery land. Not Christian ages or times, but 
 every age and time. Everywhere, therefore, 
 and always, there are and have been good 
 men and bad, but these are so different orig- 
 inally from each other that the end will dem- 
 onstrate just the reverse of the secret wish of 
 many, that the two kinds, after all, came from 
 the hand of the same Sower. Hence the 
 terms often used in both philosophical and 
 religious discussion about evil this parable 
 stamps as much too abstract and impersonal. 
 Intellectual abstractions are too far away from 
 the heart to awaken either love or feai*. In- 
 stead of abstractions, instead of sin entering 
 our world as a deadly miasm or gas, or even as 
 
THE TAKES 57 
 
 a general principle, the parable of the tares 
 pronounces it to be wholly personal in its ori- 
 gin and in all its manifestations. It never ex- 
 ists except as embodied in sinful beings, and 
 therefore the good seed and the tares are the 
 living men and women as contrasted in their 
 native instincts, to whom alone reference is 
 made. 
 
 But it is in this world only that the good 
 and the evil can grow together. When the 
 day of the world's harvest shall come, the 
 essential distinction between the two will be 
 made manifest, and a final, because necessary, 
 separation will then take place. Without such 
 separation the whole intent of the sowing of 
 the good seed would be frustrated. This sep- 
 aration, however, cannot be committed either 
 to earthly judgments or to earthly hands. 
 The Son of Man reserves to himself both the 
 time and the agents for its accomplishment. 
 
 With our Lord's explicit interpretation that 
 the "field" of this parable is "the world," no 
 exegesis can properly explain the field to be 
 exclusively the Church. Such a misinter- 
 pretation, however, has been very common, 
 
58 THE PAKAULKS AND THEIR HOME 
 
 which nuiintains that by the tares is prophe- 
 sied the entrance, with its consequent evils, 
 of worldly men into the fold and enclosure 
 of the Church. Notwithstanding the wit- 
 ness of such lives as that of Socrates the 
 Athenian or Timoleon the Corinthian, this 
 view assumes that the world is Satan's Held, 
 with nothing in it but tares, and that Christ 
 came to prepare a new field in Satan's king- 
 dom for good seed onlj', but in doing so he 
 foresaw that the outside tares were destined 
 to invade it. In that case the terms of the 
 parable should be reversed. The kingdom of 
 heaven should be likened to a man who, in a 
 liidden wa}', sowed good seed in the field of 
 his enemy, who cultivated only tares, intend- 
 ing thereby that the good seed should ulti- 
 mately kill out the tares. Now while such a 
 parable would make an awkward figure, its 
 principle is true enough, for it is just the les- 
 son of the parable of the leaven, which fore- 
 tells the effect on the world of that kingdom 
 which should begin as leaven hid in three 
 measures of meal. But the aspects of truth 
 which these two parables respectively illus- 
 
THE TARES 59 
 
 trate are very different. That of the leaven 
 contemplates the transforming, yet silent, in- 
 ner working upon our historical world of the 
 principle of life which Christ brought with 
 him, and which has continued thus to work 
 from the day of the apostles on. The parable 
 of the tares, on the other hand, precedes the 
 parable of the leaven both in time and place. 
 It closes with the Son of Man as Judge at 
 the last day ; it begins with his original rela- 
 tion to the human world, when "all things 
 were created through Christ, and unto Christ, 
 and he is before all things, and in him all 
 things hold together" (Col. i. 16, 17). That 
 relation to every human being has never been 
 without its witness, for "he was the true 
 Light, which lighteth every man that cometh 
 into the world " (John i. 9). Therefore, as the 
 beginning of this parable antedates the earth- 
 ly history of man, so its end is after that his- 
 tory's consummation. Only then will the 
 choice of the elect be justified, when the deep 
 shadows of this world will be dispelled in the 
 light of the kingdom of the Father. But as 
 it is not given to us to know how the Serpent 
 
60 THE PARABLES AXD THEIR HOME 
 
 could, and did, enter the garden which tlie 
 Lord God planted in Eden, neither is it given 
 us here to know how Satan came to enter the 
 field which the Son of Man prepared. The 
 few words, " while men slept," refer to a night 
 utterly impenetrable to our minds now, and 
 whose darkness it is useless for us to attempt 
 to dispel. These words of the second Adam 
 were not intended to clear up the obscurity, 
 in this respect, of the story of the first Adam. 
 Moreover, as all history down to Christ's 
 day but illustrates the mournful truth of the 
 Fall, so does all history after Christ find its 
 completest epitome in the parable of the tares. 
 Never has there been a fresh beo^innino^ for 
 better things in this world without its afford- 
 ing new opportunities of its own making for 
 the growth of tares. Hence have come the 
 sad disappointments of many reformers, who, 
 while rejoicing at the doing away of old fcvils, 
 as if every evil would then cease, have quite 
 forgotten how men with selfish instincts would 
 find this newly prepared field good for them 
 also. Thus we can imagine how the heroes 
 of liberty in English or American history 
 
THE TARES 61 
 
 would be dismayed if they could return now 
 to the scenes of their labors. In view of the 
 rank growth of abuses in our legislative and 
 municipal affairs, how natural it would be for 
 them to pxclaim, " Did we not sow good seed in 
 this field? From whence then hath it tares?" 
 Likewise in Church history nothing was more 
 natural than the beginning of monasticism. 
 The world was then everywhere both danger- 
 ous and hateful, nor was it as easy then as now 
 to breathe its tainted air and still live a pure 
 Christian life. For a man in those days to 
 retire to the healthy solitude of the desert, in 
 such a climate as that of Egypt, was as much 
 a gain to his soul as it was to his body to leave 
 the pestilential streets of the city. But as 
 time went on, every one of the many attempts 
 to reform monasticism by beginning over 
 again with a new order only repeated the 
 same experience of adding another variety 
 of tares to be called after the pious founder's 
 name. 
 
 It is, however, incontestably true that in no 
 other part of the great field of the world would 
 the admixture of the wheat with tares be so 
 
C2 THE TARAHLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 exemplified as in the history of the Clmrch. 
 From the first the Churcli was not allowed to 
 regard a part of the field as hers, about whicli, 
 therefore, she could erect lier own enclosure. 
 Nothing less than the whole field was her 
 right, and hence, in obedience to her native 
 instinct, she Avent forth to occupy the world. 
 But no sooner did the world perceive that she 
 bid fair to do so, than the world, by its native 
 instinct, proceeded to occupy the Church. It 
 was not alone a corrupt Roman world which 
 was then admitted, but soon afterwards a thor- 
 oughly barbarized one, by the so-called con- 
 version of whole races of savages who " em- 
 braced" Christianit}', often at the summary 
 command of their military leaders. A greater 
 contrast scarcely could be imagined than that 
 between the converts described in the Acts 
 and the converts of that great orthodox cham- 
 pion of the sixth century, the Frankish king 
 Clovis. Nor were he and his fellow-converts 
 different in type from the rest of our European 
 ancestry. Christendom at present comes by 
 lineal descent, not from Peter and Paul, but 
 mainly from Constantine, Charlemagne, Saxon 
 
THE TAKES 63 
 
 kings, and Norman chieftains. And yet when, 
 or by what earthly wisdom, could this great 
 historical admixture have been prevented ? 
 Who was to blame for it? 
 
 Soon, however, the baleful influence of 
 the children of the world began to be felt, 
 and in no respect was this more signally 
 developed than in the rise of the doctrine 
 that the Church is a field by itself, with 
 its definite bounds, which as by a pale — ill- 
 omened word ! — could both include and ex- 
 clude. One "pale" after another, therefore, 
 has been erected, without in any case prevent- 
 ing the tares from growing as abundantly as 
 ever within, while much precious seed has re- 
 mained outside. It has been this old snare of 
 a separate and ideal church without tares which 
 has prompted so many good but grievously 
 mistaken men to disobey the Master's warning 
 not to attempt to pull up the tares on account 
 of the danger to the ffood seed. Our Lord in 
 Matt. XXV. 37 represents the last day as a day 
 of great surprises in recognition, and surely 
 one of them will be when saintly persecutors 
 and saintly persecuted will then discover how 
 
64 THE PAKABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 this blinding world prevented them from see- 
 ing Christ in each other. 
 
 Since the era of the Reformation, however, 
 this disobedience of the Master's injunction 
 about the tares has assumed, M'ith n)any, a dif- 
 ferent form, though in practice it is virtually 
 the same as the other, namely, that of trans- 
 planting the good seed into a more or less 
 small enclosure of their own preparing. Judg- 
 ing also from the little but I'igid bounds which 
 some have thus chosen, it would appear as if 
 they would fain pot the heavenly seed ! But 
 as botanists assure us that the North American 
 continent now abounds with European weeds 
 which colonists unwittingly introduced with 
 the grains which they brought with them, so 
 the universality of the law of the spiritual 
 tares has never escaped illustration in the liis- 
 tory of our religious sects, from the largest to 
 the smallest of them. 
 
 As naturally might be expected, this pro- 
 found parable has excited much coji trovers}'. 
 Archbishop Trench remarks that over the 
 words " the field is the world " a " great battle 
 has been fought, greater, perhaps, than over 
 
THE TAKES 65 
 
 any single phrase in Scripture, if wo except 
 the consecrating words of the holy euchar- 
 ist." From the disputes of Augustine with 
 the Donatists down to our own day this 
 text has been appealed to against separat- 
 ists from the body of the Church, as con- 
 demning all who leave her communion be- 
 cause it contains either ungodly men or 
 those who teach errors of doctrine. So this 
 text does, as far as its words go ; but it is cu- 
 rious to note how the risk of depending on 
 mere texts is illustrated here by the fact that 
 they who use it for tliis purpose invariably 
 garble the text itself in order to have it sup- 
 port their contention. They always quote the 
 text as if the term " world " in it means, not 
 the world, but the Church. Now if our Lord 
 had said, the field is the kingdom of God 
 on earth, then not only the Donatists, but 
 the major part of Christendom, would be in 
 much perplexity whether they are now in the 
 kingdom or not. Who is to decide between 
 the ancient orthodox Eastern Church, the Ro- 
 man Catholic, the Anglican, and the other 
 Protestant communions as to which holds the 
 
 5 
 
66 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 "field"? The decision cannot be by a compar- 
 ison as to which " pale " has the most tares, 
 for each has its share of them, but which has 
 the most to show of good seed. This test seems 
 to be the last one thought of by these contro- 
 versialists, who, instead, appeal rather to the 
 antiquity of date in the erection of their re- 
 spective enclosures. 
 
 Other discussions have arisen whether by 
 the good seed and the tares we are to infer 
 that there is such a generic difference between 
 men originally that neither kind could ever 
 become the other. Our Lord himself has illus- 
 trated his doctrine about the relationship of Sa- 
 tan to men in this world, as far as he saw fit for 
 us to go. To men who boasted of their descent 
 from Abraham (which he did not dispute), 
 but who were then planning to murder him, 
 he said : " Ye are of your father the devil, and 
 the lusts of your father it is your will to do. 
 He was a murderer from the beginning" 
 (John viii. 44). In contrast with men of such 
 instincts we read that to those who receive 
 Christ " gave he the right to them to become 
 children of God, to be born not of blood [de- 
 
THE TARES 67 
 
 scent], nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the 
 will of man, but of God" (John i. 12, 13). 
 In each case a close relationship througli a 
 deep communion of spirit is asserted, which 
 truth is all that concerns us now to know. 
 
 We may remark here that many of the di- 
 vergencies in exposition of the parables have 
 arisen from attempts to use them in polemics, 
 as if doctrinal formularies could be derived 
 from them. Isolated texts from the parables 
 thus were made often to do duty in the con- 
 struction of Church dogmas, or for decid- 
 ing Church controversies, with the result, of 
 course, that every part, or even word, in the 
 parable had to have its definite setting, as 
 plainly indicated as if it were a stone in a per- 
 fect arch. But the fact should be emphasized 
 that the parables, from their very nature, were 
 intended, not to define truth, but to illustrate 
 it, and an illustration never can be made sy- 
 nonjnnous with a proposition. Indeed, one 
 might as well try to represent an apple-tree 
 in beauteous blossom by drawing a diagram 
 of it, as to show how one or other phrase in a 
 parable corresponds to the articles of a creed. 
 
