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Thus we have a clue to the fact that the prophets perceived nearly everything in parables and allegories, and clothed spiritual truths in bodily forms, for such is the usual method of imagination. All these expressions are plainly in harmony with the current ideas of God and spirits.
"You do not answer me, De Launay," he resumed, "You think perhaps that I am talking in parables, and that my mind has been persuaded into a metaphysical and rambling condition by an hour's contemplation of the sunlight on the sea!
The stage before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully growing; the stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict, and in storm. To the first stage belong the plant parables, full of exquisite sympathy with the unfolding of natural beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second stage belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the proximate, sudden second coming.
From the close air of crowded cities, from thronged temples and synagogues, where priest and Levite kept up a show of worship, drumming upon hollow ceremonials the more loudly for their emptiness of life, as the husk rustles the more when the grain is gone, He led His disciples out into the country stillness, under clear Eastern heavens, on the breezy tops of mountains, in the shade of fruit- trees, by the side of fountains, and through yellow harvest-fields, enforcing the lessons of His divine morality by comparisons and parables suggested by the objects around Him or the cheerful incidents of social humanity, the vineyard, the field-lily, the sparrow in the air, the sower in the seed-field, the feast and the marriage.
While this parable rebukes all pride and cuts off all merit of works, it is nevertheless true that in other parables our Lord taught the certainty of rewards which he is to grant faithful servants not as a matter of compulsion on his part but in loving grace. C. The Last Stages. Chs. 17:11 to 19:28 The Samaritan Leper. Ch. 17:11-19
The charm of Heaven will be the Lord's presence. "Where I am, ye shall be also." We shall see His face, and be forever with Him. What would not men give, if some old manuscripts might turn up with new stories of His wondrous life, new parables as charming as those of the Good Shepherd and the Prodigal Son; new beatitudes; new discourses like that on the Vine. God might have permitted this.
He was speaking in parables, as a philosopher should; but if he had stood among an English working crowd, his philosophic imagination would have been terribly strained by literal fact.
It is my hope that a hundred apter and more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine as far behind as the religious pictures of the fifteenth century left behind the first attempts of the early Christians at iconography. In that hope I withdraw and ring up the curtain. In the Beginning The Garden of Eden. Afternoon.
The young seaman laughed; and, as if this sally had broken through the barrier of his reserve, his manner lost much of its cold restraint during the remainder of their conference. "It is just as plain," he said, "that you have been at sea, as it is that I have been at school. Since we have both been so fortunate, we may afford to be generous and cease speaking in parables.
"They [this and the parable of the tares] convey, too, the same further lesson, that this fact [the actual intermixture of evil in the visible Church] does not justify self-willed departure from the fellowship of the Church, and impatient leaping over or breaking through the nets, as here it has often been called; but the Lord's separation is patiently to be waited for, which shall surely arrive at the end of the present age." Dr. Trench, Notes on the Parables, p.
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