facts, has served a good
purpose in the evidences and exposition of revealed religion. The more
abstract terms of a language are not so distinctly apprehended as the
more concrete, and in the course of ages are more liable to change. The
habit, universal among the writers of the Scriptures from the most
ancient to the latest, of making abstract moral conceptions fast to
pillars of natural objects and current facts, has contributed much to
fix the doctrines like fossils for all time, and so to diminish the area
of controversy. All the more steadily and safely has revealed truth come
down from the earliest time to the present day, that it has in every
part of its course run on two distinct but parallel tracks.

II.--PARABLES.

The parable is one of the many forms in which the innate analogy between
the material and the moral may be, and has been practically applied.[2]
The difficulty of constructing a definition which should include every
similitude that belongs to this class, and exclude all others, has been
well appreciated by expositors and frankly confessed. The parables of
the New Testament, after critics have done their utmost to generalize
and classify, must in the end be accounted _sui generis_, and treated
apart from all others. The etymology of the name affords us no help, for
it is applied without discrimination to widely diverse forms of
comparison; it indicates the juxtaposition of two thoughts or things,
with the view of exhibiting and employing the analogy which may be found
to subsist between them; but several other terms convey precisely the
same meaning, and therefore it cannot supply us with the distinguishing
characteristic of a class. As far as I have been able to observe, hardly
anything has been gained at this point by the application of logical
processes. The distinctions which have been successfully made are
precisely those which are sufficiently obvious without a critical
apparatus; and in regard to those comparisons which bear the closest
affinity to the parable, and in which, on account of the rainbow-like
blending of the boundaries, logical definitions are most needed, logical
definitions have most signally failed. Scholars have, for example,
successfully distinguished parables from myths and fables; but this is
laboriously to erect a fence between two flocks that in their nature
manifest no tendency to intermingle; whereas, from some other forms of
analogy, such as the allegory, the parabl