68 THE PARA.BLBS AND THEIR HOME 
 
 The parables are stories of life from fall day- 
 light, not theses from lamplit desks. In a 
 contract it is needful that the precise meaning 
 of each important word should be settled care- 
 fully, and creeds often, very proper]}', do duty 
 as contracts when any one solemnly accepts 
 them in public, or subscribes to them on as- 
 suming the duties of an office. In this world 
 of deceptions creeds are as necessary as any 
 other binding engagements, and in the Gos- 
 pels and Epistles there are all the requisite 
 elements for making them, but not in the 
 parables. As illustrations of God's truth the 
 parables are invaluable, because they are so 
 replete with life that their suggestiveness 
 often is both more and deeper than we can 
 safely attempt to formulate in set theological 
 terras. Thus the part which Satan takes in 
 this parable strongly suggests that man's story, 
 as wo know it, is not a beginning, but a link 
 in the story of the intelligent universe. But 
 no statement of the kind would be in place 
 in any Christian creed. 
 
 "We do not imply by these remarks a dis- 
 paragement of creeds. On the contrary, a 
 
THE TARES 69 
 
 creed holds the sanie relation to a religion 
 that obtains between the Iniman body and its 
 bony framework. On the perfection of the 
 skeleton depends the effectiveness of the whole 
 voluntary motor system of mnscles, whilst the 
 most living element of the blood, the red cells, 
 owe their origin and constant renewal to the 
 marrow of the bones. It is only with the 
 simplest organisms that no skeleton is needed, 
 because they can move, secrete, and digest 
 equally well in every part. So he who can 
 adapt himself to all doctrines, and share his 
 sympathies impartially between Christians, 
 spiritualists, agnostics, or atheists, is but an 
 intellectual polyp, who suffers no more incon- 
 venience from dividing sentiments in his soul 
 than a polyp does when his body is cut up. 
 Instead of dividing the Church, its future re- 
 union is to come by creed, when the whole 
 Church adequately appreciates the great fact 
 that on the doctrines about the person of 
 Christ there is even now but one Christian 
 creed. 
 
 In conclusion, we may say that, as with all 
 our Lord's parables, the parable of the tares 
 
70 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 contains its own special and great practical 
 lesson, but meant in this case for Christians 
 rather than for men of the world. A Divine 
 patience, so to speak, is enjoined upon men 
 on account of their fellow-men. The good 
 and the evil are not found here as genuine 
 and counterfeit coins may be heaped together. 
 If that were so the services to the Church of 
 heresy experts or specialists in orthodoxy 
 would be of great value. But the good seed 
 and the tares are contemplated as growing to- 
 gether, not only in community of blood or 
 race, but even, it may be, in the same family 
 household. No more touching scene of love 
 and affection can be found described than that 
 of the parting of Paul with his weeping friends 
 of Ephesus (Acts xx.). Yet even then the 
 teaching of this parable came to his mind, as 
 he said, "I know that from among your own 
 selves shall men arise, speaking perverse 
 things to draw away the disciples after them." 
 If with such a teacher as Paul, and in those 
 days when there was comparatively so little 
 temptation for worldly men to enter the 
 Church, nevertheless the tares were already 
 
THE TAKES 11 
 
 taking root along with the good seed, how can 
 we expect to be free from perverse men in 
 the Church now? That they should be re- 
 buked and warned against is as much a Chris- 
 tian duty now as ever, but both this parable 
 and the verdict of history is against the divid- 
 ing of the Church on their account. The 
 evangelical branches of the Church especially 
 have had more than enough of these ruinous 
 uprootings in the past. Wiser would it be to 
 accept the simple thought of the Syrian peas- 
 ants, who to this day believe that tares can 
 best be kept down by nourishing to the ut- 
 most the life of the good seed. 
 
THE DKAW-NET 
 
Matt, xiii., 47-50. 
 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net,^ that 
 was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: V/hich, 
 when it icasfull, they dreio to shore, and sat doicn, and 
 gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So 
 shall it be at the end of the world ; the angels shall come 
 forth, and sever the icickedfrom among the just, And shall 
 cast them into the furnace of fire : there sluill be wailing 
 and gnashing of teeth. 
 
THE DRAW-NET 
 
 Saida, the present successor of the ancient 
 city of Sidon, the Zidon of the times of Jacob 
 (Gen. xlix. 13), is beautifully situated on a 
 point which, jutting out from the general 
 trend of the sea-shore, forms on the north 
 a gently curved beach some three miles in 
 length and about two hundred yards in width, 
 where it meets the hedge line of the orange 
 gardens for which the town is famous. Dur- 
 ing five pleasantly spent years in that city I 
 would often time my evening walk so as to 
 watch the fishermen draw their nets, about 
 sundown, upon that stretch of soft sand. Be- 
 fore my first experience of the kind, I was 
 not at all prepared for the large scale on 
 which this work is done, nor for the immense 
 size of the nets. At early dawn a fleet of 
 boats may be seen close to a long line of huge 
 floating corks, extending far out upon the 
 glassy surface of the sea. The vast net, in 
 
76 THE PARABLES AND TUEIK HOME 
 
 fact, is dropped down ere the stars fade, and 
 as the day wears on one end is brought to 
 land by some of the boats, while the other is 
 slowly swung round in a great sweep by the 
 united tow of the others, and not till the close 
 of a hard day's toil do the two ends approach 
 each other, and the fishermen turn to and pull 
 it up on shore. Then comes the exciting time 
 for seeing whether the catch will repay the 
 heavy labor of the day. On one occasion I 
 heard a more than usual outbreak of fisher- 
 men's imprecations. For variety of terms 
 Arab cursing cannot be surpassed, though in 
 all countries fishermen are unfortunately noted 
 for bad language, as our OAvn English " bil- 
 lingsgate" testifies. The reason for this par- 
 ticular chorus of oaths I soon saw in a strange, 
 dark-looking mass, evidently of fishes, rolling 
 over and over in the net meshes as it was yet 
 heaving in the breaking waves. It proved to 
 be a large shoal of sting-rays, a fish which is 
 a flat, leather}'', ungainly-looking creature, re- 
 sembling our flounder, but armed with a long 
 tapering tail ending in a sharp barbed spine, 
 which is a dangerous weapon both for offence 
 
THE DRAW-NET '77 
 
 and defence.* When these are numerons, 
 other fishes are apt to be scarce in the catch, 
 and so the baskets were but half filled, while 
 the discarded rays were left upon the sand. 
 At times the dreaded electrical torpedo island- 
 ed, while at others the Sidon fishermen are 
 driven to distraction by immense shoals of sar- 
 dines, for, as the Arabs do not know how to 
 preserve them, they simply leave them to poi- 
 son the air with their decaying heaps. At no 
 time is their catch good throughout, for the 
 Mediterranean teems with a wonderful variety 
 of life, including "■ each kind of badness," as 
 every fisherman there will feelingly tell you. 
 I may remark in passing that these Moslem 
 fishermen interested me for reasons which 
 they would not have suspected. One elder 
 among them, wlio faithfully fulfilled his prom- 
 ise to bring a torpedo fish alive, was a devout, 
 
 * The case of a New Jersey fisherman attracted a good 
 deal of notice in our New Yorli newspapers a few years ago, 
 who was killed by one of these fishes which he drew into his 
 boat, and which severed an artery in his leg by a single blow 
 of its tail, so that he bled to death before assistance could 
 reach him from other boats. 
 
78 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 simple-hearted man, who refused pay out of 
 gratitude for a small medical favor. It was 
 easy to recognize a good groundwork in his 
 nature. But, as a class, the fishermen of 
 Saida would not be very different from the 
 ancient fishermen of Galilee. So little has 
 been the change that dress, habits, manners, 
 and even turns of colloquial expression still 
 remain to afford living, yet perfectly corre- 
 sponding, object-lessons of tlie origin of our 
 apostles. Especially is the mental correspond- 
 ence complete, whether we regard the stock 
 of general ideas possible to either as a class, 
 or the religions conceptions that would occur 
 to men living under the traditional rule of 
 Jewish Pharisees or of Mohammedan ulems. 
 If so, then, humanly speaking, no " fishers of 
 men," or persons capable of drawing into cap- 
 tivity multitudes of other men, could be ob- 
 tained from either company. The " environ- 
 ment" about which some philosophic writers 
 have so much to say, renders this simpl}' in- 
 conceivable. The chair of St. Peter, or the 
 court of St. James, indeed ! How could the 
 names of those Syrian fishermen have become 
 
THE DRAW-NET TO 
 
 SO strangely associated ? Not to speak of Ori- 
 ental fishermen, where among fishermen the 
 world over could the makers of great history 
 be found ? 
 
 On natural principles it is as inevitable that 
 a man's mental horizon should be bounded by 
 the conditions of his life, as that his physical 
 horizon should depend upon the place where 
 he stands. The Moslem fishermen of our day 
 live in a world of thought which is wholly 
 dominated by the great literary caste of the 
 ulema, or students of the Koran, Starting 
 with the postulate that every letter, vowel, and 
 dot of that book was brought down from God 
 by the archangel Gabriel, it follows that noth- 
 ing can equal in worth and importance the 
 learning of God's own language, and hence 
 the life of the ulem is spent in the heavy 
 study of the laws of Arabic grammar. The 
 Arabs, therefore, boast that they have twenty- 
 five thousand books on this sacred science in 
 their literature. The world has scarcely seen 
 such an example of the concentration of hu- 
 man toil on mere words, or such a wilderness 
 of laborious pedants as Islam presents. We 
 
80 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 have to go back to the doctors of the law in 
 Christ's day to lind a parallel to it. 
 
 The reward is a superstitious veneration on 
 the part of the coinnion people for the learn- 
 ed sheikh, which is wafted as a sweet-smell- 
 ing savor to his nostrils whenever he appears 
 in the market-place. But nothing possibly 
 can so stir the human heart to anger as to 
 suggest to such a man that all this deference 
 of his fellows is misplaced because there is a 
 better wisdom than his, and that all his life's 
 labor has been misdirected and will come to 
 naught ! Hence, towards a representative of 
 a Christian civilization, the glance of hate in 
 a ulem's eye is simply indicative of that spirit 
 which prompts those recurrent teri'ible massa- 
 cres of Oriental Christians by Mohammedans, 
 of which the world has by no means witnessed 
 the last. It is beo^ottcn of the same oris^in as 
 that literary caste malignity which pursued 
 our Saviour until it exulted in his crucifixion. 
 This very expression, aami, " this multitude," 
 "which knoweth not the law, are accursed" 
 (John vii. 49), I have myself repeatedly 
 lieard from the lips of Arab literati as they re- 
 
THE DRAW-NET 81 
 
 ferred to the common herd, and, of course, it 
 would be peculiarly applicable to such as fish- 
 ermen. The fishermen, on the other hand, 
 humbly receive this estimate as no more than 
 their due. To regard themselves as near the 
 lioly level of the doctors of their law and 
 classical language would never enter their 
 minds. In everything, and especially in 
 speech, they feel themselves to be altogether 
 vile. It was thoroughly natural, therefore, in 
 Peter, though in him there spoke also a genu- 
 ine feeling, for him to " fall down at Jesus' 
 knees, saying, " Depart from me, for I am a 
 sinful man, O Lord" (Luke v. 8). But what 
 a solemn lesson, nevertheless, did that dear 
 good soul give of the lasting heart-pang which 
 an old, long-forsaken evil habit may yet occa- 
 sion by its sudden revival when least expect- 
 ed ! " But he began to curse and to swear, I 
 know not this man of whom ye speak !" 
 
 The parable of the draw -net, therefore, 
 the apostles could well understand. Unlike 
 the parable of the tares, which was given to 
 the whole multitude, our Lord gave this to 
 them as they gathered around him in private. 
 
