INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

CHAPTER I.

ON THE DEFINITION OF THE PARABLE.

THOSE writers who have had occasion to define a parable* do not appear to have found it an easy task to give such a satisfying definition as should omit none of its distinguishing marks, and yet at the same time include nothing that was superfluous and merely accidental. Rather than attempt to add another to the many definitions already given,† I will seek to note briefly what seems to me to difference it from the fable, the allegory, and such other forms of composition as most closely border upon it. In the process of thus distinguishing it from those forms of composition, with which it is most nearly allied, and therefore most

* Пaρaßoλń, from rаpaßáλλew, projicere, objicere, i. e. rì rív, to put forth one thing before or beside another; and it is assumed, when rapaßoλń is used for parable, though not necessarily included in the word, that the purpose for which they are set side by side is that they may be compared one with the other. That this is not necessarily included is proved not only from the derivation, but from the fact that the word itself and the whole family of cognate words, as παράβολος, παραβόλως, parabolanus, are used in altogether a different sense, yet one growing out of the same root, in which the notion of putting forth is retained, but it is no longer for the purpose of comparison, which is only the accident, not of the essence of the word. Thus apáßoλos, qui objicit se præsentissimo vitæ periculo, one who exposes his life, as those called parabolani, because they buried infected corpses at Alexandria.

Many from the Greek Fathers are to be found in SUICER'S Thes., s. v. πapaßoλń. Jerome, on Mark iv., defines it thus: Sermonem utilem, sub idoneà figurâ expressum, et in recessu, continentem spiritualem aliquam admonitionem; and he calls it finely in another place (Ad Algas.), Quasi umbra prævia veritatis. Among the moderns, Unger (De Parab. Jesu Naturâ, p. 30): Parabola Jesu est collatio per narratiunculam fictam, sed verisimilem, seriò illustrans rem sublimiorem. Teelman: Parabola est similitudo à rebus communibus et obviis desumta ad significandum quicquam spirituale et cæleste. Bengel: Parabola est oratio, quæ per narrationem fictam sed veræ similem, à rebus ad vitæ communis usum pertinentibus desumtam, veritates minus notas aut morales repræsentat.

likely to be confounded, and justifying the distinction, its essential properties will come before us much more clearly than I could hope to bring them in any other way.

But not to say assertion, the dif

1. There are some who have confounded the parable with the sopic fable, or drawn only a slight and hardly perceptible line of distinction between them, as for instance Lessing and Storr, who affirm that the fable relates an event as having actually taken place at a certain time, while the parable only assumes it as possible. that examples altogether fail to bear them out in this ference is much more real, and far more deeply seated than this. The parable is constructed to set forth a truth spiritual and heavenly: this the fable, with all its value, is not; it is essentially of the earth, and never lifts itself above the earth. It never has a higher aim than to inculcate maxims of prudential morality, industry, caution, foresight; and these it will sometimes recommend even at the expense of the higher self-forgetting virtues. The fable just reaches that pitch of morality which the world will understand and approve. But it has no place in the Scripture, and in the nature of things could have none, for the purpose of Scripture excludes it; that purpose being the awakening of man to a consciousness of a divine original, the education of the reason, and of all which is spiritual in man, and not, except incidentally, the sharpening of the understanding. For the purposes of the fable, which are the recommendation and enforcement of the prudential virtues, the regulation of that in man which is instinct in beasts, in itself a laudable discipline, but by itself leaving him only a subtler beast of the field,-for these purposes, examples and illustrations taken from the world beneath him are admirably suited. That world is therefore the haunt and the main region, though by no means the exclusive one, of the fable: even when men are introduced, it is on the side by which they are connected

*The two fables that are found in the Old Testament, that of the trees which would choose a king (Judg. ix. 8-15), and the brief one of the thistle and cedar (2 Kin. xiv. 9), may seem to impeach the universality of this rule, but do not so in fact. For in neither case is it God that is speaking, nor yet messengers of his, delivering his counsel: but men, and from an earthly standing point, not a divine. Jotham seeks only to teach the men of Shechem their folly, not their sin, in making Abimelech king over them: the fable never lifting itself to the rebuke of sin, as it is sin; this is beyond its region; but only in so far as it is also folly. And Jehoash, in the same way, would make Amaziah see his presumption and pride, in challenging him to the conflict, not thereby teaching him any moral lesson, but only giving evidence in the fable which he uttered, that his own pride was offended by the challenge of the Jewish king.

