The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
The Parables of the 
 Old Testament 
 
 NOV 10 19^0 
 
 CLARENCE EDWARD ^MACARTNEY, M.A., D.D. 
 
 Minister, Arch Street Presbyterian Church, 
 Philadelphia, Pa, 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1916, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
To my friends in the First Presby- 
 terian Church of Pater son, New Jersey ^ 
 and the Arch Street Presbyterian 
 Churchy of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 
 
Preface 
 
 SOME years ago I commenced a study of the 
 Parables of the Old Testament with the 
 purpose of making use of the Parables as 
 material for sermons. I was not disappointed as 
 to the suggestions afforded by such a study; in- 
 deed, it opened up for me a rich vein of moral and 
 spiritual truth. But I was surprised to find how 
 little there was in print that would be of help to 
 me in conducting such a study. Book stalls and 
 libraries abound in volumes on the Parables of the 
 New Testament, but nowhere, either in America 
 or Great Britain, could I come on a single book 
 which dealt with the Parables of the Old Testa- 
 ment. Whatever, then, the offenses of this volume, 
 it cannot be laid against it that it traverses a field 
 whose fruits already have been harvested and 
 garnered. As for these Parables, I think I can 
 feel almost like those mariners of the sixteenth 
 century who sailed upon seas that never before had 
 been cleft by the keel of a ship. 
 
 I have no desire to draw out fine spun distinc- 
 tions between the different forms of illustrative 
 speech. "We used to define them and refine them 
 in our college days ; but as a matter of fact, the 
 partitions which divide metaphor from simile, and 
 allegory from parable, and parable from fable, are 
 exceedingly thin. The human spirit, when it de- 
 
 7 
 
8 Preface 
 
 sires to express an idea, readies out for some way 
 of illustrating that idea. Eliphaz wished to ex- 
 press the beauty and usefulness of the old age of a 
 good man; so he said, "Thou shalt come to thy 
 grave in a full age, as a shock of corn cometh in 
 his season." That is a direct comparison of two 
 spheres, the ideal and the material, the human and 
 the vegetable, the life of man and the life of the 
 corn. This sort of illustration we call a simile. 
 Or, in a more direct way, the formal comparison 
 may be omitted and the thing to be illustrated 
 identified for the moment with the object of com- 
 parison. Jesus wished to say that the Pharisees 
 were like the sepulchres, white without but rotten 
 within ; but instead of saying, " Ye are like unto 
 whited sepulchres" He said, "Woe unto you, 
 whited sepulchres ! " This we call a metaphor. 
 
 The word " parable " comes from two Greek 
 words which mean to place side by side. In the 
 parable, then, we lay one kind of actions in one kind 
 of sphere alongside of another kind of actions in an- 
 other kind of sphere, and illustrate the one by the 
 other. Jesus said the Kingdom of Heaven was 
 like unto a man going into a far country, or a shep- 
 herd who had a hundred sheep, or a fisherman cast- 
 ing his nets, or a merchant giving his servants 
 money for investment, or a sower going forth to 
 sow. In other words. He laid the spiritual king- 
 dom side by side with the animal or vegetable or 
 mineral, or the occupations of men in those king- 
 doms. 
 
Preface 9 ' 
 
 The difference between the Parables of Jesus 
 and those of the Old Testament consists in the fact 
 that nearly all the Parables of Jesus teach a spir- 
 itual truth that is timeless, and has no particular 
 relation to or connection with the occasion or con- 
 dition of utterance. The Parable of the Lost Sheep 
 tells of the redeeming love of God and speaks to 
 all ages and all conditions of men. But the Parable 
 of the Ewe Lamb was spoken by Nathan for the 
 purpose of arousing David to a sense of his sin 
 against Uriah the Hittite. This is true of every 
 Parable commented upon in this volume ; they were 
 messages for a special occasion. ISTevertheless, they 
 teem with suggestions of truth that is applicable 
 for any age, and, in many instances, they may be 
 made the vehicle of evangelical truth, as well as 
 general or moral. The Fable of the Thistle and 
 the Cedar was spoken to rebuke one king fer his 
 presumption in dealing with another king. The 
 two kings are long dead, but the Fable still may 
 be used to point the lesson that pride goeth before 
 destruction and the haughty spirit before a fall. 
 The Parable of the Vineyard in Isaiah was spoken 
 with reference to the imminent overthrow of Judah 
 and the dispersion of her citizens. But who does 
 not see in it a noble and beautiful sermon on the 
 full provision of God's love and the peril involved 
 in the rejection of Jesus Christ ? And as for the 
 Atonement, what better passage could one have 
 from which to explain that great doctrine than the 
 Parable of the Wise Woman of Tekoah ? 
 
10 Preface 
 
 Although this volume is entitled " The Parables 
 of the Old Testament," there are included in it two 
 fables, and the only fables in the Bible, that of the 
 Trees and that of the Thistle and the Cedar. The 
 fable differs from the parable in that in the fable 
 the subjects of the mineral or vegetable or animal 
 kingdom " feign to speak and act with human in- 
 terest and passion." But the general purpose of 
 the fable and the parable are the same, to illustrate 
 moral and spiritual truth by comparison with what 
 actually transpires, or is imagined to transpire, in 
 the life of man or in the world of nature. 
 
 The minister who chooses to preach from the 
 Parables of the Old Testament will find that most 
 of the stories are new and fresh to his auditors, and 
 he himself will not fail to share in the consequent 
 interest and alertness which such preaching awakens 
 in a congregation. The teacher or popular speaker 
 will find much in these Parables which may be em- 
 ployed with telling effect to illustrate morals. The 
 Parables dealt with in this volume represent the 
 garnered wisdom of prophets, chroniclers, and 
 seers, some of them known and some of them un- 
 known, but all worthy of a better acquaintance. 
 These addresses have been delivered and this book 
 is now sent forth in the JS'ame of Him who taught 
 the people in Parables, and without a Parable 
 spake He not unto them. 
 
 C. E. M. 
 
 Philadelphia^ Pa. 
 
Contents 
 
 L The Parable of the Trees . . 13 
 
 n. The Parable of the Thistle and 
 
 THE Cedar 24 
 
 III. The Parable of the Lost Prisoner 33 
 
 IV. The Parable of the Ewe Lamb . 43 
 
 V. The Parable of the Woman of 
 
 Tekoah 54 
 
 VI. The Parable of the Vineyard . 64 
 
 VII. The Parable of the Faithless 
 
 Wives 83 
 
 VIII. The Parable of the Two Eagles 
 
 AND THE Vine 94 
 
 IX. The Parable of the Ploughman . 109 
 
 II 
 
The Parable of the Trees 
 
 Judges ix. 7-20 
 
 THIS is a rough and tumble world that we 
 enter when we open our Bibles to the 
 Book of Judges. Men are a law unto 
 themselves, and the result is lawlessness and un- 
 righteousness. Everything is on the heroic scale — 
 mirth, sorrow, revenge, hate, murder, anger, love 
 of country. Silhouetted against this dark back- 
 ground are strange and unforgetable characters 
 who move across the stage of Israel to the music of 
 strong passions : Shamgar, Gideon, Samson, Deb- 
 orah, Jael, Jephthah, Jotham. Jotham speaks and 
 is gone, but his message remains. 
 