82 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 The dijfference in scope between the two para- 
 bles explains this. That of the tares applied 
 to the whole world of mankind from its be- 
 ginning. This applies rather to the history of 
 the Clinrch in that world. Therefore, in this 
 parable the world is the sea, in which live fish 
 of every kind, and the Church is to be a great 
 net let down to gather men out of that sea. 
 No comparison thus could have made plainer 
 to the minds of those fishermen that the 
 Church was destined in the future to extend 
 immensely, for the net is much larger than 
 the field of any sower. But clearly enough 
 it taught them also that the fishing for men 
 by them, and by their successors, was to bring 
 within the great folds of the Church many 
 other than saints, even the worst kinds of the 
 creatures with which they were too familiar. 
 It was not enough that they should think of 
 the kingdom as sharing the common lot of 
 the world itself in being a tare-strewn field ; 
 for even when the Church should have its 
 definite bounds, like a strong net in the sea, 
 it would still draw within itself the bad with 
 the good. There is no way for opening a net, 
 
TllE DKAW-NET 83 
 
 while it is being drawn, to let out the bad 
 only. The separation must be left to the last, 
 when the object of the whole labor will be 
 found in the good kinds alone which have 
 been secured. 
 
 This parable, indeed, emphasizes the lesson 
 which the apostles, like all true Christians 
 also, would be slow to learn, and therefore 
 would need to have reiterated to them. The 
 Church of Christ is a sacred and a beautiful 
 ideal. Ko words of the New Testament are 
 so strong or so tender as those which describe 
 the sweet, blessed bride of the Lord, Why 
 cannot we always think of her without a single 
 association of evil? Let the world be a field 
 where Satan walked by night ; but since Jesus 
 came to bring his own, why should he not 
 draw them out of the world to himself, to be 
 a peculiar people, a holy nation, and all within 
 the same great fold ? But Jesus in the parables 
 is a prophet, not an idealist, and the prophets 
 of the Lord were not wont to speak, as human 
 imagination ever prompts, of a coming earthly 
 perfection. History exactly fulfilled his words. 
 His Church has become a thing of vast extent 
 
84 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 in the world; but let no one think that be- 
 cause he is within the Church therefore must 
 he be gathered with the chosen of God at the 
 last. 
 
THE MUSTARD-SEED 
 
Matt, xiii., 31-32. 
 
 Another parable put Tie forth unto tliem, saying. The 
 kingdom of Jicawn is like to a grain of mustard seed, which 
 a man took, and soioed in his field : Which indeed is the 
 least of all seeds : (Mark, is less than all the seeds that be 
 in the earth) but wlien it is grown, it is the greatest among 
 Jierbs, and becometh a tree, so tlmt tlie birds of tlie air come 
 and lodge in tlie branches thereof. 
 
THE MUSTARD-SEED 
 
 The four parables of the sower, the seed 
 growing secretly, the tares, and the draw- 
 net certainlj' had ranch in thera to disappoint 
 both the multitude and the disciples. In- 
 stead of their cherished visions of a mighty 
 kingdom suddenly appearing and accomplish- 
 ing the conquest of the world in their genera- 
 tion, these parables intimated at best a very 
 gradual development, accompanied by much 
 seeming failure. The King was to be like a 
 sower who failed three times out of four to 
 get any return for his labor, and what suc- 
 cess he had was not at all uniform in degree. 
 Then, in complete contrast with the dazzling 
 apparition of Alexander's kingdom, the king- 
 dom of the Son of David was to increase as 
 silently and imperceptibly as a seed unfolds 
 itself — too slowly for any bystander to watch 
 it grow. Again, he was to be like a man 
 whose whole work was irretrievably damaged 
 
88 TUE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 by the malice of an cnem}' ; and, finally, ere 
 his kingdom of heaven became in fact what it 
 had been in name, many of his followers would 
 be found so wholly unfit for it that they would 
 be cast away. 
 
 In the four parables, however, of the mus- 
 tard-seed, the leaven, the hid treasure, and 
 the pearl the prophecy is one of unqualified 
 success. The first pair, the mustard-seed and 
 the leaven, illustrate the two great aspects of 
 the kingdom in its relation to the world. That 
 of the mustard-seed foretells how, as regards 
 its external manifestation, beginning with a 
 gathering of 120 souls in an upper chamber 
 in Jerusalem, a Christendom was to grow 
 which would attract to itself many diverse 
 races of men; while that of the leaven tells of 
 that within it which no birds of the air can 
 see nor any animals know, for Influence be- 
 longs only to the high realm of spiritual be- 
 ings, and therefore is outwardly known only 
 by its effects. 
 
 The second pair, the hid treasure and the 
 pearl, go straight to the heart. In them the 
 kingdom is no general cause of country, race, or 
 
THE MUSTAKD-SEED 89 
 
 church, but a fact of overpowering individual 
 love. Men and women are represented with 
 their own personal discoveries of a precious- 
 ness in it which none but heirs of heaven could 
 make, for at once every earthly possession is 
 surrendered by them for the exchange. Their 
 discovery is the King himself 1 For the joy of 
 meeting him at his appearing many thousands 
 in all ages have willingly laid down their lives. 
 In no respect does history ever fail abundantly 
 to fulfil the prophecies of the parables. 
 
 The characterization of the mustard-seed as 
 "less than all the seeds that be in the earth" 
 (Mark iv. 31) was as truthful a statement by 
 our Lord as when, in the parable of the sower, 
 he said, " when the sun was risen " (R. V.), 
 though in neither case was he scientifically 
 accurate, for the sun never rises, and botanists 
 know of smaller seeds than those of mustard. 
 But truthfulness and accuracy are not neces- 
 sarily synonj'mous terms. Nothing can be 
 more accurate than a photograph from life, 
 for no inaccuracy can be detected in it even 
 by a microscope. But people will continue to 
 prefer and to pay for an expensive portrait by 
 
90 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 a skilled artist, with all his human mistakes, 
 rather than for the sorry likenesses which the 
 accurate sun often makes of their friends. 
 Our Lord was speaking to the people of seeds 
 which they daily used, and whose strong 
 growth was before their eyes, for the purpose 
 of emphasizing the apparent insignificance in 
 its beginning which would characterize the 
 kingdom of heaven. The illustration of the 
 parable lies in the smallness of the mustard- 
 seed compared with other seeds, rather than in 
 the greatness of the subsequent development, 
 for if the latter were his object, the familiar in- 
 stance of the acorn and the oak would have an- 
 swered better. Yet even in this respect the 
 soil of Gennesaret furnishes an example strik- 
 ing enough in the size of its mustard-plants, 
 especially just about the shores of the lake. 
 
 All around the Lake of Tiberias, on its east- 
 ern as well as along its western borders, nu- 
 merous hot springs pour forth their waters, 
 making the shores in many places yellow with 
 their deposits of sulphur. These, when dry, 
 are raised by the winds, to descend upon the 
 surrounding soil, rendering it, therefore, pe- 
 
THE MUSTARD-SEED 91 
 
 culiarly adapted to cause the mustard-plant to 
 flourish beyond what it does probably any- 
 where else in the world. The mustard-seed, 
 as is well known, is remarkable for the large 
 proportion of sulphur which it contains, and 
 which exists in it in a peculiar chemical com- 
 bination or principle to which the activity of 
 mustard is due. This activity, however, does 
 not pre-exist in the seed, for itr. is not called 
 forth until the seed has been crushed and 
 mixed with water. Birds, therefore, can eat 
 the seed with impunity, and in the proper 
 season the traveller on Gennesaret may ride 
 by rnustard-bushes as high as his horse, and 
 alive with flocks of merry bullfinches or of 
 rock-pigeons feeding upon the seeds. 
 
 As just remarked, the particular lesson of 
 this parable is not the wonderful increase, 
 simpl}' as such, of Christ's kingdom in the 
 world from a small beginning, though this is 
 now the most salient fact of history. Other 
 great religions have grown also from a small 
 following at first of their single founders. 
 The personal ministry of Mohammed was 
 more than twice as long: as that of Jesus ere 
 
92 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOAIE 
 
 he could count seventy disciples. It is, there- 
 fore, not by numerical estimate, but rather 
 when we compare the seed-pi"inciple of each 
 of these historical religions, that tlie true won- 
 der of Christ's kingdom is revealed. We can- 
 not, indeed, illustrate better what a little mus- 
 tard-seed in the field of human nature the 
 Gospel seems at its beginning, when meas- 
 ured with the.moral obstacles which it had to 
 overcome, than to cite the contrasts between 
 Christianity and Islam, which even their many 
 historic parallels only serve to intensify. Thus, 
 both these religions are of Shemitic origin, 
 and both have led great races, wholly foreign 
 to the Shemitic world, to exchange their na- 
 tive religions for an earnest devotion to the 
 one personal God of Shem. As the apostles 
 went forth from Judea after the death of 
 their Master to found a Christendom, so it 
 was after the death of Mohammed that the 
 remarkable body of men, "the Companions 
 of the Prophet," issued forth from Arabia to 
 found the wide realm of Islam. But long ere 
 this the parallelism gives place to contrasts. 
 Instead of the scene on Palm-Sunday, when 
 
TUE MUSTAED-SKED 93 
 
 Jesus came, a few days before his death, to 
 the city which rejected him, Mohammed re- 
 turned, a short time before his death, to 
 the Mecca which had spurned liim, at the 
 head of 114,000 of the best warriors and 
 robbers of tlie world. But does liistorj 
 find it difficult to explain that Arab gath- 
 ering to the standard of such a successful 
 marauder as Mohammed had by that time 
 proved himself to be? He was only different 
 from the savage Soudan Mahdi of this age in 
 being the first of tlie kind. From the day 
 that a race, predatory by custom and by de- 
 scent, was summoned by Mohammed to a war 
 upon all mankind, every distinctive feature 
 of Islam, whether in its past or its present, is 
 found to be based upon easily understood mo- 
 tives of human nature. Thus nothing could 
 be more welcome to the heart of the natural 
 man than Mohammed's compromise, by a 
 mere easily repeated sentence, between Al- 
 lah and the old human passions for combat 
 and for bodily license. Taught that they can 
 be Allah's sole elect, not only without any 
 inner cross to bear, but enjoined to call and 
 
94 TIIK PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 to treat all other people as dogs, Moslems can 
 be extremely devout in speech while ever 
 ready to wage religious war by tongue and 
 by sword on all the world. As man's oldest 
 and most natural enemy is man, so the fol- 
 lower of this Ishmaelitish religion finds it in 
 constant harmony with his native instincts. 
 What, therefore, the life of the original seed 
 in these two religions was is shown by the 
 first definite step of each in its development. 
 Christianity as an aggressive movement be- 
 gan with the Day of Pentecost — that day 
 which wholly transformed the apostles from 
 the men which they had been, in thought, 
 word, and act, into the men who established 
 the Church in the world. Islam, likewise, 
 by a true instinct, dates its beginning, not 
 from Mohammed's first preaching in his na- 
 tive city, but from his Hegira, or flight from 
 Mecca, for that event wholly transformed 
 him from a preacher against the old Arab 
 religions into a man of the sword, and a man 
 who, for planning and for executing cold- 
 blooded assassinations of individuals or massa- 
 cres of whole bodies of men, has few superiors 
 
THE MUSTARD-SEED 95 
 
 in history except among his own followers. 
 Hence it was but a natural outcome of the 
 spirit of the Hegira that Mohammed's own 
 apostles soon fell to murdering each other, 
 and that his trusted body-guard, the Ansar, 
 were all shockingly butchered, with their 
 wives and children, leaving such memories 
 that the graves of the first three caliphs, who 
 correspond as pillars in the church of Islam 
 to Peter, James, and John in the Church of 
 Christ, have still to be guarded night and day 
 from insults by the followers of Ali, whom 
 these caliphs treacherously supplanted. As 
 it began from the Hegira with a marauder, 
 Islam has continued ever since so to foster 
 the marauding spirit that in no generation of 
 its twelve centuries have men been able to 
 travel unarmed from one city to another in 
 any country where it has borne sway. The 
 constant danger which any peaceable travel- 
 ler encounters now in Morocco, in Arabia 
 itself, or in Afghanistan, is but a repetition 
 of the same old story, for never in the high 
 days of the caliphs of Bagdad or in Spain 
 could caravans be dispensed with. The best 
 
96 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 development to which Arab rule ever at- 
 tained would fairly correspond with the Italy 
 of the Borgias. Mohammedan pilgrims have 
 always had to fight or to buy their way, as 
 they do still, to reach Mecca itself. Moslems, 
 indeed, cease to rob and to kill each other, 
 as well as other people, only where Christian 
 power compels them to keep the peace. 
 