†The greatest of all fables, the Reineke Fuchs, affords ample illustration of all this; it is throughout a glorifying of cunning as the guide of life and the deliverer from all evil.

with that lower world; while on the other hand, in the parable, the world of animals, though not wholly excluded, finds only admission in so far as it is related to man. The relation of beasts to one another not being spiritual, can supply no analogies, can be in no wise helpful for declaring the truths of the kingdom of God. But all man's relations to man are spiritual, many of his relations to the world beneath him are so also. His lordship over the animals, for instance, rests on his higher spiritual nature, is a dominion given to him from above; therefore, as in the instance of the shepherd and sheep (John x.) and elsewhere, it will serve to image forth deeper truths of the relation of God to man.

It belongs to this, the loftier standing point of the parable, that it should be deeply earnest, allowing itself therefore in no jesting nor raillery at the weaknesses, the follies, or the crimes of men. Severe and indignant it may be, but it never jests at the calamities of men, however well deserved, and its indignation is that of holy love: while in this raillery, and in these bitter mockings, the fabulist not unfrequently indulges ;the rubs biting salt into the wounds of men's souls-it may be, perhaps it generally is, with a desire to heal those hurts, yet still in a very different spirit from that in which the affectionate Saviour of men poured oil and wine into the bleeding wounds of humanity.

Phædrus' definition of the fable squares with that here given:

Duplex libelli dos est, ut risum moveat,

Et quod prudenti vitam consilio monet.

As finds place, for instance, in La Fontaine's celebrated fable,-La Cigale ayant chantè tout l'été,-in which the ant, in reply to the petition of the grasshopper, which is starving in the winter, reminds it how it sung all the summer, and bids it to dance now. That fable, commending as it does foresight and prudence, preparation against a day of need, might be compared for purposes of contrast to more than one parable urging the same, as Matt. xxv. 1; Luke xvi. 1; but with this mighty difference, that the fabulist has only worldly needs in his eye, it is only against these that he urges to lay up by timely industry a sufficient store; while the Lord in his parables would have us to lay up for eternal life, for the day when not the bodies, but the souls that have nothing in store, will be naked and hungry, and miserable, to prepare for ourselves a reception into everlasting habitations. The image which the French fabulist uses was very well capable of such higher application, had he been conscious of any such needs (see Prov. vi. 8, and on that verse, COTELER, Patt. Apos., v. i. p. 104, note 13, and Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. lxvi. 2). In Saadi's far nobler fable, The Ant and the Nightingale, from whence La Fontaine's is undoubtedly borrowed, such application is distinctly intimated. Von Hammer has in this view an interesting comparison between the French and the Persian fable (Gesch. d. schön. Redek. Pers., p. 207).—The fable with which Herodotus (i. 141) relates Cyrus to have answered the Ionian ambassadors, when they offered him a late submission, is another specimen of the bitter irony, of which this class of composition is often the vehicle.

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And yet again, there is another point of difference between the parable and the fable. While it can never be said that the fabulist is regardless of truth, since it is neither his intention to deceive, when he attributes language and discourse of reason to trees, and birds, and beasts, nor is any one deceived by him; yet the severer reverence for truth, which is habitual to the higher moral teacher, will not allow him to indulge even in this sporting with the truth, this temporary suspension of its laws, though upon agreement, or, at least, with tacit understanding. In his mind, the creation of God, as it came from the Creator's hands, is too perfect, has too much of reverence owing to it, to be represented otherwise than as it really is. The great Teacher by parables, therefore, allowed himself in no transgression of the established laws of nature-in nothing marvellous or anomalous; he presents to us no speaking trees or reasoning beasts,* and we should be at once conscious of an unfitness in his so doing.