 The bright day of Gideon*s work for God and 
 Israel had set in darkness and in gloom. The hero of 
 the victory over the hosts of the Midianites had fallen 
 a victim to the glory of that victory. Out of the 
 golden earrings, pendants, crescents, chains, wristlets 
 and anklets taken from the fallen foe, Gideon made 
 an ephod which was worshipped by Israel as an idol. 
 "And Gideon made an ephod even in Ophrah." 
 " Even in Ophrah ! " — as if the sacred chronicler 
 would tell of his grief and surprise at the last end 
 of Gideon. Where was Ophrah ? It was beneath 
 the oak at Ophrah that Gideon was beating out the 
 
 13 
 
14 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 grain to hide it from the Midianites, his heart burn- 
 ing with anger against the invaders, when the angel 
 of the Lord appeared unto him and cried, " The 
 Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour." It 
 was in Ophrah that God called him. There the 
 fire came forth to devour the offering on the rocks, 
 and there Gideon pressed the fleece of wool to- 
 gether and wrung out the dew% a bowlful of w^ater. 
 "Even in Ophrah!" You would think that if 
 Gideon were going to forget God and worship 
 idols, he would have set up that idol anywhere 
 save in Ophrah, with the great and holy memories 
 of his youth. Yet is not this what we often see in 
 life, idols built in Ophrah ? Take the man who 
 has long ceased to name the name of God back to 
 the church of his youth, back to the old family pew, 
 and let him sit there and call up the days and the 
 faces that are gone ; let him think of the youth, 
 the child, that once sat there with a heart that 
 knew no bitterness, and a life that was free from 
 the stain of sin ; and let him compare that child, as 
 pure as the morning dew% with the sated sinner 
 worshipping the idols of this w^orld. Take the 
 husband and wife whose hearts have grown cold, 
 alienated, separated, divorced, back to that morning 
 of love, when to seek each other's happiness was 
 life's chief joy, when with hand clasped in hand, 
 their faces bright with the holy oil of joy and their 
 souls arrayed in the garments of praise, they re- 
 peated the vows they once thought naught could 
 sever : — " I do promise and covenant, before God 
 
The Parable of the Trees 15 
 
 and man, to be thy loving and faithful wife, hus- 
 band, in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, 
 in sickness and in health, until death us do part." 
 Take the man who has failed in the race of life, or 
 if successful, wears honours that are tainted, and 
 does, as a matter of habit, things that once he would 
 have scorned to do ; take that man back to the 
 morning of his consecration, to the day when he 
 left the doors of the college with the fires of high 
 resolution and lofty ambition burning in his heart, 
 and let him contrast his present, disenchanted, dis- 
 illusioned, easy-principled self with that youth of 
 long ago, when the fleece was filled with dew and 
 the God spake on every wind that blew. Oh, these 
 abandoned, forgotten, sinned against Ophrahs of 
 the past ! Now the fleece is dry ; no flame goes 
 up from the altar ; no voice of God makes the 
 heart beat quick and the eye look up. 
 
 That was the fate of Gideon. But he had 
 enough character left to refuse the proffered crown. 
 When they said, " Eule thou over us," he answered, 
 " I will not rule over you ; neither will my son rule 
 over you. The Lord shall rule you." But when 
 Gideon was dead and buried in the sepulchre of 
 Joash, his father, the family quarrels began. A 
 nation's memory is short, and Gideon's service was 
 soon forgotten in the service of Baal. Among the 
 sons of Gideon was Abimelech, a base, contempt- 
 ible man, illegitimate in birth and lawless in heart. 
 But if he possessed less virtue than the other sons, 
 he had more ambition than all. His being the son 
 
l6 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 of the concubine shut him out from a chance for 
 the crown, should Israel decide to have a king. 
 He therefore went among his mother's friends at 
 Shechem and persuaded them to assist him in the 
 slaughter of the seventy sons of Gideon on one 
 stone at Ophrah. Then they went out to crown 
 him king by the oak that was in Shechem. But 
 the bloody knife of Abimelech had not quite fin- 
 ished its work. The youngest son, Jotham, escaped. 
 That is always the way with evil and evil deeds. 
 Truth and righteousness are never left without an 
 heir to their throne. Some youngest son escapes 
 the sword and comes back to judge. Evil builds 
 its tower, grim and strong walled ; but it leaves 
 some chink or crevice through which flies the arrow 
 of judgment. Truth and justice may seem to be 
 suppressed and none left to speak on their behalf, 
 when, from some unexpected quarter, comes the 
 voice to assure and to judge. 
 
 Just as the men of Shechem were crying '' God 
 save the king ! " Jotham appeared to tell them 
 what kind of king they had chosen. From his 
 station on the top of Mount Gerizim he told his 
 fable of the trees. "The trees went forth on a 
 time to anoint a king over them ; and they said 
 unto the olive tree, ' Reign thou over us.' But the 
 olive tree said unto them, ' Should I leave my fat- 
 ness, wherewith by me they honour man and God, 
 and go to wave to and fro over the trees ? ' And 
 the trees said to the fig tree, * Come thou and reign 
 over us.' But the fig tree said unto them, * Should 
 
The Parable of the Trees 17 
 
 I leave my sweetness and my good fruit, and go to 
 wave to and fro over the trees ? ' And the trees 
 said unto the vine, * Come thou and reign over us.' 
 And the vine said unto them, * Should I leave my 
 new wine, which cheereth God and man, and go to 
 wave to and fro over the trees ? ' Then said all 
 the trees unto the bramble, ' Come thou and reign 
 over us.' And the bramble said unto the trees, ' If 
 in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come 
 and take refuge in my shade ; and if not, let fire 
 come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of 
 Lebanon.' " 
 
 The astounded Abimelech and his confederates 
 saw all too plainly the point of the parable. The peo- 
 ple had rejected the sons of Gideon who might have 
 ruled them with justice and equity, and had chosen 
 the basest and the wickedest of the sons, a man 
 among men as the bramble among the trees. They 
 must now serve Abimelech with slavish fear, or he 
 would burn them in his wrath. This proved to be 
 so. Jotham was not only a satirist, but a prophet. 
 In three years the men of Shechem got tired of 
 their bargain, and rebelled against their bramble 
 king. Abimelech came with his army, took their 
 city by storm, and slew the people and beat down 
 the walls and sowed the place with salt. If any 
 of the men of Shechem were left to tell the tale, 
 they remembered the word of Jotham, " Fire shall 
 come out of the bramble and devour the cedar of 
 Lebanon." 
 
 The trees by their own vote elected a bramble 
 
i8 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 over them. Their forest government was what 
 they made it, nothing more, nothing less. They 
 elected and crowned a bramble, and the bramble 
 ruled them like a bramble. Life is what you make 
 it. You choose your own king and government. 
 At first you may feel tempted to challenge this 
 proposition that life is what you make it. You 
 answer that life is made for you. You came 
 into the world by no wish or plan of your own ; 
 you found yourself born into a home where a cer- 
 tain kind of example and thought and life pre- 
 vailed ; as soon as you commenced to breathe, you 
 were formed, moulded, coloured, by that thought ; 
 on your shoulder was laid the mysterious hand of 
 heredity, guiding you along paths that your fathers 
 trod before you ; you can no more throw off your 
 past than you can blot out your present ; you find 
 yourself in a given intellectual, or moral, or religious 
 scale of life by no desire and by no protest of your 
 own ; you travel your threescore and ten along this 
 path of life, here and there a rough place where 
 the stones bruised you ; here and there a dark, 
 deep place where the floods overwhelmed you, and 
 here and there a pleasant meadow-land where the 
 fields were peaceful and bright with flowers, and 
 here and there high, exalted, spiritual places where 
 the winds were fresh and the air was clear, and 
 you thought you could see the land to which you 
 were travelling. Now, as you grope your way 
 down the path that leads you into silent, mist- 
 wrapped valleys, looking back over the long journey 
 
The Parable of the Trees 19 
 
 where you met with joys that were so real and so 
 divine, sorrows that were so real and so penetrating, 
 gains so indefinable and losses so irreparable, are 
 you not tempted to say that life was not so much 
 what you made it as what you found it and were 
 compelled to take ? 
 
 ** Ah, love ! could you and I conspire 
 To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, 
 Would we not shatter it to bits, 
 And mould it nearer to the heart's desire? " 
 
 Things that we might have done differently ; things 
 that we would change in life if we could turn back 
 the years, and other things that we could never 
 change — all this comes to mind when we think at 
 all seriously about our life. But when we get 
 above the incidents of existence, and come to the 
 finer issues of the soul, regardless of the station 
 into which we were born, regardless of the place 
 which we now hold, it remains true that life is 
 what we make it. 
 
 Clad in all her beauty and mystery, life stands be- 
 fore us as the Lord stood before Solomon when he 
 dreamed his dream on the holy hill of Gibeon, and 
 speaks to us saying, " Ask what I shall give thee." 
 