 That religion should ally herself with hu- 
 man passions and inclinations was no new 
 thing in the world, as the religions of an- 
 tiquity everywhere prove. But what was re- 
 served to Islam was to make the God of the 
 Old and of the l^ew Testament likewise ac- 
 ceptable to the original bent of human nature, 
 and especially to man's dominant passion, 
 pride. But did Christianity offer any such 
 allurement when her voice was first heard ? 
 Rather, we cannot emphasize the difference 
 in this respect too strongl3', for if there be one 
 term fitly descriptive of her most character- 
 istic aspect to the world it would be — the Re- 
 ligion of Humiliation. Whence, therefore, 
 the attraction, or what the promise of success 
 in a cause which must always maintain the 
 
THE MUSTARD-SEED 97 
 
 attitude of confession ? Even now, and in 
 Christian lands, many find it is not easy to 
 confess Christ. That fact of itself implies an 
 element in Christianity which never fails to 
 run counter to the most constant of human 
 inclinations, the passion for superiority. But 
 if it be so now, what must it have been in the 
 beginning, when this seed was the least of all 
 the seeds that were in tlie earth 1 A despised 
 Galilean village gave her Founder its name, 
 and which is still perpetuated with character- 
 istic scorn by Islam as the one designation for 
 all Christians — the Nazarenes. How natural, 
 also, were the feelings of contempt and of 
 hate aroused in most Jews at the occasion of 
 Pilate's insult, not so much to Jesus as to 
 them, in his trilingual inscription, " This is 
 the King of the Jews" — fitly on a cross! 
 Love and scorn are much wider apart than 
 love and enmity, and thus all the facts show 
 that more than mere hostility had to be over- 
 come ere a Jew, with his native conception of 
 his expected Messiah, could be brought to ac- 
 cept the man of Nazareth as his king. As a 
 whole the nation chose to die first. 
 
98 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 But when we turn from the Jews to the 
 rest of the contemporary world, liow could the 
 prospect for growth of the new seed there be 
 more unlikely? The Jews themselves were 
 throughout the Roman world already a prov- 
 erb of dislike, or as Tacitus tersely desig- 
 nates them, a repulsive people. Their expec- 
 tation of a Jewish conqueror of the world 
 was as well known as it was despised, so that 
 the very title of Messiah was a term for ridi- 
 cule. When Paul, therefore, said that he had 
 nothing to tell about save a Messiah, and him 
 crucified, we generally fail to appreciate the 
 wonder of this message to the men who first 
 heard it, on account of our very different and 
 sacred associations with the word cross. To 
 their ears it came, a Jewish Messiah, and a 
 gibbeted Messiah at that ! That in a contest 
 then to the death, continuing through three cen- 
 turies between the wonderfully organized pow- 
 er of Rome and the wholly unarmed Church, 
 it was the Church which conquered, has been 
 the problem of history for explanation, because 
 the struffijle lasted too long for the result to 
 be ascribed either to fortune or to individuals. 
 
THE MUSTARD-SEED 99 
 
 But a more impressive testimony still to her 
 inherent vitality was the spread of Christian- 
 ity among the savage races who overthrew 
 Rome, because historically it began while they 
 were yet beyond the Rhine, and in the first 
 instance is traced to captives whom they had 
 taken in their incursions into Roman terri- 
 tory. It has been well said that by the time 
 the Northern invaders finally subdued the em- 
 pire they had become already better Chris- 
 tians than the Romans were. That ere that 
 period the mustard -seed had become a tree, 
 with the birds flocking to its branches, was 
 strikingly shown when Rome herself was 
 saved by appealing to the German tribes, who 
 had stripped her of everything except Italy, 
 to make liead with her against the terrible 
 pagan Hun, and to overthrow Attila on the 
 field of Chalons, because he came to destroy 
 the Church of Christ. The question natu- 
 rally arises. How came those shaggy warriors 
 to be imbued with a reverence for that Name ? 
 What could be further from the ideal of 
 fierce manliness of the old Teutonic hero 
 than this image of meek saiutliness ? Yet so 
 
100 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 it was then, and ever has been since, tliat a 
 mighty Christendom has grown apace in the 
 world, more and more uniting the nations by 
 bonds of principle and of sentiment which 
 mark them off very distinctly from the peo- 
 ples of either Islam, Brahminism, or Buddh- 
 ism. Whatever be the thongnts of men about 
 Jesus, none can deny that his forecast in this 
 parable has been quite fulfilled, in that his 
 kingdom in its external development has be- 
 come the greatest growth of history. 
 
THE LEAVEN 
 
Matt, xiii., 33. 
 
 AnotJier parable spake he iinio them ; The kingdom of 
 heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid 
 in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. 
 
THE LEAVEN 
 
 Notwithstanding the uncertainty which 
 prevails as to the exact equivalents in modern 
 terms of ancient measures, it cannot be doubt- 
 ed that the three measures of meal which con- 
 stituted the Hebrew ephah of this parable 
 amounted to more than an English bushel in 
 quantity. To us this would appear as more 
 than what a large family would use at one 
 baking, but the conditions of ordinary Pales- 
 tinian life do not render it at all unusual. 
 Accustomed as we are to a great variety of 
 food, including an abundance of meat, we use 
 bread more as an accompaniment to, than as 
 the chief article of, a meal. But in our Sav- 
 iour's time, as well as now, the main food of 
 the people was fermented milk, cheese, olives 
 and oil, figs, raisins, and bread. It will be 
 seen by this that bread is literally the staff 
 of life with them, to which all else is subsid- 
 iary, and therefore that the statement of the 
 
104 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 parable simply conforms to the familiar facts 
 of household economy in that land. This fact, 
 however, it served to illustrate, that it would 
 not be a small world which finally would 
 become wholly leavened by the kingdom of 
 heaven ! 
 
 As in the case of the term " seed," so we 
 may say that to this parable of the leaven 
 modern science gives a peculiar significance 
 which was wholly unknown in the times when 
 the parable was first uttered. Then, and un- 
 til very lately, it was supposed that the leav- 
 ening of bread was caused by an inanimate 
 material acting by purely physical processes 
 upon the meal which it fermented. This was 
 the view which the distinguished chemist 
 Liebig maintained to the last, but the illustri- 
 ous Pasteur has effected the greatest and most 
 important revolution in history, so far as the 
 physical life of mankind is concerned, by his 
 epoch-making researches on what fermenta- 
 tion really is. It was by these researches that 
 the vitally important relations became known 
 of the microscopic forms of life to the visible 
 animal and vegetable kingdoms, whether in 
 
THE LEAVEN 105 
 
 the processes of liealtli or those of disease and 
 death. Pasteur has demonstrated, to the ac- 
 ceptance of the whole scientific world, that 
 ferments are not portions of lifeless organic 
 matter which set up their changes by their 
 mere presence in fermentable substances, but 
 are instead actually living organisms, and that 
 the fermentation which they occasion is a nec- 
 essary consequence or manifestation of their 
 vital activity and growth. As he expresses 
 it, " the conversion can only take place when 
 the material to be fermented comes into act- 
 ual contact with the living protoplasm of the 
 ferment." One result, however, of the action 
 of these living cells is the formation of what 
 may be termed pervasive cliemical principles, 
 which extend to some distance from the cells 
 into the surrounding fermentable material, 
 profoundly, though at first scarcely visibly, 
 modifying it, and preparing it for the subse- 
 quent extension to it of the growing ferment. 
 Another development from these discover- 
 ies is that the variety of organisms which are 
 capable of inducing fermentation is seemingly 
 limitless. This in fact constitutes one of the 
 
106 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 greatest practical difficulties in producing many 
 of the fermentations in common use, for the 
 desired result is often utterly vitiated by the 
 contamination of the proper ferment by the 
 entrance with it of some form of what is 
 technically termed a " wild" yeast, wliich may 
 grow so as wholly to supplant with its evil 
 working the action of a " cultivated " yeast. 
 How to procure a " pure " yeast is therefore 
 one of the most carefully investigated prob- 
 lems of this branch of economic chemistry. 
 
 With these preliminaries, we can now turn 
 to the great lessons of this parable about the 
 Kingdom of God. Tlie leavening of the 
 world of which it speaks refers to much 
 deeper and more hidden results than those 
 aspects of the kingdom to which the parable 
 of the mustard -seed corresponds. Even the 
 most superficial observer cannot overlook the 
 Church in the world, while the true effect of 
 her being there might be entirely un perceived 
 by him. The surface of the meal before the 
 whole is leavened often appears much the same 
 that it ever was, notwithstanding the great 
 change which has already occurred within. 
 
THE LEAVEN 107 
 
 There is, in fact, nothing more hidden than 
 the springs of human conduct. Often they 
 are deeper than the consciousness of their 
 possessors, and this parable refers just to that 
 element in human life which reaches down 
 below beliefs and opinions, customs and laws, 
 to the sources of them all in the motives and 
 promptings of the spirit. In more senses than 
 one it is the spirit which is the life, for thence 
 proceed both belief and conduct. Therefore 
 we can speak just as properly of the spirit of 
 an age as we can of the spirit of an individ- 
 ual. We recognize by such a phrase not so 
 much the prevailing sentiments or opinions 
 of an age as that profounder animating ele- 
 ment which makes opinions and sentiments 
 prevail. 
 
 Thus we are often told in these days that 
 it is useless to enact good laws unless there 
 exist a public sentiment which will enforce 
 them. But what is this public sentiment 
 without which law might as well not be ? It 
 assumes no outward form, often indeed, it is 
 not even articulate. It owes its existence in- 
 stead to the intercommunion of human minds 
 
108 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 and spirits. Our very word " coinmnnitj," 
 when applied to people residing together, is 
 a recognition of the great fact that men cannot 
 be together without becoming sharers in each 
 others' lives. From one to the other, from 
 the highest to the humblest and back again, 
 there are constantly passing streams of influ- 
 ence, acting and reacting until not a life es- 
 capes being very different on that account 
 from what it would have been by itself, or 
 from what it would have been in a very dif- 
 ferent " community." A public sentiment, 
 therefore, is born of the passing of thought 
 and of feeling, often nneonsciously, from one 
 living soul to another, just as the vital work- 
 ing of the leavening cells passed silently from 
 particle to particle in the three measures of 
 meal. 
 
