United States or Ethiopia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Christ's parable about the Kingdom of Heaven in the world being like a man that sowed good seed in his field, which sprung up intermingled with tares, contains the lesson, not so much of the purity or nonpurity of the Church as of the inseparable intertwining in the world of Christian people with others.
Satan envied our happiness, brake our ranks, poisoned our fountains, mudded and defiled our streams; and while the watchmen slept, the wicked one sowed his tares: whence these divers years bygone, for ministerial authority, we had lordly supremacy and pomp; for beauty, fairding; for simplicity, whorish buskings; for sincerity, mixtures; for zeal, a Laodicean temper; for doctrines, men's precepts; for wholesome fruits, a medley of rites; for feeders we had fleecers; for pastors, wolves and impostors; for builders of Jerusalem, rebuilders of Jericho; for unity, rents; for progress, defection.
It is worse than useless to waste time in dissecting the negative accretions of other people's beliefs. In doing so we run great risks of rooting up the wheat along with the tares, and we shall certainly succeed in brushing people up the wrong way; moreover, by looking out exclusively for the life-giving and affirmative elements, we shall reap benefit to ourselves.
Under the sway of Barbarossa, under our old anti-chaotic friend Henry the Fowler, how different had it been! No field for a Belleisle to come and sow tares in; no rotten thatch for a French Sun-god to go sailing about in the middle of, and set fire to!
Yet there was, by reason of a fierce Flame which issued out and came from before him, a convenient distance betwixt him and them, as betwixt the Judge and the Prisoners at the bar. I heard it also proclaimed to them that attended on the Man that sat on the Cloud, Gather together the Tares, the Chaff, and Stubble, and cast them into the burning Lake.
In default of this we can only humbly erase here, and reverently suggest there, summoning to our aid all possible knowledge, lest in plucking up the tares we pluck up the wheat also. And this is really all that textual criticism for the last hundred and forty years has aimed at merely to get at what Shakespeare really wrote.
Your experience is that as soon as you turn your back the most perfect vulgarity springs luxuriantly from the soil in which you had laboured to plant the noblest things; you return, and have just ploughed up once more half of the soil, when the tares begin to sprout even more impertinently. Truly I watch you with sadness.
Her members are still a mixture of tares and wheat; of sheep and goats: so that there is still a necessity of discerning between the precious and the vile; of trying and censuring false teachers; and of guarding divine ordinances from contempt and pollution.
For though there are no hard tests for separating the tares and the wheat of any people, one rude but efficient guide is that the nice Jew is called Moses Solomon, and the nasty Jew is called Thornton Percy. The keeper of the curiosity shop was of the Thornton Percy branch of the chosen people; he belonged to those Lost Ten Tribes whose industrious object is to lose themselves.
He groaned in spirit and wrestled with his new and invisible adversary, beseeching the Most Merciful, from the bitterness of his suspense, a speedy deliverance or a happy death. There were thistles and tares in the unkept rose-garden, and the cottage was abandoned to a sisterhood of doves, who mourned perpetually for their lost princess.
Word Of The Day