 ** I am the Master of my fate ; 
 I am the Captain of my soul.'' 
 
 There are all kinds of trees in the forest, and 
 there are all kinds of desires and emotions and con- 
 siderations, vices and graces, possible for the hu- 
 
20 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 man soul. Only in a fable, only in imagination, 
 can the trees choose a king ; but man is above the 
 trees of the field ; he can and does choose his king. 
 You have chosen your king for to-day. When this 
 Sabbath day with its privileges and duties is past, 
 some will go to their beds tired in body, but not in 
 heart, for they have scattered the seeds of light 
 and love about them ; they have thought of others, 
 they have toiled for others ; they have spoken the 
 word in season, instructed many and upholden the 
 fallen, wiped away tears from the eyes of those 
 who wept, and as a ship at sea leaves a track of 
 white foam behind it, they have left behind them a 
 path that is bright with love and honour. But 
 others, with the same opportunities, and the same 
 temptations, will go to their beds weary and ill at 
 ease, dissatisfied, fretful, unhappy, because they 
 gave themselves over to the dominion of their own 
 desires, aims, appetites, worshipping their own dis- 
 likes, prejudices, enmities. Instead of the fig, the 
 olive, the vine, they have made the bramble king, 
 and the bramble has ruled them like a bramble. 
 Be miserable, wretched, contemptible, if you want 
 to be, but don't blame it on God, or your lot in life. 
 You make your own king ! Oh, how often, with a 
 folly not unlike that of the fabled trees, we are the 
 deliberate electors and architects of our own un- 
 happiness and distress ! 
 
 There was a young English poet, born to station 
 and wealth and education, and gifted with the 
 great gift of song. He scorned much that was 
 
The Parable of the Trees 21 
 
 high and holy in life, tasted much of life's bitter- 
 ness, had his share of its flattery and praise, and 
 went to his grave at thirty-seven. Of life this is 
 what he had to say : 
 
 " Fame, wisdom, love and power were mine, 
 
 And health and youth possessed me ; 
 My goblets blush'd from every vine, 
 
 And lovely forms caressed me : 
 I sunn'd my heart in beauty's eyes. 
 
 And felt my soul grow tender ; 
 All earth can give or mortal prize, 
 
 Was mine of regal splendour. 
 
 ** I strive to number o'er what days 
 
 Eemembrance can discover, 
 Which all that life or earth displays 
 
 Would lure me to live over. 
 There rose no day, there roll'd no hour 
 
 Of pleasure unembitter'd ; 
 And not a trapping deck'd my power 
 
 That gall'd not while it glitter' d.^' 
 
 Towards the end of the same century another 
 young poet and writer finished his journey. He, 
 too, was born to refinement, knowledge, ambition. 
 His life was gentle and his song was pure. When 
 he came to die in his island home amid the surges 
 of the Pacific, after his long battle with the thorn 
 in the flesh, he said : 
 
 " Under the wide and starry sky. 
 Dig the grave and let me lie. 
 Glad did I live and gladly die. 
 And I laid me down with a will. 
 
22 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 This be the verse you grave for me, 
 Here he lies where he longed to be, 
 Home is the sailor — home from the sea, 
 And the hunter— home from the hill. " 
 
 One lived so that when he came to die life was 
 nothing but a desert of regrets and bitter recollec- 
 tions. The other lived so that when he came to 
 die he could say that he had " gladly lived " and 
 therefore he could gladly die. Life was what they 
 made it. 
 
 When Pilate brought out Jesus before the people, 
 he cried to them, " Behold your king ! " They 
 answered, " Away with him, away with him ! 
 Crucify him, crucify him ! " Pilate said, " Shall 
 I crucify your king ? " They cried, " We have no 
 king but Caesar ! " That was their choice, and as 
 their choice so was their doom. Seventy years 
 after Christ died on Calvary beneath the super- 
 scription, in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, " Jesus of 
 Nazareth, King of the Jews," Titus came with his 
 army, and after a siege of three years' duration 
 and of unparalleled suffering and fei'ocity, the walls 
 of Jerusalem were battered down. A legionary, 
 standing on the shoulders of one of his fellows, put 
 a torch to one of the golden windows of the temple. 
 The Jews rushed in to save their shrine, and died 
 by the thousands until their blood ran down the 
 steps of the holy place like a river, l^o king but 
 Caesar ! On that day Jewish history came to an 
 end. Ashes, blood, carnage, heaps of slaughtered, 
 fallen walls, desecrated shrines. **No king but 
 
The Parable of the Trees 23 
 
 Caesar ! " And fire came out of the bramble. " O 
 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, 
 and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often 
 would I have gathered thy children together, even 
 as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, 
 and ye would not ! Behold your house is left unto 
 you desolate." 
 
 " And ye would not ! " Over how many cities, 
 over how many souls must Christ utter that la- 
 ment? They refuse His olive branch of blood- 
 bought peace and the shelter of His vine, and take 
 the bramble of unforgiving, unregenerate, impla- 
 cable self for king. " If thou hadst known who it 
 is that saith unto thee, ^ Give me to drink,' thou 
 wouldst have asked of him," said Jesus to the 
 woman at the well. If you and I knew the differ- 
 ence between the reign of Christ in our lives and 
 the reign of our own bramble selves, knew it, not 
 only in exhortation, the appeal of the sermon, but 
 in actual history, we should not long hesitate in 
 our choice. But no man is granted that kind of 
 wisdom. Yet in another sense we do know the 
 difference. If we do not have the knowledge of 
 experience, we have at least the knowledge of con- 
 viction. The question is, Will knowledge be turned 
 into power ? Shall we take Christ for king, com- 
 mitting all our interests and all our destinies to Him ? 
 Or, shall we take our own selves for king ? Must 
 Christ say for you as He said of the city that He 
 loved, " If thou hadst but known the things that be- 
 long to thy peace ! But now they are hid from thee ! " 
 
II 
 
 The Parable of the Thistle and the Cedar 
 2 Kings xiv. 8-14. 
 
 AMAZIAH, king of Judah, had gained a 
 victory over Edom in the Yalley of Salt, 
 where he slew ten thousand men and took 
 the town of Selah. This victory over the desert 
 tribes unduly elated him, and moved him to chal- 
 lenge the king of Israel to combat. Because he 
 had slain a few thousands in the Valley of Salt, he 
 thought he could cross swords with the kingdom 
 of Israel, then at the height of its godless splendour 
 and military power. He sent messengers to the 
 king of Israel, Joash, saying : " Come, let us look 
 one another in the face." In other words, " Let 
 us meet in battle and see who is stronger." Joash 
 scorned the impudent challenge. Half amused, 
 half angTy at the insult, he answered with the par- 
 able of The Thistle and the Cedar. " The thistle 
 that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in 
 Lebanon, saying, ' Give thy daughter to my son to 
 wife ' and there passed by a wild beast that was in 
 Lebanon and trode down the thistle." The cedar 
 did not deign to notice the arrogant proposal of 
 the thistle. But a wild beast, a prowling denizen 
 of the forest, seeking after his prey, passed that 
 
 24 
 
The Parable of the Thistle and the Cedar 25 
 
 way and set his great paw upon the impudent 
 thistle, and the place that once knew it knew it no 
 more forever. The viewless winds caught up the 
 seed and fibre of the thistle and carried them 
 hither and yon. But the tall cedar, not even be- 
 holding the end of the thistle, reigned on in soli- 
 tary dignity and might. 
 
 This is one of the shortest fables on record, and 
 one of the most effective. It was a crushing bit of 
 irony. For Judah in that day to challenge Israel 
 to combat was like the thistle proposing affinity 
 with the cedar. But Amaziah did not profit by 
 the lesson. He insisted upon a trial of strength. 
 This was granted him in Beth-Shemesh. And 
 Judah was put to the worse before Israel; and 
 they fled every man to their tents. 
 
 "The thistle that was in Lebanon said to the 
 cedar that was in Lebanon." Both cedar and this- 
 tle flourished in Lebanon. In the plan of God, 
 noble and ignoble characters thrive side by side, 
 worship in the same church, live in the same home, 
 toil in the same shop, travel on the same train, and 
 pass on the same street. Wherever you see a 
 stately cedar lifting its head above the forest, you 
 can find the thorn, the thistle, the bramble. There 
 are men who are like the cedar ; they have strength 
 and the beauty of dignity. They have vision, 
 overtopping the other trees. They tower above 
 the dust, smoke, mist, and hold communion with 
 the lonely stars. They are far removed from the 
 pettiness and the meanness and sordidness which 
 
26 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 play so large a part in the lives of ordinary mor- 
 tals, and when they fall they go down with a 
 crash that makes the earth shake and leave a 
 lonely place against the sky. Side by side with 
 them live men of the order of the thistle — arro- 
 gant, presumptuous, mean, faultfinding, back- 
 biting, contemptible, ludicrous to everybody save 
 themselves. 
 
