sooner or later they all marshal themselves in order under it: so it is tolerable evidence that we have found the right interpretation of a parable, if it leave none of the main circumstances unexplained. A false interpretation will inevitably betray itself, since it will "invariably paralyze and render nugatory some important member of an entire account." If we have the right key in our hand, not merely some of the words, but all, will have their corresponding parts, and moreover the key will turn without grating or over-much forcing; and if we have the right interpretation, it will scarcely need to be defended and made plausible with great appliance of learning, to be propped up by remote allusions to Rabbinical or profane literature, by illustrations drawn from the recesses of antiquity.*

Once more-the parables may not be made first sources of doctrine. Doctrines otherwise and already grounded may be illustrated, or indeed further confirmed by them; but it is not allowable to constitute doctrine first by their aid. They may be the outer ornamental fringe, but not the main texture, of the proof. For from the literal to the figurative, from the clearer to the more obscure, has been ever recognized as the law of Scripture interpretation. This rule, however, has been often forgotten, and controversialists, looking round for arguments with which to sustain some weak position, one for which they can find no other support in Scripture, often invent for themselves supports in these. Thus Bellarmine presses the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the circumstance that in that the thieves are said first to have stripped the traveller,

*That which is required in a satisfactory solution, is well stated by Teelman (Comm. in Luc., 16, p. 23): Explicatio non sit hiulca, non aspera, non auribus nec judicio difficilis, non ridicula; sed mollis et verecunda, leniter manantis fluvii instar amoenitate in aures auditorumque judicium influens, appropriata, proxima, et ab omni longa petitione remota.

This rule finds its expression in the recognized axiom: Theologia parabolica non est argumentativa. And again: Ex solo sensu litterali peti possunt argumenta efficacia. See GERHARD'S Loc. Theol., 1. 2, c. 13, § 202. There is a beautiful passage in ANSELM's Cur Deus Homo, 1. 1, c. 4, on the futility of using as primary arguments what indeed can but serve as graceful confirmation of truths already on other grounds received and believed, and against gainsayers most of all. The objector is made to reply to one who presses him with the wonderful correspondencies of Scripture: Omnia hæc pulcra et quasi quædam picturæ suscipienda sunt: sed si non sit aliquid solidum super quod sedeant, non videntur infidelibus satisfacere: nam qui picturam vult facere, aliquid eligit solidum super quod pingat, ut maneat quod pingit. Nemo enim pingit in aquâ vel in aëre; quia ibi nulla manent picturæ vestigia. Qua propter cùm has convenientias quas dicis, infidelibus quasi quasdam picturas rei gestæ obtendimus, quoniam non rem gestam sed figmentum arbtrantur esse quod credimus; quasi super nubem pingere nos existimant. Monstranda est prius veritatis rationabilis soliditas. Deinde, ut ipsum quasi corpus veritatis plus niteat, istæ convenientiæ, quasi picturæ corporis sunt exponendæ.

and afterwards to have inflicted wounds on him, as proving certain views of the Romish Church on the order of man's fall, the succession in which, first losing heavenly gifts, the robe of a divine righteousness, he afterwards, and as a consequence, endured actual hurts in his soul.* And in the same way Faustus Socinus argues from the parable of the Unmerciful Servant, that as the king pardoned his servant merely on his petition (Matt. xviii. 22), and not on account of any satisfaction made, or any mediator intervening, we may draw from this the conclusion, that in the same way, and without requiring sacrifice or intercessor, God pardons his debtors simply on the ground of their prayers.†

But far the greatest sinners against this rule were the Gnostics and Manichæans in old time, especially the former. The parables were far too welcome to these, who could find no color for their scheme in the plain declarations of Scripture, for them to allow themselves to be robbed of the help which they hoped to find in this quarter, by attending to any such canon as this. The whole scheme of the Gnostics was one which, however it may have been a result of the Gospel, inasmuch as that set the religious speculation of the world vigorously astir, was yet of independent growth; and they only came to the Scripture to find a varnish, an outer Christian coloring, for a system essentially antichristian; not to learn its language, but to see if they could not compel it to speak theirs. They came with no desire to draw out of Scripture its meaning, but to thrust into Scripture their own. When they fell thus to picking and choosing from it what was best adapted to their ends,

* De Grat. Prim. Hom.: Neque enim sine causâ Dominus in parabola illa prius dixit, hominem spoliatum, posterius autem, vulneratum fuisse, cùm tamen contra accidere soleat in veris latrociniis; nimirum indicare voluit, in hoc spirituali latrocinio ex ipsâ amissione justitiæ originalis nata esse vulnera nostræ naturæ. (See GERHARD'S Loc. Theol., loc. 9, c. 2. ý 86.)