 That a great change has come over the 
 spirit of men just where the bi'anches of the 
 tree of the first parable overshadow them, but 
 nowhere beyond, is evident enough, though 
 how that change has come about is disputed. 
 Many strive to regard it as spontaneous, or 
 maintain, as Matthew Arnold expresses it, that 
 
THE LEAVEN 109 
 
 there is a stream or tendency wliicli makes 
 for righteousness, whose origin is as unknown 
 as the force of gravitation. That this stream 
 or tendency is found only in Christendom is 
 looked upon by such minds as but a coinci- 
 dence. But the facts are these : One who 
 lived wiien the leaven was first hid in the 
 meal only confirmed the accounts by Eoman 
 writers themselves of the spirit of the age 
 when he described the men of that world as 
 "filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, 
 covetousness, maliciousness ; full of envy, 
 murder, strife, deceit, malignity ; whisperers, 
 backbiters, haters of God, insolent, haughty, 
 boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient 
 to parents, without understanding, covenant- 
 breakers, without natural affection, unmerci- 
 ful" ! (Rom. i. 29-31). Not a word of this 
 terrible indictment can be denied, for Roman 
 poets, philosophers, and historians only am- 
 plify it as they describe their contemporaries. 
 A people whose continuous amusement was 
 to see gladiators slaughtered, or aged slaves 
 crucified, simply enjoyed cruelty. We natu- 
 rally shrink from the thought that this race 
 
no THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 had much iii connnon with us, and would fain 
 hope that such a species of mankind has for- 
 ever passed awaj. But from my own per- 
 sonal knowledge I am sure that whole com- 
 munities of Mohammedans now would enjoy 
 just such spectacles of the slaughter of Chris- 
 tians which the proletariat of Rome did under 
 Nero. At present, in British India, the moral 
 chasm which separates the European from the 
 Asiatic in their respective sentiments about 
 truth and human brotherhood is so great that 
 neither side understands the other at all. It 
 is no insult to an Asiatic to be called a liar, 
 and cruelty he regards as akin to courage. 
 When the volcanic explosion occurs there, 
 which may happen at any time, the utter 
 powerlessness of such agencies as a free press, 
 railroads, telegraphs, and the rest of alleged 
 world transformers to leaven human nature 
 with true goodness will be startlingly proven. 
 That this is not because it is Asiatic, but be- 
 cause it is human nature which is in question, 
 is shown by the fact that where, even in Europe, 
 men are found who in common reject Chris- 
 tianity and her God, the same unleavened 
 
THE LEAVEN 111 
 
 spirit manifests itself on occasion as of old. 
 The strongest light of modern civilization in 
 France certainly showed no sweetness of ef- 
 fect on the Communards of 1870. These 
 truths amply prove that the meal in the meas- 
 ure neither can nor has changed itself, but 
 that it is changed only by a new life put into 
 it, which works according to its own laws into 
 ejffects caused alone by its presence and growth. 
 But as leavening comes only by a living proc- 
 ess, so Christians should never forget that 
 only by the pervading effects of a true Chris- 
 tian life can the world be leavened ! 
 
 And what wondrous transformations has it 
 produced, though scarcely as yet has it fully per- 
 meated even one of the three measures ! Little 
 by little, its hidden influence on the hearts of 
 individuals generated a new spirit in the world 
 of virtue and kindliness, which purified the 
 home, made men sick of the sight of blood 
 in the amphitheatre, lessened progressively 
 the awful evils of ancient slaver}^ till it ended 
 slavery itself, visited the sick and sought out 
 the prisoner, until finally its spirit has spread 
 to the field of battle itself, and enjoined the 
 
112 TUE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 same tender and skilled care for a wounded 
 enemy as for a wounded con)rade. In the 
 world of Islam men cannot trust one another 
 enough even to form a commercial company, 
 60 that the marvels produced by sncli co-oper- 
 ation in our trading or industrial fields are a 
 mystery to them. This is only one of many 
 illustrations of that blessed unifying life 
 which has entered our poor warring world, 
 everywhere permeating the springs of human 
 nature vrith that new sense of mutual obliga- 
 tion which can be satisfied with nothing short 
 of truth, justice, mercy, and good-will towards 
 all. Was not the coming of that kingdom, 
 whose beneficent influence would thus ex- 
 tend alike to all the concerns o-f human life, 
 justly named Glad Tidings to all the world ? 
 
 It was to meet the narrowness of human 
 view that the parable of the leaven forms so 
 neediul an accompaniment to the parable of 
 the mustard^seed. Our Lord's kingdom in 
 the world is a subject too great and too many- 
 sided to have even one of its aspects adequate- 
 ly represented by a single illustration. An 
 undue attention to the important truth which 
 
THE LEAVEN 113 
 
 the parable of the mustard-seed enforces has 
 led, in fact, to two widely prevalent, though 
 opposite, forms of error. The growth of the 
 mustard-seed corresponds, as we have seen, to 
 the visible growth in the world of the Church. 
 So great and imposing has that been that mul- 
 titudes accordingly have been more attracted 
 by this aspect of the kingdom than by any 
 other. There have been, therefore, many who 
 were more zealous as churchmen than as Chris- 
 tians. Moreover, as only one mustard-seed is 
 spoken of as planted, so it has been argued 
 that there could be only one visible Church, 
 and hence external evidences of her place and 
 relative growth have been much relied upon 
 to support the claims of contending parties. 
 But in the kingdom as a hidden leaven in the 
 world there is a lesson which opposes this 
 whole tendency, for the criterion which it 
 establishes is not how much of the world has 
 been overshadowed by the Church, or by her 
 branches, but how much has the world by her 
 been changed in spirit, and brought nearer to 
 the fulfilment of the prayer that the will of 
 God become also the will of man on earth. 
 
114 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 Tlie external view of the Church, on the 
 other hand, has led many to charge Christi- 
 anity with a host of wrongs and shortcomings 
 which historically have been associated with 
 her name. Thus tlie Roman world became 
 nominally Christian, and likewise in turn the 
 European nations which succeeded Rome. 
 But naming a thing is not changing it, and 
 hence Christianity tlirough the centuries has 
 had to bear the reproach of numberless mani- 
 festations of the old unleavened world of 
 human evil working under the cover of her 
 sacred name. It is a cause for thankfulness, 
 tlierefore, that as time goes on the unnatural 
 alliance of the Church and the world is laps- 
 ing by Providential limitation. The murderers 
 of the French Commune and the anarchists 
 of our day are the descendants, both natural 
 and spiritual, of the murderers of St. Bartholo- 
 mew's Day, but tliey no longer call themselves 
 Christians or children of the true Church. 
 With each generation the essential antago- 
 nism of the spirit of Christ's kingdom, and 
 tlie spirit of the world is becoming more and 
 more recognized, thus imparting a greater 
 
THE. LEAVEN 115 
 
 unity to both sides. But while this may re- 
 sult in apparently a sliarper conflict than ever 
 for the Church, yet to those who look beneath 
 the surface every indication of our times is 
 that the leaven of the kingdom is permeating 
 the world more rapidly than in any preced- 
 ing age, according to the law of life that the 
 more the individual cells multiply the more 
 others like them are born. Rather it is signifi- 
 cant of the spread of the true leaven that un- 
 belief itself is now obliged to borrow the garb 
 of Christian ethics, and to preach the gospel 
 of Altruism as the hope of humanity. 
 
 The disturbing element in certain sought- 
 for fermentations through the contamination 
 with " wild " yeasts, which we have mentioned 
 above as revealed by modern investigations, is 
 not without its striking spiritual parallels in 
 the history of the Church. Nothing so im- 
 presses the reader of Church history as the 
 amazing multiplication of Gnostic and other 
 heretical sects in the first centuries of the 
 Church's career. Scarcely had she been freed 
 from her conflict with the Judaizing teachers 
 of the apostolic times than the Greek world 
 
116 THE PARABLES AND TUEIR HOME 
 
 supplied a crowd of invaders who threatened 
 completely to overrun her field with their 
 noxious speculative growths. That they and 
 60 many other forms of evil doctrine have all 
 in turn become extinct, is a greater testimony 
 to the possession of a divinely imparted life in 
 the Church than her survival from the con- 
 flicts with her external foes in the world. 
 
THE HID TKEASUEE 
 
Matt, xiii., 44. 
 
 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in 
 afield; the which ichen a man hath found, lie hidetJi, and 
 for joy thereof goeth and selleth all tfiat he hath, and buy- 
 eth that field. 
 
THE HID TREASURE 
 
 What it is to find a hid treasure in Syria 
 was once well illustrated during my residence 
 in Sidon. A land-owner of the town had hired 
 a band of seventeen peasants, men and women, 
 to dig up a field of about an acre to plant it 
 with orange -trees. For such a purpose the 
 custom is to run close together parallel trench- 
 es about three feet in depth, and then turn 
 the soil into them until the whole field is thus 
 gone over. As I watched them from the win- 
 dows of our house on the city wall, I was 
 amused at the slowness of their work, one map 
 pushing into the soft sandy soil a long wood- 
 en shovel, Avhich was then pulled out by anoth- 
 er with a rope. For such labor the daily wa- 
 ges of the men was about twelve cents of our 
 money, and of the women nine, paid in the 
 wretched, dark-looking Turkish piastre, which 
 is a thin piece of copper with a trace of a silver 
 coating. One day two of the men while in 
 
120 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 a trench turned up a leaden box more than a 
 foot long, and as the man with the spade was 
 a dull fellow his companion lifted it out and 
 threw it under a fig-tree near by, remarking, 
 " This is nothing but an old relic ; we will see 
 what it contains by-and-by." In a moment, 
 however, another box was also unearthed, 
 which, on being struck with the spade, let 
 out a stream of glittering pieces of gold ! In 
 a moment the whole seventeen men and wom- 
 en were upon the spot in a heap, fighting and 
 screaming as only Arabs can at such a sight, 
 until one of them sagely called for silence lest 
 their hubbub would attract others to share the 
 prize with them. "Let us quietly dig," said 
 he, " and see if there be any more of these 
 precious boxes, and then at night we will di- 
 vide the treasure equally between us." His 
 advice was followed, when a third box was 
 found, and, as the sequel showed, very proba- 
 bly a fourth. Unfortunately, at their noctur- 
 nal division, one of the women thought that 
 she did not receive her full share, and in re- 
 venge she stole away to the mutsellim, or 
 Moslem governor's house, and, showing him 
 
THE HID TREASURE 121 
 
 some of the pieces, that official lost no time 
 to collect his guard, and to sally out and capt- 
 ure the whole company before they had sepa- 
 rated. The next day the entire city was in a fer- 
 ment at the news, and soon the British consular 
 agent at Sidon called at our house with an ac- 
 count of his interference with the governor 
 to stop his torturing the unfortunate peasants 
 so as to wring from them the full secret of the 
 find. This the consul had a right to do, as the 
 Turkish government had stipulated with the 
 European powers to abolish torture in the 
 Sultan's dominions. The scene which he de- 
 scribed was graphic enough : of the mutsellim, 
 with a wide silk keffeeyeh spread on the rug be- 
 fore him, with a larger pile of gold coins there- 
 on than any Sidonian had ever beheld, while 
 the poor creatures were screaming nnder an an- 
 cient form of thumb -torture inflicted upon 
 them by the savage Moslem guard. By the rep- 
 resentation of the European consular agents the 
 poor fellows were at last released, and even 
 some of the money obtained from this treas- 
 ure was subsequently distributed among them. 
 For a long time afterwards, however, stray 
 
122 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 pieces of these antique coins continued to be 
 surreptitiously sold in Sidon, so that doubtless 
 the whole treasure was not given up by the 
 peasants. They were all gold coins of Philip 
 of Macedon and of Alexander the Great, of 
 the most beautiful workmanship, the latter 
 appearing as if they had been just struck from 
 the mint. 
 
 It can be readily appreciated that to any 
 one of that poverty-stricken band the dispar- 
 ity between the worth of the least of these 
 gold pieces and the utmost reward of his daily 
 toil would make him willing to part with all 
 his worldly goods, if so he could gain that 
 treasure. 
 
 The land of the parables is, in fact, undoubt- 
 edly full of such buried treasures, for scarce a 
 year passed of my residence there in which 
 I did not hear of such discoveries. Once I 
 bought several silver coins of the Seleucida? 
 of Antioch from a considerable collection of 
 them which some children found shining in a 
 mole-hill near a village of Upper Galilee, and 
 on another occasion, not a hundred yards from 
 our house in Sidon, a soldier found an earthen 
 
THE HID TREASURE 123 
 
 jar full of old Turkish gold coins, which were 
 struck by the early sultans before Turkish 
 money had become debased. The reason for 
 these frequent discoveries is not far to seek. 
 For more than forty centuries it has been a 
 common practice with the inhabitants of that 
 country to bury their silver and their gold 
 whenever a war or an oppressor threatened 
 them with the loss of all they had ; and when 
 we consider how often in the history of that 
 land cities and towns have been captured, and 
 the inhabitants either all massacred or sold as 
 slaves, it is no wonder that the secret of such 
 hidden treasures in multitudes of instances 
 perished with those who buried them. Such 
 hiding of silver and of gold, I knew, was still 
 going on when I lived there by native Chris- 
 tian merchants, on the oft-recurring fears of 
 massacres by their Moslem neighbors, and with 
 good reason, as the terrible slaughter of the 
 Christians in Damascus in 1860 proved. There 
 being no way open in former times of trans- 
 ferring valuables from one country to anoth- 
 er, the silent bosom of mother earth thus has 
 ever been the one receptacle thought of by 
 
124 THE PARABLES AND TIIEIR HOME 
 
 the Oriental for safe keeping. In many in- 
 stances government officials or rulers have 
 similarly buried vast treasures.* From the 
 fact that this large sum of Macedonian gold 
 found in Sidon was exclusively made up of 
 fresh coins, those of Alexander apparently 
 having never been used, it is very probable 
 that the leaden boxes were deposited where 
 they were found by some embezzler among 
 Alexander's own army officials while that 
 monarch was residing in Sidon, when he was 
 conducting the siege of Tyre. So settled was 
 this practice even in Plicenician times that 
 every inscription yet found on the sarcophagi 
 of Phoenician kings consists chiefly of earnest 
 adjurations to treasure-seekers not to disturb 
 their rest, because they would find no valu- 
 ables within. 
 