 This thistle lived in the shadow of the mighty 
 cedar, but never recognized the difference, else it 
 would not have made the arrogant proposal that 
 its son should marry the cedar's daughter. Jesus 
 said to Philip, " Have I been so long time with 
 you, yet hast thou not known me, Philip ? " How 
 that strange dullness to heavenly presence and 
 character has been handed down from age to age. 
 To-morrow there comes some unusual event; a 
 great joy, a great sorrow, a great trial ; we ask for 
 comfort, we seek for guidance, and we are sur- 
 prised to find the healing fountain flowing in the 
 very midst of our life and work. Some old father, 
 or mother, kind teacher, faithful friend, has been 
 God's representative upon earth, angels walking 
 about in homely and common-day attire and dis- 
 guise. Then speak they with a strange sadness 
 and gentle rebuke, " Have I been so long time 
 with you, and yet hast thou not known me ? " 
 
 In the nave of the old Abbey Kirk at Haddington 
 one may read over the grave of Jane Welsh the first 
 of many pathetic but regretful tributes paid to his 
 wife by Thomas Carlyle : 
 
The Parable of the Thistle and the Cedar 27 
 
 " In her bright existence she had more sorrows than are 
 Common, but also a soft invincibility, a capacity of 
 Discernment, and a noble loyalty of heart which arc 
 Rare. For 40 years she was the true and loving help- 
 Mate of her husband, and by act and word unweariedly 
 Forwarded him as none else could in all of worthy that 
 He did or attempted. She died at London, 21st April 
 1866, suddenly snatched from him, and the light of his 
 Life as if gone out." 
 
 Poor, stumbling, lonely, remorseful Carlyle ! 
 How often did he mourn over that grave and 
 supplicate with unavailing words the dear shade of 
 her whom in life he felt he had neglected I Hear, 
 cai'eless soul, thou who art dealing with love as if 
 it were merchandise, and with loved ones as if, like 
 the poor, thou hadst them always with thee, this ad- 
 vice of the unhappy sage of Chelsea, " Cherish what 
 is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not 
 till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are ; 
 oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not 
 till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds 
 and dissonances of the moment, and all be at last so 
 mournfully clear and beautiful when it is too late ! " 
 
 The great men of the world seldom have been so 
 confessed by their contemporaries. Some of the 
 men, it may be, that you speak lightly of to-day, your 
 children's children will speak of with honour, and ask 
 theu" children to strive to be like them. The judg- 
 ment and the discernment of the contemporary is 
 usually the judgment of the thistle. It was said of 
 Emerson that after he had been writing about the 
 
28 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 hero for a quarter of a century, he was able to 
 recognize hira when he appeared on the scene- 
 John Brown of Harper's Ferry. But he was a 
 solitary exception. John Brown became a great 
 man after he was hanged; Lincoln after he was 
 shot ; Jesus after He was crucified. " Of whom 
 the world was not worthy " is a legend that might 
 be written on the tomb of every great man from 
 Samuel to Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 The Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of entertain- 
 ing angels unawares. This is the common ex- 
 perience of life. After they are gone, faded away 
 on the horizon of life's flat desert, and we are left 
 standing like Abraham beneath the quiet oaks of 
 meditation and recollection, then we perceive that 
 angels have passed our way. The earthen vessel 
 stands unhonoured and unappreciated in our homes ; 
 but one day death lifts its grim mallet and breaks 
 the vase, and we find that it was an alabaster box 
 of ointment ; precious, very costly. We carry our 
 burdens and trudge our dusty roads to the Emmaus 
 of our desires and purposes, and never know that 
 he who has companied with us by the way was 
 one who would have been welcomed in the elect 
 company of the children of God. 
 
 " Be merciful, O our God ! 
 Forgive the meanness of our human hearts, 
 That never, till a noble soul departs. 
 See half the worth, or hear the angePs wings 
 Till they go rustling heavenward as he springs 
 
 Up from the mounded sod." 
 
The Parable of the Thistle and the Cedar 29 
 
 "Tell me, I pray thee, where the Seer's house 
 is," said stalwart Saul to an old man on the streets 
 of Zuph. And the old man said, " I am the Seer." 
 Closer at hand than he had dreamed was the Seer 
 who could tell Saul all. So seeking for our lost, 
 lost hopes, lost joys, lost treasures, lost enthusiasms, 
 lost innocence, lost love, we hurry through the 
 streets of life to find some new person and some 
 new direction, when all the time the Seer of God 
 is just at hand. But alas! we know him not. 
 Your old Bible, your old church, your old bedside 
 prayer, your old friend, companion, wife, husband, 
 father, mother — real, discerning, far-seeing, wisdom- 
 bringing Seers of God are they ! 
 
 The thistle in proposing marriage with the family 
 of the cedar is just like man when he flaunts his 
 self-righteousness in the face of Almighty God. 
 The thistle was ignorant of the difference between 
 its prickles and the mighty cedar. Man's ignorance 
 of himself betrays him into arrogance and pre- 
 sumptuous sin. " Let us look one another in the 
 face," said the upstart king, for he thought himself 
 equal to Israel's king. Various excuses and ex- 
 planations are given by those who deliberately 
 reject the Christian revelation. Some would be 
 Christians were it not for miracles ; some were it 
 not for Genesis; some were it not for countless 
 divisions of the church ; some were it not for the 
 inconsistent persons in the churches ; some were it 
 not for the doctrine of future retribution; some 
 were it not for the doctrine of the atonement ; some 
 
30 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 were it not for the doctrine of the resurrection; 
 some were it not for diificulties and anachronisms 
 in the Bible; and some because they don't feel 
 ready. But go down beneath these surface excuses 
 and explanations, and there you will find hiding in 
 its dark cellar the real reason why this man or that 
 man rejects the Christian revelation — his own miser- 
 able and contemptible pride and self-sufficiency. 
 They say this and they say that, but down in their 
 inmost heart they say, " I need no Saviour. I 
 need no atonement. I need no forgiveness." The 
 thistle of human nature measures itself by the side 
 of the cedar of God's truth and God's Son and goes 
 away content and satisfied. There is a generation 
 that is pure in their own eyes and yet is not washed 
 from their own filthiness. Christ said, " He that 
 willeth to do the will of my Father in heaven shall 
 know the doctrine." There He touched the pulse 
 of the religious problem. The question for me is. 
 Am I going to will to do the will of God ? Am 
 I going to own His Sovereignty and bow to it and 
 accept His help ? Or am I going to match my 
 will against His will ? 
 
 Take the great and distinctive doctrines of Chris- 
 tianity and you will see how the only reason for 
 rejecting them lies in man's self-sufficiency and 
 pride. Christianity declares itself to be a revela- 
 tion of the will and mind of God. Does man need 
 that ? If he doesn't need it, then we have made 
 the whole Christian system unnecessary and absurd. 
 But does man need a revelation ? Has he all the 
 
The Parable of the Thistle and the Cedar 31 
 
 knowledge and truth and light that he would like to 
 have ? In a world that is curtained with mystery, 
 that throbs with the mighty pulsations of love and 
 affection, that is vocal with the strange music of 
 human joy and human sorrow, your life coming 
 you know not whence, and passing you know not 
 whither, utterly unable to explain the least thing 
 about yourself, to tell why the heart begins to beat, 
 or why it rests forever, tenting for a little day on 
 this brief island amid the two eternities, all about 
 you the tokens of man's frailty, weakness and 
 brevity, and everywhere, in the sun that lights 
 your way by day, and in the stars that light your 
 way by night, in this strange and intricate mech- 
 anism — tabernacle, tent, house — that we call the 
 body, in the earth in which you live, in the sod 
 where you lay your dead, in the heavens that drift 
 above your head — everywhere the witness of a 
 wisdom and a power that is greater and vaster 
 than your own; are you, this lump of deformity 
 and diseases in body and mind, going to stand up 
 and say that you have no need of a revelation 
 from God ? 
 
