ts of it differing from each
other, cannot be both correct, is impertinent and trifling. It is a
pedantic literalism contrary to experience and to common sense. It rests
upon the assumption that a public Teacher who taught the common people
daily, on the margin of the lake and in private dwellings, in the Temple
at Jerusalem and in the sequestered villages around, never repeated with
variations in one place the substance of a lesson which he had given in
another. Even in the immense profusion of nature every plant is not in
all its features different from all others; two individuals or species
are found in some respects the same and in some respects different. The
two walk together as far as they are going the same way, and separate
when each approaches his own peculiar and specific terminus. This
combination of identity and difference pervades creation; and you may
observe the same characteristics in the scheme of Providence. Two men
during a portion of their life-course suffer the same troubles and taste
the same joys; but at a certain point in their progress their paths
diverge, and they never meet again in a common experience. Look even to
the history of any citizen whose life is public, and you will find that
by speech, or writing, or act, he prosecutes his objects by a mixture
of sameness and diversity. His address in the high court of the nation,
and his address to his rustic constituents in a distant province, will
be found in some features similar and in some different: yet the address
in either case will be found an independent and consistent whole,
corresponding to the character of the speaker and the circumstances of
his audience.

[43] No. XXI. of this series.

This "Teacher sent from God" was wont in later lessons to walk sometimes
over his own former footsteps, as far as that track best suited his
purpose, and to diverge into a new path at the point where a diversity
in the circumstances demanded a variety in the treatment. This is the
method followed both in nature and revelation,--the method both of God
and of men.

"A certain king made a marriage for his son," the two important features
here are the royal state of the father, and the specific designation of
the supper as the nuptial feast of his son. It may be quite true, as
some critics say, that because the greatest feasts were usually
connected with marriages, the epithet "marriage" was sometimes applied
to any sumptuous banquet; if in the Scri