+ DEYLING, Obss. Sac., v. 4, c. 649. Socinus here sins against another rule of Scripture interpretation as of common sense, which is, that we are not to expect in every place the whole circle of Christian truth to be fully stated, and that no conclusion may be drawn from the absence of a doctrine from one passage which is clearly stated in others. Jerome (Adv. Jovin., 1. 2): Neque enim in omnibus locis docentur omnia; sed unaquæque similitudo ad id refertur cujus est similitudo. Jerome: Ad voluntatem suam Scripturam trahere repugnantem.

Irenæus, 1. 1, c. 8: Ut figmentum illorum non sine teste esse videatur. All this very nearly repeats itself in Swedenborg, in whom, indeed, there are many resemblances to the Gnostics of old, especially the distinctive one of a division of the Church into spiritual and carnal members. One, estimating his system of Scripture interpretation, thus speaks: "His spiritual sense of Scripture is one altogether disconnected from the literal sense, is rather a sense before the sense; not a sense to which one mounts up from the steps of that which is below, but in which one must, as by a miracle, be planted, for it is altogether independent of, and disconnected from, the accidental externum superadditum of the literal sense."

the parables would naturally invite them almost more than any other portions of Scripture; for it was plain that they must abandon the literal portions of Scripture; their only refuge was in the figurative, in those which might receive more interpretations than one; such perhaps they might bend to their purposes. Accordingly we find them revelling in these; with no joy indeed in them, on account of their simplicity or practical depth or ethical beauty; for they seem to have had no sense or feeling of these; but delighted to superinduce upon them their own capricious and extravagant fancies. Irenæus is continually compelled to vindicate the parables against them, and to rescue them from the extreme abuse to which they submitted them, who not merely warped and drew them a little aside, but made them tell wholly a different tale from that which they were intended to tell.* Against them he lays down that canon, namely, that the parables cannot be in any case the original or the exclusive foundations of any doctrine, but must be themselves interpreted according to the analogy of faith; since, if every subtle solution of one of these might raise itself at once to the dignity and authority of a Christian doctrine, the rule of faith would be nowhere. So to build were to build not on the rock, but on the sand.†

Tertullian has the same conflict to maintain. The whole scheme of the Gnostics was a great floating cloud-palace, the figment of their own brain, and having no counterpart in the actual world of realities. They

* In a striking passage (Adv. Hær., 1. 1, c. 8), he likens their dealing with Scripture, their violent transpositions of it till it became altogether a different thing in their hands, to their fraud, who should break up some work of exquisite mosaic, wrought by a skilful artificer to present the effigy of a king, and should then recompose the pieces upon some wholly different plan, and make them to express some vile image of a fox or dog, hoping that, since they could point to the stones as being the same, they should be able to persuade the simple that this was the king's image still.

†Thus Con. Hær., 1. 2, c. 27. Et ideò parabolæ debent non ambiguis adaptari: sic enim et qui absolvit sine periculo absolvit, et parabolæ ab omnibus similiter absolutionem accipient: et à veritate corpus integrum, et simili aptatione membrorum et sine concussione perseverat. Sed quæ non apertè dicta sunt neque ante oculos posita, copulare absolutionibus parabolarum, quas unusquisque prout vult adinvenit [stultum est]. Sic enim apud nullum erit regula veritatis, sed quanti fuerint qui absolvent parabolas, tantæ videbuntur veritates pugnantes semet invicem. So too c. 3: Quia autem parabola possunt multas recipere absolutiones, ex ipsis de inquisitione Dei affirmare, relinquentes quod certum et indubitatum et verum est, valde præcipitantium se in periculum et irrationabilium esse, quis non amantium veritatem confitebitur? et numquid hoc est non in petrâ firmâ et valida et in aperto positâ ædificare suam domum, sed in incertum effusæ arenæ ? Unde et facilis est eversio hujusmodi ædificationis. Cf. 1. 2, c. 10; and for an example of what they were able to bring out of a parable, see the explanations of the Lost Sheep, and the Lost Piece of Money, 1. 1, c. 16. The miracles were submitted by them to the same process of interpretation; see 1. 1, c. 7, and 1. 2, c. 24.

could therefore shape or mould it as they would. They found no difficulty then in forcing the parables to be upon their side. For they readily modified their scheme, shaping their doctrine according to the leadings and suggestions of these, till they brought the two into apparent agreement with one another. There was nothing to hinder them here; their doctrine was not a fixed body of divine truth to which they could neither add nor take away, which was given them from above, and in which they could only acquiesce but it was an invention of their own, and they could invent and fashion it as they pleased, and as best suited their purposes. We, as Tertullian often says, are kept within limits in the exposition of the parables, accepting as we do the other Scriptures as the rule to us of truth, as the rule therefore of their interpretation. It is otherwise with these heretics; their doctrine is their own; they can first dexterously adapt it to the parables, and then bring forward this adaptation as a testimony of its truth."