 And when that revelation tells you that you are 
 weak, that you are fallen, that you are sinful ; do 
 you find anything in your brief experience with 
 yourself and with others that would lead you to 
 deny this? And when that Christian revelation 
 presents to you the Incarnate God, God in Christ 
 reconciling the world to Himself, and holds up be- 
 fore you the Crucified Eedeemer, and commands 
 
32 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 you to repent, believe and live ; are you going to 
 tell God that you don't need it ? If so, that refusal 
 and denial has no basis in reason, fact or experience. 
 It rests upon human pride, upon the blindness and 
 ignorance and arrogance of the thistle thinking its 
 one-inch stem of thorns equal to the one-hundred- 
 cubit cedar. 
 
 The lines that were most often upon the lips of 
 the Sad Emancipator were those of "William Knox : 
 
 *^ Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? 
 Like a fast-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, 
 A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, 
 He passes from life to his rest in the grave. '^ 
 
 No ; no room for pride ; but plenty of room for 
 humility, for abasement, for praying the publican's 
 prayer, for singing the sinner's song, — 
 
 ^' When I survey the wondrous Cross 
 On which the Prince of Glory died, 
 My richest gain I count but loss, 
 And pour contempt on all my pride." 
 
Ill 
 
 The Parable of the Lost Prisoner 
 / Kings XX. J ^-4 J 
 
 ISKAEL had just won a great victory over her 
 inveterate enemy, Benhadad, king of Syria. 
 Because of the previous defeat in the hill 
 country, the Syrians fancied that a battle in the 
 valleys would bring them victory, for they said, 
 " Their god is a god of the hills, therefore they 
 were stronger than we." But the battle in the 
 plain proved even more disastrous than that of the 
 hills. An hundred thousand fell in the combat and 
 the remaining twenty thousand perished in an earth- 
 quake. The very stars in their courses were fight- 
 ing against Syria. The army had been beaten, but 
 the heart and soul of that army was still alive. 
 There are some causes and some armies which are 
 never beaten till the leader who incarnates them is 
 beaten. From his secret hiding-place, Benhadad 
 sends messengers to Ahab. They find him in high 
 feather over his victory. As he surveyed the field 
 where so many Syrians had fallen and so few 
 Israelites, he was tempted to a foolish magna- 
 nimity. Instead of destroying Benhadad, or at 
 least taking precaution to prevent his further out- 
 breaks, he gave him a ride in his chariot and sent 
 
 33 
 
34 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 him off to Syria with a treaty of peace which Ben- 
 hadad at once proceeded to violate. 
 
 " But a certain man of the sons of the prophets ! " 
 One of God's nameless ambassadors of conscience 
 was at hand to rebuke the foolish king and pro- 
 nounce his judgment. As in the parable of The 
 Ewe Lamb, the plan is to have the king condemn 
 himself by passing judgment on an imaginary case. 
 In the disguise of a wounded soldier, the man of 
 God sat lamenting by the roadside. As the chariot 
 of the king rolled by, he sprang up with his tale of 
 woe. " Thy servant went out into the midst of the 
 battle ; and, behold, a man turn^ed aside and brought 
 a man unto me, and said, ' Keep this man : if by 
 any means he be missing, then shall thy life be for 
 his life.' And as thy servant was busy here and 
 there, behold, he was gone." And the king of 
 Israel said to him, " So shall thy judgment be ; thy- 
 self hath decided it." Then the man unwound the 
 bandage about his head and the king of Israel dis- 
 cerned that he was of the prophets. With bowed 
 head and heavy heart he listened to the word of 
 doom : '' Because thou hast let go out of thy hand 
 the man whom I devoted to destruction, therefore 
 thy life shall be for his life, and thy people for his 
 people." And the king of Israel went to his house 
 heavy and displeased. Oh, these nameless monitors 
 who sit ever by the roadside and wait for us as we 
 return from the fields of desire ! How they turn 
 the sweets of victory into bitterness of gall ! How 
 they make the ivory palace of our pride seem stale, 
 
The Parable of the Lost Prisoner 35^ 
 
 flat and unprofitable ! Who can penetrate the dis- 
 guise ? Who can avoid the hiding-place and wait- 
 ing-place of conscience, God's unrelenting prophet ? 
 Whether it be a king who passes in his chariot 
 fresh from victory in war, or a peasant with lowly 
 tread, there conscience waits to tell us of our folly 
 and name our judgment. It is not enough that the 
 battle has been won and the army beaten. Con- 
 science comes, not to praise us for what we have 
 done, but to rebuke us for what we have left un- 
 done ; to tell us that one hundred thousand slain 
 foes will not compensate for one king of evil dis- 
 missed in peace ; to tell us that a hundred prayers 
 and gifts and deeds cannot atone for one act of dis- 
 obedience, or stay the approaching hand of judg- 
 ment. 
 
 Not the main lesson, but one of the by-products 
 of this parable, is the manner in which it illustrates 
 the danger of half-way measures with evil and sin. 
 Three years after Ahab let Benhadad go free and 
 sent him back to his own country, Ahab and Je- 
 hoshaphat are again at war with him before the 
 walls of Kamoth Gilead. Kemembering the words 
 of the man of God, that the king whom he had 
 let go would one day take his life, Ahab went into 
 battle in the disguise of a common soldier. But a 
 certain man drew a bow at a venture, and Ahab 
 was slain. His life was for the life of the man he 
 let go. The conduct of Ahab, in view of the past 
 and the present and the future, was a stupendous 
 piece of folly. If, after Waterloo, the Allies, 
 
36 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 thinking that an emperor whose legions had been 
 crushed could never again menace the peace of 
 Europe, had let N'apoleon go free, or established 
 him on the continent of Europe, their folly would 
 have been of a piece with that of Ahab. It was 
 sad to see him digging in the garden at Longwood, 
 or standing on the naked cliff at Helena, musing 
 over the past, feeling himself only a memory, a 
 dead man not yet buried, bothered with petty offi- 
 cials and quarrelling with his companions in cap- 
 tivity. But it was good for the peace of Europe. 
 It was an instance where severity was mercy. 
 There are national problems which now and then 
 confront the statesmen of a nation and the tend- 
 ency wiU always be to half-way measures of com- 
 promise. In our Civil War the Yalley of Virginia 
 was the granary of Lee's army. Union forces 
 marched through it and gained victories ; but the 
 crops grew again, the sheep and oxen and cattle 
 waxed fat, and all the resources of that well- 
 watered valley were propping up the Confederate 
 Government. Finally Grant sent Hunter and then 
 Sheridan into the valley and told them to burn it 
 out ; not to leave a mill-wheel that could turn, or 
 a barn that could store the grain, or a crop that 
 could feed the animals : to lay it waste, and deso- 
 late it so that even a crow flying over it would 
 have to carry its own rations. A howl of rage 
 w^ent up, North and South, but the torch of Sheri- 
 dan and Hunter did more to bring the war to a 
 close and end the sufferings of North and South 
 
The Parable of the Lost Prisoner 37 
 
 than the explosion of the shell or the thrust of the 
 bayonet. 
 
 When it becomes plain that a thing is devoted to 
 destruction by God, then man had better line up 
 on the side of God. In 1808 Congress forbade the 
 further importation of slaves, thus recognizing 
 that the thing was wrong and dangerous. But 
 for fifty-three years the nation fooled and compro- 
 mised and debated, and then slavery had to be 
 washed out in a sea of blood. To right-thinking 
 men and women it must be increasingly apparent 
 that the Ijguor tragic is a thing devoted by God to 
 destruction. If God's curse doesn't rest on it, then 
 God never has and never will curse an evil thing. 
 In the 'forties and 'fifties the danger was recog- 
 nized in this country. Then it would have been 
 an easy matter to destroy the business. But in- 
 stead of that, States and Government began to 
 regulate, license, limit, compromise, until now hell 
 from beneath is stirred if you but put your little 
 finger on the business. Busy here and there with 
 canal-digging and road-making and financial re- 
 forms, the Nation has let this hideous prisoner, 
 potential with so much damnation and woe, escape 
 to its stronghold with sundry promises and regu- 
 lations, only to come back at the return of the year 
 with a bigger army and renewed vigour. 
 