 *In the Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny, by W. Forbes 
 Mitchell, p. 152, is given a graphic account of the labors of 
 the soldiers of the 93d Highlanders, with other detachments, 
 in raising, from a well at Poona, boxes containing money 
 valued at £306,250, besides plate and other valuables said to 
 be worth more than a million sterling, which had been se- 
 creted there by Nana Sahib in his flight from Cawnpore. 
 
TUE HID TREASURE 125 
 
 When, here in America, the legend of a 
 noted buccaneer of the eighteenth century, 
 named Captain Kidd, having buried a treasure 
 of Spanisli gold somewhere between points a 
 thousand miles apart along our Atlantic coast, 
 has led to numerous attempts to find it, we 
 need not wonder that in Syria every inhabi- 
 tant has hopes that ere he dies he shall become 
 boundlessly enriched by such a secret gift of 
 fortune. Tales of the kind excite the imagi- 
 nation of every child in that land, and they 
 continue to cherish them throughout life. 
 Scarcely does a man indulge in an unusual 
 outlay or expense but his neighbors begin to 
 rally him with questions whether he has come 
 upon some golden store in a field or well. 
 
 It is this wide-spread and well-founded be- 
 lief that there are buried treasures of untold 
 value all over the land which furnishes the 
 special parallel to a great truth about Christ 
 and men in this world. Instead of a surprise 
 undreamt of, as a treasure-trove would be to a 
 man in this country, this parable is based upon 
 a most familiar idea to dwellers in Palestine, 
 of riches heard of throughout their lives, and 
 
126 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 whose discovery is constantly hoped for. But 
 are not the riclies of Christ and the kinjrdom 
 of heaven widely known and spoken of among 
 ns ? Yet nothing is truer than that the world 
 does not see them, but ever leaves them to 
 become matters of personal discovery. 
 
 It is M'ell to ponder why this is so. In no 
 other religion is there anything which corre- 
 sponds to this finding of Christ by the Chris- 
 tian. In a Mohammedan country all men hear 
 about Mohammed, just as in a Christian coun- 
 try all men hear about Christ ; but does a Mos- 
 lem ever need to " find " Mohammed ? And 
 yet, though multitudes have been told from 
 their childhood, often most earnestly by their 
 own parents, what an inestimable gift from God 
 is Christ, nevertheless, in an important sense, 
 he always remains hidden, and a treasure to be 
 found. To the end of time this seeming par- 
 adox of the parable will liold true. Neither 
 the hearing of the ear, nor the reasoning of the 
 mind, nor any enumeration of the "evidences 
 of Christianity " will change the fact that the 
 true revelation of Christ to a man is ever a 
 new as well as a most critical event in his life. 
 
THE HID TREASURE 127 
 
 The great difference among men in their 
 estimation of Christ is solely due to this fact. 
 To some lie is their all in all, practically dom- 
 inating their everj' object and choice in life. 
 Their devotion to him is such that they are 
 ready to surrender for his sake all that men 
 naturally would hold to the last. Whenever 
 the test has come, life itself has not been too 
 precious to be refused by the Christian for his 
 Lord. But all this is as inexplicable to the 
 men of the world as the action of a man who 
 would exchange his whole property for a 
 small, barren-looking field. Most men of the 
 world, indeed, secretly regard Christians as 
 deluded visionaries. And so they are unless 
 Christ be an infinitely greater treasure than 
 all the treasures together of this world. But 
 if he be of such transcendent worth, why is 
 he to the world as gold buried out of sight ? 
 
 We need not feel this to be a difficulty 
 when we consider that it is not the knowledge 
 of Christ only which is similarly hidden from 
 men. Other momentous facts which concern 
 all men without exception appear to be just 
 as strangely buried out of their sight. Thus if 
 
128 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 there be any certainty on earth, it is that 
 death awaits every one born into this world ; 
 and yet who does not act as if practically he 
 felt that he need not take death into account ? 
 So strong is this confidence in one's own im- 
 mortality here, so to speak, that in war men 
 can always be found to lead a forlorn hope 
 more from a feeling that others are to fall and 
 not they than from any deliberate calculation 
 of the risk to be run. We do not even find 
 advancing age, with its clear demonstration 
 that the end cannot be far off, yet bring the 
 grave any nearer to view, for men then still 
 behave as if it were as distant to them as ever. 
 Old men are as ready as any younger men to 
 build houses which they cannot long occupy, 
 or to plant trees whose fruit they can scarcely 
 expect to gather. 
 
 Now it is a mistake to say that this is be- 
 cause men cling to life. It is not because they 
 cling to life, but because they forget death. 
 It is because the other world, and everything 
 w^hich concerns it, even the portal of its en- 
 trance, are so wholly hidden from men's minds 
 by this present world that no thoughts but 
 
THE HID TKEASURK 129 
 
 those which go below the surface of their 
 daily lives will ever awaken them to the im- 
 portance of the hereafter, and thus to the su- 
 preme importance of Christ. 
 
 It is, therefore, a great thing for a man to 
 find his thoughts awakening to the weighty 
 subject of the End. It is then that he has 
 begun to tread a field where a great treasure 
 can be found. For it is impossible to appre- 
 ciate the full significance of death to us here 
 without soon recognizing what a sad orphan- 
 age human life without God is on this earth. 
 The one word which best comports with the 
 facts of man's earthly existence is — insecurity. 
 Made to enjoy and to love many things, not 
 one of them can he be sure of for a day. 
 Years make every one more and more a loser, 
 and if he attain to old age, what has he at- 
 tained to then but to a wreck of his former 
 self. Finally, he is told by the world that the 
 debt of Nature has to be paid. Need we 
 wonder, in view of what that last payment is, 
 often after so many other heavy payments, 
 that many wish the debt had never been in- 
 curred? It is a pathetic illustration of the 
 
130 TUE PARABLES AND TUEIR HOME 
 
 underlying sense of their orphanage, that so 
 man}' millions of our race have accepted the 
 teaching of the Gautama Buddha that all con- 
 scious existence is a punishment, and that the 
 best thing which can come to a good man is an 
 eternal sleep ! But to every heart burdened 
 with earth's dark destiny and darker ending 
 comes the word of this parable, joined with 
 that former gracious injunction, " Seek, and 
 ye shall find." Not a heavenly kingdom on 
 earth, which therefore must perish with all 
 earthly things, but ye shall find the Kingdom 
 of Heaven, where the Father waits the coming 
 of his child. When that is found, all the 
 weight of man's helplessness here, and of life's 
 long poverty, vanishes. Naked we came into 
 this world, but the finding of this treasure in- 
 sures our leaving it rich indeed with an eter- 
 nal possession which cannot be spent ; for it 
 is not the pay of the hireling who barely lives 
 by paying it out again. The man who finds a 
 hid treasure has not received it in payment, nor 
 could he ever have earned a tithe of its value by 
 his own exertions. So he who works on earth 
 even for a heavenly reward, will be paid only 
 
THE HID TKEASUKE 131 
 
 according to the wages of earth, and in its 
 poor coin, without receiving one of the golden 
 pieces of God's great treasure. As unfamiliar 
 to him at first as were the shining ancient 
 coins to the eyes of the poor Sidon peasants, 
 he who begins to take the full measure of this 
 treasure of the parable which so long has been 
 waiting for him learns more and more of its 
 inestimable worth, though he may not be able 
 to reveal it to the world, and only carry the 
 full knowledge of it as his own secret. But 
 this he knows, that its revelation of a loving 
 fellowship with God, cemented by Christ, and 
 furnished for every step of his sojourn here, 
 exchanges the sense of life's loneliness for the 
 sanctifying sense of a sacred companionship 
 which shall not end until, with all who are 
 made pure in heart, he shall see God ! 
 
THE PEAEL 
 
Matt, xiii., 45, 46. 
 
 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like 'unto a mercliant- 
 man, seeking goodly pearls : Who, when he had found 
 one pearl of great price, went and sold all that lie had, and 
 bought it. 
 
THE PEARL 
 
 A PEAKL of the first quality is unquestion- 
 ably the most beautiful object in nature. 
 However brilliant the hard and cold diamond 
 may be, yet it cannot approach in loveliness 
 the bright but delicate lustre of the pearl. 
 Moreover, as an authority on the subject re- 
 marks, "of all the objects employed as orna- 
 ments, the pearl is almost the only one which 
 derives nothing from art. On the contrar}', 
 all attempts to give it more value only end in 
 deteriorating it." * Its worth, therefore, is 
 always intrinsic, and wholly dependent upon 
 its own properties. Hence the very great 
 difference between pearls. There are natural 
 pearls of a beautiful form and ample size, 
 which, however, do not display those wonder- 
 ful reflections of white light mingled with 
 azure which command a great price. They 
 
 * A Popular Account of Gems, by Louis Dieulafait, p. 192, 
 Scribner. 
 
136 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 are, therefore, called dead pearls, and may be 
 very cheaply bought. In all ages the pearl 
 really possessing the purest tints outranks in 
 costliness all except a very few diamonds. 
 Julius CsBsar gave one such to Servilia, the 
 sister of Cato, for which he paid a sum equal 
 to $223,000 of our money. A jewel which 
 cost but one-thousandth of this amount would 
 generally be considered expensive, but so rare 
 and yet unmistakable is the highest quality 
 of these exquisite objects tliat history abounds 
 with statements of still more extraordinary 
 sums which have been paid for single pearls. 
 We should not fail to note, therefore, that 
 when such a pearl is found by the seeker, he 
 knows that only in the highest quarters should 
 he offer it. " One famous pearl was brought 
 from the Indies by Gorgibus of Calais, and 
 presented to Philip IV. of Spain. ' How have 
 you ventured,' asked Philip of the merchant, 
 ' to put all your fortune into such a little ob- 
 ject?' 'I knew there was in the world the 
 king of Spain to buy it of me,' the merchant 
 answered. There was but one royal way of 
 rewarding such faith as this, and Philip IV. 
 
THE PEARL 137 
 
 became forthwith the owner of the pearl of 
 Gorgibus." * 
 
 Special knowledge, indeed, of the highest 
 order is requisite on the part of a pearl mer- 
 chant. Only long acquaintance with the re- 
 spective merits of thousands of specimens 
 would fit him safely to put all his fortune into 
 one ' such little object,' knowing that by doing 
 so he was making a very great gain. But both 
 in ancient times and in the Orient to this day 
 tlie search of a merchant for goodly pearls is 
 one which commonly entails much personal 
 hardship and danger. Whether on the shores 
 of the Red Sea or of the Persian Gulf, where 
 the pearls are obtained from the fishermen, 
 those regions have always had an evil repute 
 for the character of their inhabitants. Even 
 in Bagdad or in Damascus, the life of a man 
 known to be carrying a pearl of great price 
 about him would not be safe for an hour. Of- 
 ten, therefore, these possessors of costly pearls 
 disguise themselves and accompany caravans as 
 poor religious beggars or pilgrims, while they 
 
 * A Popular Account of Gems, by Louis Dieulafait, p. 196, 
 Scribner. 
 
138 THE I'AUABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 may have secreted in their bosoms more than 
 what would buy all the goods of their com- 
 panions. We need not wonder, therefore, 
 that the man himself becomes an enthusiast 
 over the preciousness of his treasure. His 
 whole life is bound up in it. His one sole 
 restorative, through the long desert journey, 
 is secretly now and then to feast his eyes upon 
 its matchless beauty, while he thinks of the 
 hour when it shall give him entrance into the 
 presence of the king. 
 