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As it was with the Gnostics of the early Church, exactly so was it with the cognate sects of a later day, the Cathari, and Bogomili; they too found in the parables no teaching about sin and grace and redemption, no truths of the kingdom of God, but fitted to them the speculations about the creation, the origin of evil, the fall of angels, which were uppermost in their minds, which they had not drawn from Scripture, but which having framed, they afterwards turned to Scripture to find if there was not something there which they could compel to fall into their scheme. Thus the apostasy of Satan and his drawing after him a part of the host of heaven, they found set forth by the parable of the Unjust Steward. Satan was the chief steward over God's house, whom he deposed from his place of highest trust, and who then drew after him the other angels with the suggestion of lighter tasks and relief from the burden of their imposed duties.†

*De Pudicitiâ, c. 8, 9. Among much else which is interesting, he says, Hæretici parabolas quo volunt trahunt, non quo debent, aptissimè excludunt. [His image is from the workers in gold or rather metals; called exclusores (see Augustine, Enarr. in Ps. liv. 22) from excludere, to strike or stamp out (Du Cange, s. v.) This meaning of the word excludere is wanting in SCHELLER'S Dictionary.] Quare aptissimè? Quoniam à primordio secundùm occasiones parabolarum, ipsas materias confinxerunt doctrinæ. Vacavit scilicet illis solutis à regula veritatis, ea conquirere atque componere, quorum parabolæ videntur. Thus too De Præsc. Hæret., c. 8, Valentinus non ad materiam Scripturas sed materiam ad Scripturas, excogitavit.

† NEANDER, Kirch. Gesch., v. 5, p. 1082. They dealt more perversely, and at the same time more characteristically still, with the parable of the Servant that owed the ten thousand talents (Ibid, v. 5, p. 1122): This servant too, with whom the king reckons, is Satan or the Demiurgus, his wife and children whom the king orders to be sold, the first his Sophia or intelligence, the second the angels subject

But, though not testifying to evils at all so grave in the devisers of the scheme, nor leading altogether out of the region of Christian truth, yet sufficiently injurious to the sober interpretation of the parables, is such a theory concerning them as that entertained, and in actual exposition carried out by Cocceius, and his followers of what we may call the historico-prophetical school. By the parables, they say, and so far they have right, are declared the mysteries of the kingdom of God. But then laying hold of the term, kingdom of God, and understanding it in far too exclusive a sense, they are determined to find in every one of the parables a part of the history of that kingdom's progressive development in the world, to the remotest times. They will not allow any to be merely for exhortation, for reproof, for instruction in righteousness, but affirm all to be historico-prophetical. Thus, to let one of them speak for himself, in the remarkable words of Krummacher,*— "The parables of Jesus have not primarily a moral, but a politicoreligious, or theocratic purpose. To use a comparison, we may consider the kingdom of God carried forward under his guidance, as the action, gradually unfolding itself, of an Epos, whose first germ lay prepared long beforehand in the Jewish economy of the Old Testament, but which through him began to unfold itself, and will continue to do so to the end of time. The name and subscription of the Epos is, The kingdom of God. The parables belong essentially to the Gospel of the kingdom, not merely as containing its doctrine, but its progressive development. They connect themselves with certain fixed periods of that development, and, as soon as these periods are completed, lose themselves in the very completion that is, considered as independent portions of the Epos, remaining for us only in the image and external letter." He must mean, of course, in the same manner and degree as all other fulfilled prophecy -in the light of such accomplished prophecy, he would say, they must henceforth be regarded.

Boyle gives some, though a very moderate countenance, to the same opinion, saying of the parables, "Some, if not most, do, like those oysters that, besides the meat they afford us, contain pearls, not only include excellent moralities, but comprise important prophecies ;" and having adduced the Mustard Seed and the Wicked Husbandmen as plainly

to him. God pitied him, and did not take from him his higher intelligence, his subjects or his goods; he promising, if God would have patience with him, to create so great a number of men as should supply the place of the fallen angels. Therefore God gave him permission that for six days, the six thousand years of the present world, he should bring to pass what he could with the world which he had created-But this will suffice.

* Not the Krummacher who is now, or was of late, so popular in England, but his father, himself the author of a volume of very graceful original parables.