 What is true of man collectively is true of man 
 as the individual. The time to destroy sin and 
 crush evil habits is when you have them in your 
 power. If you have had some encounter with a 
 
38 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 besetting sin, or evil habit, don't be content to let 
 it go with compromise. God told Saul to destroy 
 Amalek. Saul thought he was wiser than God 
 and let some of them escape. Years have passed 
 by, and Saul, lying self-wounded on the field of 
 Gilboa, called to a man, " Stand upon me and slay 
 me." "So I stood upon him and slew him, and I 
 took the crown that was on his head and the brace- 
 let that was on his arm." And that man was an 
 Amalekite. That is the natural history of sin 
 when we spare it, and treat it lightly. One day 
 it comes back to find us weak, and it stands upon 
 us and takes the crown of manhood from our dis- 
 honoured brow. When you deal with sin, deal 
 with it — not as an hypothesis of theology — but as 
 a foe who will one day show you no quarter. 
 
 " As thy servant was busy here and there, be- 
 hold he was gone." The precious prisoner escaped 
 him while he was busy with other things. The 
 great business of that man's day was to guard that 
 prisoner. But he went here and there, to do this 
 and that, and the prisoner escaped. Every period 
 of life has its irrevocable and irreparable. The 
 farmer who doesn't get his plough out in March 
 and April and turn up the soil, and sow the seed, 
 will starve when December comes. There is a 
 time to plant, and a time to reap. There are 
 things to be done in March that cannot be done in 
 December. Youth is a prisoner committed to our 
 keeping for only one day. If we neglect to do 
 some things in youth, train the body, clothe the 
 
The Parable of the Lost Prisoner 39 
 
 mind, we must pay for it in after life. There is an 
 angel who comes down to stir the pool of life in 
 the days of youth. He who will not step down 
 then, steps down never. In the early morning, 
 after the sun is up, the roses on a June morning 
 will sparkle with a thousand diamonds of beauty 
 and glory. In a little moment the dew is gone, 
 and gone the glory of it. At high noon you may 
 take a pitcher of water and pour it over the rose- 
 bush, but no matter how abundant the water, and 
 how pure it may be, all your pouring will never 
 bring back that golden glitter of the short-lived 
 dew of sunrise. Kejoice, O young man, young 
 woman, in thy youth ! Eemember thy Creator in 
 the days of youth. Fit body, mind and soul in the 
 days of thy youth. One day you will awake to 
 find youth, that elusive prisoner, is gone, and gone 
 forever. 
 
 ^* Break, break, break, at the foot of thy crags, 
 OSea! 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 Will never come back to me." 
 
 Opportunity for doing good comes to all of us, 
 but its day is brief. No one of us is so limited in 
 sphere or so humble in place but he can shed 
 heaven about him. Eecall for the moment how it is 
 the little kindnesses and courtesies and thoughtf ul- 
 nesses which constitute the staple of human happi- 
 ness. The power lies within the reach of us all, 
 but it does not lie there forever, for the simple 
 
40 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 reason that those to whom we might do good are 
 not always at our hand, and we ourselves may sud- 
 denly be called to our account. Therefore, redeem 
 the time. There is Jesus kneeling in agony in 
 prayer in the moonlit shadows of Gethsemane, and 
 the Three whom He had asked to watch with Him 
 — Peter, James and John — asleep. '* Could ye not 
 watch with me one hour ? " Just one hour ! The 
 opportunity of serving Jesus in that way lasted just 
 one hour. They failed to awake and use the hour, 
 and when it was past, Jesus came to them and find- 
 ing them still sleeping, said sadly, " Sleep on now 
 and take your rest ! Whether you wake or sleep 
 makes no difference to me. Your hour of holy 
 service and fidelity is past. Sleep on now ! " Do 
 we not deal with our friends and beloved and fel- 
 low men as these disciples did with Jesus ? We 
 sleep as if we could have the same chance to-mor- 
 row. The one with whom you ought to watch, by 
 whose side you ought to stand, at this very hour 
 may be kneeling in his garden, distilling from his 
 brow the drops of agony, and you asleep, careless, 
 indifferent. You are busy here and there, and 
 while you are busy the precious prisoner is gone, 
 and all Eternit}^ can never bring him back. Oh, 
 do not live and do not work, and do not love as 
 though you were fixed in your present state and 
 relationship for Eternity, and not for a little seg- 
 ment of time between the two eternities. Whatso- 
 ever is in your heart and mind to do, and to say, 
 and to be, do it, say it, be it now ! To-morrow 
 
The Parable of the Lost Prisoner 41 
 
 you may take up the morning paper and find that 
 he is gone and your chance is gone. To-morrow 
 you may call and none will answer. To-morrow 
 the still face, the vacant place, the unlifted book, 
 the unfinished letter, will speak to you with a re- 
 buke that your vexed soul will scarce be able to 
 bear : — " Sleep on no\y !• Sleep, sleep forever ! You 
 had it in your heart, you meant to do it, you meant 
 to say it, ^But as thy servant was busy here and 
 then^, behold, he was gone ! ' " 
 
 *' I did not know how short your Jay would be ! 
 I had you. safe, and words could wait awhile — 
 E'en when your eyes !tegged tenderness of me, 
 Behind their smile. 
 
 *^ And now for you, so dark, so long, j^ight ! 
 I speak, but on my knees," unheard, alone — 
 "What words were these to make a^ghort day iJright 
 
 '' —If I had known ! -V-*^ ' /* ^ *' • 
 
 Ah, love — if I had.khown ! ''^ . - 
 
 ^ • * ^ 
 
 One final application of this pai'able. This life •, 
 
 is a probation for the next. Time, is a 'tri^l for 
 eternity^ That is the ^teaching, bi^ Christianity. ^ 
 IN'either you nor I can prc^ve that it is so ; but if it 
 isn't so, then worship, prayers and serm9n^ are all 
 a farce. Christ must have knowUj and if you go 
 through His teachings you will find that He al- 
 ways dwells on that, that this life is the probation 
 for the next. If I could show you that your period 
 of probation would come to an end this night at six 
 
42 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 o'clock, and when I came again to this pulpit for 
 the evening service you would be in eternity, what 
 now would be your thoughts ? You, like all others, 
 would think of things done that you would either 
 do differently or not at all ; of things not done that 
 you would do ; of friends from whom you are 
 alienated and to whom you would seek to be recon- 
 ciled ; of little debts of love, of kindness that you 
 would make haste to pay. But the greatest thing 
 that could engage your mind would be this : How 
 do I stand in regard to the offer of salvation and 
 eternal life which God has made to me through 
 Jesus Christ ? Then you would not be too busy 
 here and there to neglect to do what Christ said 
 every wise man ought to do — Seek first the king- 
 dom of God and His righteousness. Between now 
 and six o'clock this evening is six hours. But 
 whether it be six hours, or six days, or six years, 
 nothing is more certain than that your probation 
 will end, and the chance and trial of life will be 
 over. Do I speak to some who have been busy 
 here and there, careless of the great thing ? Ee- 
 member that between you and eternity there is 
 nothing but time, which is of all things the frailest. 
 Seek ye the Lord while He may be found. Call 
 upon Him while He is near ! 
 
IV 
 
 The Parable of the Ewe Lamb 
 2 Samuel xii. 1-2 j 
 
 ALEXANDER of Macedon was painted with 
 his hand resting on his face, as if in reverie. 
 But the real purpose was to hide the ugly 
 scar on his cheek. The German emperor is photo- 
 graphed and painted standing in a position so that 
 his withered arm will not appear. But in the Bible 
 men are painted just as they are. No scar, how- 
 ever hideous, no ugly deformity is omitted. When 
 Nathan rebuked the king for his sin, he told him 
 that what he had done would give occasion to the 
 enemies of the Lord to blaspheme. It gave occa- 
 sion then, and it gives occasion now. Like vultures 
 over the carrion, the enemies of God have wheeled 
 and screamed over the fallen king. But had it not 
 been that God wanted to teach judgment and peni- 
 tence and forgiveness, we should never have heard 
 of the fall of David. He was a man after God's 
 heart, and yet the thing that David had done dis- 
 pleased the Lord, and the Lord sent Nathan. For 
 David's good, and our own, this parable is told. 
 