2. The parable is different from the mythus, inasmuch as in the mythus, the truth and that which is only the vehicle of the truth are wholly blended together: and the consciousness that there is any distinction between them, that it is possible to separate the one from the other, belongs only to a later and more reflective age than that in which the mythus itself had birth, or those in which it was heartily believed. The mythic narrative presents itself not merely as the vehicle of the truth, but as itself being the truth; while in the parable, there is a perfect consciousness in all minds, of the distinctness between form and essence, shell and kernel, the precious vessel and yet more precious wine which it contains. There is also the mythus of another class, the artificial product of a later self-conscious age, of which many inimitable specimens are to be found in Plato, devised with distinct intention of embodying some important spiritual truth, of giving an outward subsistence to an idea. But these, while they have many points of resemblance with the parable, yet claim no credence for themselves either as actual or possible (in this differing from the parable), but only for the

* Klinckhardt (De Hom. Div. et Laz., p. 2): Fabula aliquod vitæ communis morumque, præceptum simplici et nonnunquam jocosâ oratione illustrat per exemplum plerumque contra veram naturam fictum: parabola autem sententiam sublimiorem (ad res divinas pertinentem) simplici quidem sed gravi et serià oratione illustrat per exemplum ita excogitatum ut cum rerum naturâ maximè convenire videatur. And Cicero (De Invent., 1. 19): Fabula est in quâ nec veræ nec verisimiles res continentur. But of the parable Origen says, "EσTI Tаρaßoλn, λóyos ás περὶ γινομένου, μὴ γινομένου μὲν κατὰ τὸ ῥητόν, δυναμένου δὲ γενέσθαι. There is then some reason for the fault which Calov finds with Grotius, though he is only too ready to find fault, for commonly using the terms fabula and fabella in speaking of our Lord's parables, terms which certainly have an unpleasant sound in the ear.

truth which they embody and declare. The same is the case when upon some old legend or myth that has long been current, there is thrust some spiritual significance, clearly by an afterthought; in which case it perishes in the letter that it may live in the spirit; all outward subsistence is denied to it, for the sake of asserting the idea which it is made to contain. To such a process, as is well known, the latter Platonists submitted the old mythology of Greece. For instance, Narcissus falling in love with his own image in the water-brook, and pining there, was the symbol of man casting himself forth into the world of shows and appearances, and expecting to find the good that would answer to his nature there, but indeed finding only disappointment and death. It was their meaning hereby to vindicate that mythology from charges of absurdity or immorality-to put a moral life into it, whereby it should maintain its ground against the new life of Christianity, though indeed they were only thus hastening the destruction of whatever lingering faith in it there yet survived in the minds of men.

3. The parable is also clearly distinguishable from the proverb, though it is true that in a certain degree, the words are used interchangeably in the New Testament, and as equivalent the one to the other. Thus "Physician heal thyself" (Luke iv. 23), is termed a parable, being more strictly a proverb; so again, when the Lord had used that proverb, probably already familiar to his hearers,† "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall in the ditch," Peter said, "Declare unto us this parable" (Matt. xv. 14, 15); and again, Luke v. 36 is a proverb or proverbial expression, rather than a parable, which name it bears. So, upon the other hand, those are called proverbs in St. John, which, if not strictly parables, yet claim much closer affinity to the parable than to the proverb, being in fact allegories: thus Christ's setting forth of his relations to his people under those of a shepherd to his sheep, is termed a "proverb," though our translators, holding fast to the sense rather than to the letter, have rendered it a "parable." (John x. 6, compare xvi. 25, 29.) It is not difficult to explain how this interchange of the two words should have come to pass. Partly from the fact which has been noted by many, of there being but one word in the Hebrew to signify both parable and proverb; which circumstance must have had considerable influence upon writers accustomed to think in that language, and itself

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* Пupoquía, that is, rap' olμov, a trite, wayside saying, rapodía. But some derive it from olun, a tale, or poem. Yet Passow's explanation of the latter word shows that at the root the two derivations are the same.-See SUICER'S Thes., s. v. Topoчuía.

It is current at least now in the East, as I find it in a collection of Turkish Proverbs, in VON HAMMER'S Morgenl. Kleelbatt, p. 63.

The word mapaßoλ never occurs in St. John, nor wapouía in the three first Evangelists.