 The difference between the parables of the 
 hid treasure and the pearl is that the find- 
 ing of the treasure might occur to any one, 
 though in fact it usually comes to a poor 
 working-man while engaged in his ordinary 
 daily toil, and because he happened to be so 
 engaged. The pearl merchant, on the other 
 hand, devotes himself to a definite search, for 
 which he has undergone a long training, so 
 that he can appreciate the different values be- 
 tween pearls, while he never ceases to hope 
 that he will yet gain possession of some un- 
 equalled prize which will crown the labor of 
 his life. Frequent arc the parallels to such a 
 
THE PEARL 130 
 
 seeker in the story of the Church of God of 
 pure and noble spirits who by nature were in- 
 clined to be ever looking for the goodly pearls 
 of truth just for their own sake. In the 
 searcli for wisdom and knowledge there are 
 many such pearls to be found whose value is 
 great, and it testifies to a high instinct in a 
 man for him to choose any such pursuit. The 
 precious pearl of the parable does not pre- 
 clude there being in the world many other 
 beautiful and costly gems which are worth 
 seeking and possessing. It only enjoins the 
 search for the one pearl which will be worth 
 presenting to the king, and it implies that the 
 knowledge of all true pearls, instead of hin- 
 dering, will rather assist the more in finding 
 this greatest of them all. 
 
 The memory of one such seeker, Justin 
 Martyr, should ever be cherished by the 
 Churcli with especial affection as the forerun- 
 ner of many who through the ages have wit- 
 nessed to the prophecy of this parable by 
 letting the world know why, after much seek- 
 ing, they found no preciousness like the pre- 
 ciousness of Christ. At this very day the tes- 
 
140 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 tiraony of Justin is fought over between the 
 friends and the foes of Christianity, from a 
 clear recognition of its historical importance. 
 In his Dialogue Justin tells his own story 
 with that simple sincerity which gives the 
 true strain of his nature, for he wrote with a 
 perfect knowledge that it might bring death 
 to him, as in fact it did. Justin began as 
 a searcher for truth among the old philo- 
 sophic schools. He applied first to a Stoic, 
 then to an Aristotelian peripatetic, then to a 
 Pythagorean, and then to a Platonist. With 
 this last teacher he seemed to himself to grow 
 wiser every day. It was at that time, " when," 
 as he says, "in my foil}' I hoped soon to attain 
 to a clearer vision of God, that, seeking calm 
 and retirement by the sea-shore, I met an aged 
 man, meek and venerable, who led me at 
 length from philosophy and metaphysics to 
 faith. ' Pray before all things,' were the last 
 words of this new master, ' that the gates of 
 light be opened to you.' Immediately " (after 
 prayer), Justin adds, "a fire was kindled in 
 my soul, and as I discussed his arguments 
 with myself, I found Christianity to be the 
 
THE PEARL 141 
 
 only philosophy that is sure, and suited to 
 man's wants. Thus, then, and for this cause, 
 am I a philosopher." 
 
 It was a dangerous thing at that time for a 
 man like Justin to let it be known that he had 
 come upon such a discovery. It meant that 
 he should be ready for it to give up every- 
 thing — name, philosophy, life. But ready to 
 exchange all these, he came forward to ad- 
 dress Marcus Aurelius in defence of Christ 
 and his cause, appealing as a philosopher to a 
 philosopher. The result was that the philo- 
 sophic Aurelius became all the more deter- 
 mined that he who claimed the right as a phi- 
 losopher to advocate the cause of the despised 
 Galilean should pay for it with his blood. 
 Need we doubt that Justin now found his 
 pearl steadily gain in its sweet lustre, till 
 from his prison he went forth to kneel at the 
 block ? A short moment there, and he passed 
 to give his one treasure to Him who alone 
 could own it. For now the splendid pearl is 
 seen to be the man himself, reflecting in his 
 perfected spirit all the glory of Heaven's pure 
 liffht. The treasures of wisdom and of kuowl- 
 
142 THE PARABLES AND THEIK HOME 
 
 edge which the world prizes so much God 
 does not need, for lie has them ail and more. 
 But what he has long and ever desired is the 
 possession of just such sons of men. "And 
 they shall be mine, saith the Lord of hosts, 
 in that day when I make up my jewels." (Mal- 
 aclii iii. 17, rendered in the Revised V^crsion, 
 " a peculiar treasure.") 
 
 Everything in the preceding parables leads 
 np to this pair of the hid treasure and of the 
 pearl as the crowning teaching of them all. 
 A wide field of thought intervenes between 
 the conception of the seed of the first parable 
 and the pearl of great price, for we come to 
 the inmost heart of the truth about the king- 
 dom when it is presented as a single object of 
 inestimable worth which is only found by a 
 man for himself. The teaching of the hid 
 treasure and of the pearl, therefore, refers to 
 a deeply personal relation of the kingdom, 
 which from its very nature cannot be spoken 
 about always and everywhere. Our Lord in- 
 deed had enjoined before a wise form of 
 Christian reticence, which by some is too of- 
 ten forgotten, when he said, " Cast not your 
 
THE PEARL 143 
 
 pearls before swine." So there is a sacred 
 truth about Christ and each believer which 
 the world can neither see nor appreciate, but 
 which is the one explanation of Christ's en- 
 during hold upon men from age to age. It 
 is this which sustains liis follower just when 
 he has to go, as all others have to go, alone 
 to the grave. The difference between the 
 Christian and all others, then, is this pearl, or 
 the knowledge that Jesus is his own divine 
 redeemer. If Jesus be only a man there 
 would be no room in him for that knowledge 
 of every individual heart w^hich the Christian 
 is taught to depend upon. No finite being, 
 though an archangel, could ever fill the place 
 of Christ at death, because for that great hour 
 of individual experience the human heart can 
 accept nothing less than God, that blessed In- 
 finite One who alone can be to each man as if 
 he were the only one of his children. The 
 mysterious union of each of his people to 
 Christ, of which the New Testament speaks, 
 becomes, therefore, an intelligible doctrine 
 when the truth about the Son of God is 
 known. To feel that he knows all about us 
 
144 THE I'AUABLES AND TIIEIK HOME 
 
 as God only can know — our longings and our 
 fears, and everj'tliing which our spirits would 
 express, but for weakness cannot — and that he 
 will supply out of his divine love whatever 
 we lack, making us rich indeed, now, at death, 
 and forever, is that personal revelation in the 
 kingdom of heaven whose preciousncss can- 
 not be told in M-ords. That Jesus died for ev- 
 ery man is a doctrine which implies that he 
 could do so as an actual fact, and not in a gen- 
 eral or representative sense. It is this con- 
 viction which consecrates every life so bought 
 to a complete heart service in life to Ilini who 
 thus has become the dearest of friends, our 
 helper in every need and difficulty, whether 
 without or within, even to the hour when his 
 shepherd form will be seen going before, as 
 wc follow into the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death. 
 
THE HOUSEHOLDER'S TREASURE 
 
Matt, xiii., 51, 52, 
 
 Jesus saith iinto them. Have ye understood all these 
 things? They say unto him, Tea-, Lord. Then said he 
 unto them. Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto 
 the kingdom ofJicamn, is like vnto a man tbat is a house- 
 holder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new 
 and old. 
 
THE HOUSEHOLDER'S TREASURE 
 
 The close of our Lord's teaching on that 
 eventful day at the Lake was with an illustra- 
 tion given to his disciples of the varied as- 
 pects and many-sidedness of the kingdom 
 which he was to establish through them upon 
 the earth. At present, as in that age, the dis- 
 tribution of wealth in Palestine is so unequal 
 that the difference is wide indeed between the 
 common man, whose shelf shows only a few 
 vessels of clay, and whose coat is his one cov- 
 ering at night (Exod. xxii. 27), and the " son 
 of men," as the Arabic term is for those who 
 correspond to the "householders" of the para- 
 bles. During my own young days we spent 
 the summer months at Mount Lebanon vil- 
 lages in the ordinary houses of the people, 
 where, among other signs of the same pover- 
 ty as in old times, the infants are still not 
 uncommonly laid during the daytime in the 
 mangers of the cattle. Such an experience 
 
148 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 makes one appreciate how our modern man- 
 ufactures have enriched the homes of our 
 poor witli many an article, from a glass tum- 
 bler to a clock, which even the rich could not 
 show in former times. But in contrast with 
 our cheaply-turned -ont fineries, the store of 
 a wealthy emir may abound with treasures 
 which no machine can duplicate, precious in 
 material, and still more in the art and skill 
 which wrought them. Among these would be 
 cashmere shawls, embroideries in cloth and 
 leather, splendid vessels of silver and of gold; 
 inlaid armor and jewelled sword-hilts, with 
 blades whose steel is the despair of modern 
 metal-workers. These are his things old, 
 shown with a just historic pride, and not old 
 in the sense that such a man would keep in 
 his store anything worn out. Kather that 
 which he would show as new acquisitions 
 would have to be of much intrinsic value, so 
 as to correspond with the high worth of the 
 old. 
 
 This illustration of the householder was 
 based upon the examples which our Lord had 
 just given how the one theme of the kingdom 
 
THE householder's TREASURE 149 
 
 afforded many great themes of varied inter- 
 est and of supreme importance. Always will 
 there be many precious things old and pre- 
 cious things new to offer to this poor world 
 about the kingdom of God. With such a sub- 
 ject a Christian teaclier lias no excuse for 
 sameness or dulness, and should be the last 
 man to be charged with a poverty of ideas. 
 Also he should no more dwell monotonously 
 on some one truth out of the rest of his rich 
 store than the householder would bring forth 
 but one of his treasures as if that were all. 
 Such a phrase as " preaching the simple Gos- 
 pel " should never imply that the Gospel it- 
 self is simple, for it is very much the reverse, 
 and so infinitely varied in its relations to the 
 hearts of men that no man can preach it truth- 
 fully by merely repeating the words of an- 
 other man, even though an inspired man. He 
 must instead give something of the newness 
 of his own spirit and feeling to illustrate 
 whatever precious old truths it affords him, 
 for God has not made men duplicates in their 
 hearts or in their experiences any more than in 
 their features or their voices. Each genera- 
 
150 THE PAKABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 tion, also, is a new generation, and a preacher 
 should show that he is a man of his time as 
 well as one well furnished with the rich her- 
 itage of former generations. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 We may say, in conclusion, that in one great 
 respect the parables are a special revelation 
 of Christ himself. An illustration always 
 implies something very definite in the mind 
 beforehand which is to be illustrated, and 
 hence from these parables we deduce the cen- 
 tral conception itself which Jesus had from 
 the beginning. Pervading them all, and uni- 
 fying them as parts of one whole, is his King- 
 dom of Heaven. Much of the significance of 
 the parables, however, the men of that day 
 could not enter into because they were proph- 
 ecies, whose coming true we can perceive 
 now, but which then required generations yet 
 unborn to prove. Jesus looked far beyond 
 the multitude standing before him to scenes 
 and events of a very distant future. He fore- 
 told that the kingdom which was then the 
 least of all the seeds would wax so great that 
 his and its natural foes, even the very chil- 
 
154 THE TARABLES AND TUEIR HOME 
 
 dren of Satan, would fain ally themselves 
 with it for their own purposes. This kind of 
 success would never have occurred to human 
 imagination, but history answers with such 
 spectacles as the Caesar entering the fold from 
 motives of worldly calculation, and after him 
 more than one great monarch compelled to 
 fall at the feet of men who claimed all power 
 on earth because they were the successors of 
 one of those fishermen of that day on the 
 Lake. Though happily such forms of fulfil- 
 ment of the parables of the tares and of the 
 draw-net cannot recur now that the worldly 
 attractions of the Church are lessening, yet it 
 remains true that no men, whether Jews or 
 not, would have pictured a coming kingdom 
 other than with the old bodily sway of a 
 political dominion, witliout the faintest con- 
 ception of that mightier rule over the spirits 
 as well as the bodies of men which Jesus 
 knew that his kingdom would wield even 
 when perverted. 
 