 *^ Not in their brightness, but their earthly stains, 
 Are the true seed vouchsafed to earthly eyes, 
 And saints are lowered that the world may rise." 
 43 
 
44 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 Although a sharp dart for a heinous sin, the 
 parable has a tenderness and winsomeness in it 
 which might make one think that He who taught 
 in parables had spoken it Himself. The first 
 chapter in David's fall w^as bad enough. He had 
 taken the wife of the brave and loyal Uriah and 
 that created conditions that made it expedient for 
 him to go the next step and cover up his sin by 
 taking the life of the faithful and unsuspecting 
 soldier. Failing to make Uriah his tool by flattery 
 and intoxication, he plots for his death. Sin is 
 like some drugs — cumulative. Take them to-day, 
 you must have them, and in larger quantity, to- 
 morrow. One sin opens the gate and prepares the 
 way for the next. Herod slew James, and when 
 he saw that it pleased the people, he stretched forth 
 his hand to kill Peter also. The plan of David 
 reveals a strange state of mind. He was king of 
 Israel and could have taken the life of Uriah at 
 any moment he desired it. But the light of truth 
 and conscience had not deserted him. He wanted 
 Uriah to die, and yet realized that Uriah did not 
 deserve to die. Therefore, he devised a plan that 
 would end the life of Uriah and bring relief to 
 David, and yet David would not have lifted his 
 hand against him. In the siege of this Ammonite 
 stronghold of Kabbah Joab was to set Uriah in 
 the forefront of the hottest battle. At a pre- 
 arranged signal, those fighting with him were to 
 retire suddenly and leave him to his foes. Thus 
 gallantly fighting for his king, never suspecting 
 
The Parable of the Ewe Lamb 43; 
 
 the wicked and treacherous plot, Uriah died, and 
 his wife became David's wife. O David, why didst 
 thou not die, fall thyself in battle, before this dread- 
 ful night! The glory and the splendour of thy 
 reign are past ; now comes the eclipse and the 
 night. If thou hadst died before this double crime, 
 thy name would have come down to us unstained. 
 But now, sufferings and misfortunes await thee. 
 Never shall the sword depart from thy house. If 
 thou hadst only died before thine eyes beheld 
 Bathsheba, before thou didst write the letter that 
 murdered Uriah, thou wouldst never have seen 
 incest among thine own children ; Tamar dis- 
 honoured and Amnon murdered ; the bloody 
 dagger of Absalom would never have passed like 
 a curse before thine eyes ; never wouldst thou have 
 forsaken thy capital to hear the curses and execra- 
 tions of Shimei, and never wouldst thou have cried 
 out, there on thy face in the chamber over the 
 gate, with the tears bathing thine aged cheeks, — 
 " O Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! Would 
 I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son ! " 
 But that's an afterthought. In order to say 
 when it had been good for a man to die, you must 
 know the whole history of his life. The im- 
 penetrable and not to be lifted veil hangs between 
 me and to-morrow. What does that to-morrow 
 have in store for me ? What of pain ? What of 
 joy ? What of fame ? What of sin ? What of 
 shame ? After that to-morrow has passed, will it 
 have been such a day that will make me wish that 
 
46 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 I had died before it dawned ? I waive the matter 
 of pain and loss and sorrow and loneliness, for that 
 can bring no bitter self-reproach. But what of life 
 in its tragic possibilities for good and evil ? Ought 
 it not to soberize us to think that there are many 
 who will live to-day and to-morrow so that the 
 close of to-morrow will make them wish that life 
 had ended for them this morning ? 
 
 " David sent and took her home to his house and 
 
 she became his wife." But ! " the thing that 
 
 David had done displeased the Lord." In vain are 
 all your honours and achievements and pleasures, 
 if at the end there must be attached this grim 
 addendum, "But the thing displeased the Lord." 
 Did it displease David ? It is foolish to suppose 
 that David never had a moment of remorse or mis- 
 giving. Too many Psalms written and too many 
 hours spent with God for that. The savage and 
 atrocious vengeance that he took upon the conquered 
 Ammonite stronghold, causing the inhabitants to 
 be dragged under harrows, and to be driven through 
 the furnaces, shows an irritability fed by the fuel 
 of an uneasy conscience. When people are mean 
 and ugly and irritable, the causes are not always 
 physical and gastronomical ; they may lie far 
 hidden in the recesses of a disturbed conscience. 
 
 But months passed by, and David showed no 
 sign of repentance. In the cares of state it may 
 be that he had pushed aside the first interrogations 
 of conscience. But the Lord sent Nathan. He 
 might have openly named the sin of David and 
 
The Parable of the Ewe Lamb 47 
 
 pronounced the judgment, but he chose the better 
 way of describing it, and then letting David judge 
 himself. He makes David pass sentence upon an 
 imaginary case, and then shows him that it is his 
 own case. " There were two men in the city, one 
 rich and one poor. The rich man had exceeding 
 many flocks and herds; but the poor man had 
 nothing save one little ewe lamb, which he had 
 bought and nourished up ; and it grew up together 
 with him and with his children ; it did eat of his 
 own morsel, and drank of his own cup, and lay in 
 his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter." 
 What a picture of helplessness, preciousness and 
 innocence ! " And there came a traveller unto the 
 rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock, 
 and of his own herd, to dress it for the wayfaring 
 man that was come unto him, but took the poor 
 man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was 
 come unto him." The tale would have moved a 
 heart of ice, and David's generous nature kindled 
 at the recital. His hand grasped his sword, and 
 his eye flashed fire as he exclaimed, " The man that 
 hath done this is worthy to die ! " Then Nathan 
 applied the parable — " Thou art the man ! " 
 
 The most heinous sin is the sin of heartlessness. 
 David's anger rises against this man, and God's 
 anger rises against David, for the reason that 
 David himself gives — " Because he had not pity ! " 
 David knew that he was a murderer and an adul- 
 terer. But he had never yet accused himself, or 
 been accused, of being a man without pity. He 
 
48 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 had forgiven Saul and showed mercy unto his 
 helpless household. But now Nathan lifted the 
 disguise, and he saw himself a cruel, pitiless mon- 
 ster. "With palaces and armies and wives and serv- 
 ants, he had taken all that Uriah had, what was 
 to him all that the ewe lamb was to the poor man. 
 In the most terrible description of judgment in the 
 Bible, Dives in hell, the rich man is set forth as a 
 man who is punished because he had no pity ; he 
 let the beggar lie unheeded at the gate. Sin is 
 cruelty, it matters not in what garb it parades. 
 There will be the bitterness of your remorse, and 
 the fires of your judgment, in the recollection or 
 the realization that in thought, or word, or deed 
 you have had no pity. Pity is no idle passing 
 sentimentalism. It is the surest path to love, and 
 where love is there can be no injustice and no 
 cruelty and no judgment. A moment's passing 
 pity for the simple, brave soldier whose wife he 
 proposed to take, and whose life he must now have, 
 would have saved David from this black night of 
 sin. Can you name a single sin, of any kind, of 
 any form, that would not be left uncommitted, did 
 the sinner but look at that sin through the eyes 
 of pity ? Would a man get drunk, would he lie, 
 would he slander, would he speak harshly, would 
 he judge unkindly, would he torture, would he 
 defile the body, if he were guided by the hand of 
 pity ? How about stealing ? Suppose your chil- 
 dren are starving, and you rob the bank or the 
 store to feed them ? Is not that a case where pity 
 
The Parable of the Ewe Lamb 49 
 
 is the father to the deed ? But the next day when 
 your wife looks into your face, she looks into the 
 face of a thief ; when your children take you by 
 the hand, they take the hand of a thief. Did you 
 really pity them when you stole the money or the 
 bread? O Christ, Master of all compassion, do 
 Thou surround us with a wall of pity, so that no 
 evil thing may come in to curse our lives with its 
 blackness and its woe ! 
 
 It is easy to condemn in others what we con- 
 done in ourselves. It is possible to condemn and 
 hate sin in the abstract, and love and practice it in 
 the concrete. It is possible to confess that you are 
 a sinner and yet not confess your sin. David 
 flamed with hot anger when he heard Nathan's 
 tale of the cruel rich man. The man who had 
 done it ought to die. But David had done the 
 same thing, only he had taken a man's life instead 
 of a sheep. When we look at others' faults, our 
 eyes have a strange magnifying effect ; but when 
 we turn the glass on ourselves, it reduces and min- 
 imizes our sins. We see extenuating circumstances, 
 and our seLf-love weaves a veil of embroidery 
 which hides the corruption within. Men can wax 
 eloquent over world wrongs, social wrongs, and 
 never imagine that in their own homes they are 
 tyrants and heartless despots. Just as some loathed 
 disease is less tolerable when seen in another than 
 in ourselves, so sin looks worse in my neighbour 
 than it does in me. Men are like Swift's Yahoos 
 who hated one another more than they did any 
 
50 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 different species of animals; "and the reason 
 usually assigned was the odiousness of theu^ own 
 shapes, which all could see in the rest, but not in 
 themselves." As Jesus put it, "Thou fool! first 
 take the beam out of your own eye, and then pass 
 judgment upon the mote in thy brother's eye." 
 
