d entirely useless for the practical purposes of
life. Such would sacred literature become if in blind admiration of the
fathers, the children should simply use the old, and not produce the
new. As we advance along the course of time, we are, as it were, tracing
a circle; and he who would be of use in his generation, must bend his
speculations to the time, and let them touch society on the level at
every point in the progress of the race. To throw a new contribution
into the goodly store does not, therefore, imply a judgment on the part
of the writer that the modern theology is better than the ancient. We
must make our own: it concerns us and our children that what we make be
in substance drawn from the word of God; and in form, suited to the
circumstances of the age.

Still further, the accumulations of the past should be used by those who
inherit them, as a basis on which to build. It is the business of each
generation to lay another course on the wall, and so leave the structure
loftier than they found it. The Bible, like the world, is inexhaustible;
in either department hosts of successive investigators have plied their
tasks from the beginning, and yet there is room.

Some observations are here submitted, more or less strictly introductory
to a treatise on a specific branch of Scriptural exegesis--the Parables
of Our Lord.

I.--ANALOGY.

As the husbandman's first care is neither the fruit nor the tree which
bears it, but the soil in which the tree must grow: so an expositor,
whose ultimate aim is to explain and enforce the parables of Jesus,
should mark well at the outset the fundamental analogies which pervade
the works of God, and constitute the basis of all figurative language,
whether in human teaching or divine.

The Maker and Ruler of the universe pursues an object, and works on a
plan. His purpose is one, and he sees the end from the beginning: the
variations, infinite in number, and vast in individual extent, which
emerge in the details of his administration, are specific accommodations
of means to ends.

The material and moral departments of the divine government are, like
body and soul of a human being, widely diverse from each other; but one
Master administers both with a view to a common end. The two departments
are different in kind, and therefore the laws which regulate the one
cannot be the same as the laws which regulate the other; but in both one
designer operates towards one design, and t