 These aspects of the kingdom, however, are 
 but its incidental historical accompaniments. 
 Above all and through all runs the great truth 
 
CONCLUSION 155 
 
 that his kingdom, though in this world, is not 
 of this world, but of heaven. This conception 
 was too high not only for the Galilean multi- 
 tude, but for other multitudes as well, down 
 to our own day. There are some among us 
 who fondly cherish an ideal which is virtually 
 the same as that of the ancient Jews, of a 
 kingdom which Christ will establish at his 
 Second Advent, when he will personally reign 
 in the city of Jerusalem. But one would sup- 
 pose that even in the days of Jewish expec- 
 tancy some thoughtful minds would have 
 asked, of what abiding worth can any earthly 
 kingdom, even the Messiah's, be to men, when 
 at best they could enjoy its benefits only for 
 the brief period of their natural lives ? "With- 
 out death being abolished, along with disease 
 and suffering, without the whole present econ- 
 omy of nature being entirely changed, how 
 could men have but a life interest, so to 
 speak, in such an estate? But if such a 
 change should occur, of what service would 
 an earthly Jerusalem be then for the many 
 millions of the human race of any generation, 
 not to mention all the redeemed of every gen- 
 
156 THE PARABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 eration, a multitude we are told which no man 
 can number ? The entire area of the Jerusa- 
 lem which our Lord visited does not equal 
 the area of the Central Park of New York. 
 Such a fact shows how easily the imagination 
 can emancipate itself from all reasoning when 
 it turns to dreaming about the Lord's king- 
 dom. 
 
 Moreover, the conceptions of many minds 
 about the future triumph of the Church on 
 earth are bound with much the same sort of 
 secular limitations ; for they plainly think 
 more of her restoration to full power in this 
 present world than of her connection with the 
 world to come. But are the Christians of the 
 future, or of the millennium, to possess a great- 
 er importance in the kingdom than we do, 
 or than those who have preceded us in the 
 faith? After all is said about the importance 
 of the visible Church on earth, how can she 
 for a moment compare in true personal inter- 
 est for every one with the Church in heaven ? 
 It would be well for any one who sets such 
 store upon the particular church "pale" in 
 which he is found to reflect how he may 
 
CONCLUSION 157 
 
 meet at the King's riglit hand with his chosen 
 ones out of another fold. Of what importance 
 will it then seem to which temporary fold on 
 earth the heirs of the everlasting Kingdom of 
 Heaven belonged ? 
 
 In corapletest contrast with all such passing 
 things as any and every kingdom which men 
 conceive of, spoke in the parables He whose 
 words shall not pass away, though the heav- 
 ens and the earth shall pass away. Here he 
 tells us that man is not a temporary being, be- 
 cause he belongs to a kingdom which shall 
 have no end. There is, and there always has 
 been, a thing permanent in man, and that is 
 religion. The forms in which this element in 
 his nature has manifested itself have constant- 
 ly varied, changed, and passed away, but his 
 interest in religion itself has remained un- 
 changed and unchangeable, as it ever seeks to 
 find its last and abiding resting-place. In these 
 parables our Lord foretold the story of long 
 ages to come because he knew that he was 
 dealing with a permanent force in human 
 nature which comes from man's intuition that 
 there is more than this world which he sees 
 
158 THE TAIiABLES AND THEIR HOME 
 
 about him, and a life more enduring than that 
 which his fleeting breatli sustains. This old 
 witness to the Kingdom of Heaven our Lord 
 appealed to when lie exclaimed, " He who hath 
 ears to hear, let him hear!" for men always 
 have been conscious of a higher, purer, better 
 life than they find anywhere in this world. In 
 proportion to their longing for such a world 
 would their hearts be natural, honest, and 
 good, and thus ready to receive tlie seed-be- 
 ginning of its life from Him who is its divine 
 sower. That seed would manifest itself first 
 in the field of earthly life where it was sown, 
 in bringing forth tlie fruits of righteousness, 
 peace, and all goodness, until this world itself 
 would become transformed and changed by 
 the mighty but silent working of this heaven- 
 sent life. Do not the mind and the heart both 
 answer that his words must be true, for how 
 else can a life in heaven be possible ? With- 
 out a nature purified from every trace of that 
 love of self which is the source of all sin, im- 
 mortality, with its inconceivable opportunities 
 for action, would be only an awful curse. But 
 with a perfect transformation into the likeness 
 
CONCLUSION 159 
 
 of the King himself, wliose name is the Lamb 
 of Sacrifice, entitling the changed man then to 
 society with him and with all the sons of God, 
 our Lord's revelation of such a Kingdom of 
 Heaven makes it meet indeed to exchange all 
 this poor world can give for its priceless and 
 beautiful inheritance. 
 
 THE END 
 
CHRIST IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 JESUS CHRIST IN THE OLD TESTAMENT; or, 
 The Great Argument. By W. II. Thomson', M.A., 
 M.D., Professor of Materia Mcdica aud Therapeu- 
 tics, Medical Departmeut University of New York. 
 Crown 8vo, Cloth, $3 00. 
 
 The book is worthy in every way of careful reading, and 
 we trust it will do much to confirm the faith of wavering 
 Christians, and show the " internal critics " that men outside 
 the pulpit see the folly of their assaults on God's Word just 
 as plainly as those who preach the whole Bible's simple 
 truth to sinners. — Christian Intelligencer^ N. Y. 
 
 The argument of the author is masterly, grand, unanswer- 
 able. It should be carefully studied by all who wish to have 
 an intelligent understanding of the fundamental truths of the 
 Word of God. — Interior, Chicago. 
 
 Dr. Thomson's special qualifications for the task lie in his 
 familiarity with Oriental, Arabic, and Jewish habits of 
 thought aud expression, and with the scenery and modes of 
 life of those lands where the Bible writings originated, while 
 his own scientific training fits him for exactness of reason- 
 ing. — N. Y. Times. 
 
 A book which can be recommended to the thoughtful stu- 
 dents of the life of our Lord as related to Old Testament 
 prophecy. It is fresh, stimulating, and eminently readable. 
 Dr. Thomson's style -is stirring and aggressive. — Sunday 
 School Times, Philadelphia. 
 
 We commend this book to all our readers, aud more espe- 
 'cially to the clergy. — Churchman, N. Y. 
 
 Pdblished by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 
 gST'The above imrh is for sale by all booksellers, or will be sent 
 by the xiuhlishers, postage prepaid, to anij part of the United States, 
 Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. 
 
MODERN MISSIONS 
 MODERN MISSIONS IN THE Ex\ST. Their 
 Metliods, Successes, and Limitations. By Ed- 
 ward A. Lawrence, D.J). With an Introduc- 
 tion by Edward T. Eaton, D.D., LL.D. Post 
 8vo, Cloth, $1 75. 
 
 Most of tiic contents of this volume were first given to 
 the pubhc in the form of lectures at Andover Theological 
 Seminary, and later at the Yule Divinity Scliool and at Beloit 
 College. It gives an account of a missionary journey around 
 the world, undertaken with the express purpose of studying 
 the work of the several denominations. The author was 
 equipped for his task with a more than ordinary training of 
 mind, breadth of judgment, and the glow of spirit necessary 
 for the large and accurate understanding of what such a 
 journey has to disclose. Among the chapters are the fol- 
 lowing : 
 
 Providence in Missions. 
 
 Tiie Principles of Missions — 
 Tlie Mission Aim, Scope, 
 Motive, Call, Fitness, and 
 Fitting. 
 
 Cliina — Corca — Japan. 
 
 India. 
 
 The Turkish Dominions. 
 
 Entrance into Work. 
 
 The Problems of Missions. 
 
 Tiie Departments of Mission- 
 ary Work in Their Vari- 
 ety. 
 
 The Ilome and Rest of the 
 Missionary. 
 
 Sketches from the Mission 
 Field. 
 
 Tlic Church and Missions. 
 
 Tlie Spiritual Expansion of 
 Christendom. 
 
 PcjDLisiiED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 
 ^W^ The above loork in for sale hy all booksellers, or will be 
 sent hy the publishers, postage prepaid, to any part of the United 
 States, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. 
 
THE LAND AND THE BOOK 
 
 THE LAND AND THE BOOK; or, Biblical Illnstra- 
 tious drawn from tlio Mauuers and Customs, the 
 Scenes and Scenery, of the Holy Land. By William 
 M. Thomson, D.D., Forty-five Years a Missionary in 
 Syria and Palestine. In Three Volumes, 8vo, with 
 many Blustrations and Maps. Price per volume : 
 Cloth, |6 00; Sheep, $7 00; Half Morocco or Half 
 Calf, $3 50; Full Morocco, $10 00. (Volumes sold 
 separately.) 
 
 Popular Edition in Three Volumes, 8vo, Illuminated 
 Cloth, $7 50; Half Leather, %\Q 50. {Sold only in 
 sets.) 
 
 Vol. I. Southern Palestine and Jerusalem. 
 
 Vol. II. Central Palestine and Phcenicia. 
 
 Vol. III. Lebanon, Damascus, and Beyond Jordan. 
 
 Students of the daily life, the personal and ideographical en- 
 vironments of Jesus and his disciples, will find the work invalua- 
 ble— A'. 1". Herald. 
 
 His work is more than a mere geographical description of 
 Palestine, though he has given much attention to that department; 
 or a mere delineation of Eastern manners, though it would be 
 difficult to find anywhere else so graphic and accurate a por- 
 traiture of the daily life of the Orientals. — Christian at Work, N. Y. 
 
 For the preacher, the Sunday-school teacher, every Bible 
 student and Christian home, the work will prove a rare treasure. 
 There is no work that can come even near taking its place. — 
 Christian Advocate, N. Y. 
 
 The information which may be derived from Dr. Thomson's 
 careful and authentic descriptions of the manners and customs, 
 the natural products and common sights, of the Holy Laud is fresh 
 and true, and is not to be found in the works of other writers, 
 who have not, as a rule, possessed the advantages, the scholarship, 
 or the Biblical knowledge of this veteran authority. — Athcnmuni, 
 London. 
 
 Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 
 
 e^The above ivm-k is for sale by all booksellers, or luill be sent 
 hij the jnihlishers, jMstacje prepaid, to any part of the United States, 
 Canada, or Mexico, on receipt o/ the price. 
 
ILLUSTRATED BIBLE DICTIONAHY 
 
 ILLUSTEATED BIBLE DICTIOXARY and Ticasury 
 of Biblical History, Biography, Geography, Doc- 
 triuo, aud Litcratiuc. With Niimcrons Illustra- 
 tions aud Important Chronological Tables and 
 Maps. By M. G. Easton, M.A., D.D. Crowu 8vo, 
 Cloth, |1 50. 
 
 Every preaclier, every teacher, and every Bible student 
 will find this an invaluable aid to the study of the Bible. It 
 is a complete and trustworthy book of reference on all bibli- 
 cal subjects, handy and compact in form. It contains over 
 200 illustrations, besides numerous maps and plans (includ- 
 ing a large colored map of Palestine) which have been spe- 
 cially designed, and embody the results of recent travel and 
 exploration, and it is issued at a price which places it within 
 the reach of every student and jSunday-school teacher. 
 
 There are three good features in this Dictionary: it is 
 cheap ; it is compact in form ; it was prepared with great 
 care and learning. The essence of the larger works is here. 
 It makes a convenient reference book for the table of the 
 scholar; it will prove invaluable to the preacher, teacher, 
 and Bible student; it is amply illustrated, and contains all 
 the requisite maps of Biiile lands. — Zion's Herald, Boston. 
 
 A complete and useful book of reference in the study of 
 the Word, concise and careful, with the results of the most 
 recent research in all departments of biblical literature. It 
 is not sectarian, but is orthodox, and will be an efficient 
 helper, especially to the Sabbath-school teacher. — Presby- 
 terian, Philadelphia. 
 
 PnnLiSHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, New Youk. 
 
 j8f5°" The above xoork is for sale by all bookftcllers, or will be, 
 sent by the publibhers, postayc prepaid, to any part of the United 
 Slateti, Canada, or Mexico, on receipt of the price. 
 
Date Due