 *^ O wad some Power the giftie gie us 
 To see ourselves as ithers see us ! 
 It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 
 An' foolish notion. '^ 
 
 When, in that play within the play, the assas- 
 sin poured the poison into the sleeper's ear, the 
 guilty king rose up in terror, for he saw just what 
 Hamlet intended he should see, his own crime. 
 How was it possible for guilty David to have 
 missed the point of the parable and not to have 
 known who was meant by the rich man and the 
 poor man and the ewe lamb ? Not until the sword 
 was a hairbreadth from the heart did he know 
 that it was meant for him. If David had been a 
 hardened sinner, we would not wonder. But he 
 was a man whose heart had been right with God, 
 alive to things that were good and evil. His case 
 presents an example of how a man, familiar with 
 the moral law, and accustomed to hear its blessing 
 and penalties, may be blinded to his own faults. The 
 Thirty-second Psalm, supposed to have been written 
 after David received pardon, describes for us the 
 hot and fevered restlessness of a man who tries to 
 hide his sin. He knows no peace until pardon 
 
The Parable of the Ewe Lamb 5 1 
 
 comes after confession. But that is the recollec- 
 tion or musing of an awakened conscience. There 
 was a time when his sin gave him no trouble. He 
 was not tossing on a sleepless bed, nor stuug by 
 the whips and scorns of conscience. Sin can anaes- 
 thetize conscience. One of the results of evil-doing 
 is the deadening of one's sense of right and wrong. 
 David's own conscience did not convict him. He 
 could listen to the parable of Nathan without a 
 tremor of self-condemnation. His conscience was 
 in a deep sleep. Why does man need a revelation ? 
 Why does man need a church? Why does man 
 need a Bible ? Why does man need a Kathan, 
 preacher, priest, messenger, to tell him what is in 
 that Bible and that revelation? Because of the 
 veil of blindness which sin has drawn over his 
 eye ; because of the stupor into which sin has cast 
 his conscience. "I had not known sin except 
 through the law " and I had not known the law 
 except it had been given and declared unto me. 
 You trust in your own conscience, but it may be as 
 scarred as was the conscience of David. Search your 
 conscience by the light of God's word. Let God's 
 candle down into the hidden places of the heart. I 
 wonder if it was after this experience with sins and 
 conscience that David said, " Search me, O God, and 
 try my thoughts. Know me, and try my heart, and 
 see if there be any evil way in me. Who can dis- 
 cern his errors ? Cleanse thou me from secret sins." 
 This would be a melancholy tale, fitted only to 
 harrow the feelings and open old wounds to bleed 
 
52 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 again, were it not for the final issue. And David 
 said, "I have sinned." And Nathan said, "The 
 Lord hath put away thy sin." Now the storm has 
 passed and the rainbow of mercy spans the heaven. 
 If you say, " I have done a wrong thing, an evil 
 thing. I have committed a crime," no answer 
 comes from the mercy seat of God. But when 
 you say, " I have sinned against the Lord," when 
 you relate your offense to Him who is the source 
 of all justice and mercy and righteousness, then 
 quick as the hills give back their echoes, quick as 
 the sun comes through an open window, God's for- 
 giveness comes down to heal the soul. That for- 
 giveness has been prepared for us from before the 
 foundations of the world, for the Lamb was slain 
 from the foundation of the world. Divine plans 
 and agencies have announced it to men, and it will 
 take the immeasurable stretches of Eternity to ap- 
 preciate to the full its beauty and power; but 
 quicker than the eye can flash, faster than the 
 heart can beat, it comes to you when you seek it. 
 " Because the quick chemistries of grace take our 
 slow study a lifetime — nay, an Eternit}^ — to under- 
 stand, let us not forget that it takes God but a mo- 
 ment to work these beautiful combinations, and 
 create the strange new life whose power is folded 
 up within them." It is this that makes the Gospel 
 good tidings. It is a morning note of joy. It 
 sounds the reveille and resurrection of the soul. It 
 chants the return of the prodigal. It breaks the 
 bonds of the prisoner. There is joy in heaven over 
 
The Parable of the Ewe Lamb 53 
 
 one sinner that repenteth, and joy in the heart of 
 him who is forgiven. Blessed is the man whose 
 transgression is forgiven. If we confess our sins, 
 He is just and faithful to forgive us. Christianity, 
 after all, is a religion for sinners, and only those 
 who are willing to confess themselves as such are 
 permitted to enter into its joy. In his " Seven 
 Great Statesmen" Andrew White tells of the 
 death of Hugo Grotius. It is a recital that touches 
 the deep places of the heart. On his way back 
 from Sweden the ship on which Grotius was 
 travelling was wrecked on the Pomeranian coast. 
 Battered by the elements, he managed to get as far 
 as Rostok, and there the famous scholar lay down 
 to die. The beacon light that had illuminated the 
 darkness of his age was soon to be quenched in the 
 smoke of death. The pastor of the Lutheran church, 
 learning of his presence, came in to see him. He 
 made no effort to wrestle with the great statesman, 
 but simply read to him our Saviour's Parable of the 
 Publican and the Pharisee, ending with the words, 
 " God be merciful to me, a sinner ! " At that the 
 dying sage opened his eyes and exclaimed, " That 
 publican. Lord, am I ! " Until we are ready to 
 make a like confession Christianity is a closed book, 
 a forbidden garden. Grotius, the poor Publican, 
 wicked David, stainless Paul, — all made that prayer, 
 and making it, passed into the City of Forgiveness 
 and Peace. Without that prayer, Christianity may 
 be a history, a philosophy, a code, but not a re- 
 ligion that saves. 
 
The Parable of the Woman of Tekoah 
 2 Samuel xiv, i-2/i. 
 
 WE come now to the greatest of the par- 
 ables of the Old Testament. I call it 
 the greatest, not because it is superior 
 in form and directness. It has not the winsome- 
 ness of the parable told by JS'athan, nor the biting 
 irony of Jotham's fable. But it stands first in the 
 chief thought which it brings to our consideration 
 — the way in which God has devised means to 
 reconcile the world to Himself. 
 
 When David confessed his sin, the Lord forgave 
 him. INTathan said to him, "The Lord hath put 
 away thy sin. But the sword shall never depart 
 from thy house." David's sin was forgiven, but he 
 had to suffer for his sin. The results of sin were 
 not cancelled. David could repent and confess, 
 but there was one thing that he could not do ; he 
 could not stop the swords of suffering and woe that 
 he had loosed from their scabbards. The first one 
 to feel the anguish of those swords of retribution 
 was the one in all the world the most innocent — 
 the little child. " And the Lord smote the child." 
 It was as if He had put the sword in David's own 
 hand, and had said, " Smite the child ! " That was 
 
 54 
 
The Parable of the Woman of Tekoah ^^ 
 
 only the first drop in the cup of bitterness that 
 David had brewed for himself. The two sins 
 which had disgraced him were to reproduce them- 
 selves in his favourite sons, Amnon and Absalom. 
 Those names were sad misnomers for David. 
 Amnon means "faithful," and Absalom, "the 
 peace of his father." Oh, bitter disappointment! 
 When Amnon was born, David named him " Faith- 
 ful," for he was filled with the joy of having a son 
 who should be faithful and loyal to his father and 
 to his father's God. He named the other " Peace 
 of his Father," for he looked forward to the days 
 when this son should be the peace of his declining 
 days. See how his dreams came true. There is 
 Amnon, a filthy wretch, faithless even to the ordi- 
 nary standards of decency, cut down by his broth- 
 er's sword. There is Absalom, anything but the 
 peace of his father, born not to bring peace but a 
 sword, now an outlaw beyond the Jordan, and 
 when he comes home, it will be only to fill the last 
 days of his father with humiliation and suffering. 
 When all these troubles came upon him, David re- 
 called the words of the prophet who brought him 
 the promise of forgiveness, " But the sword shall 
 never depart from thy house." There are things 
 which even the forgiven man cannot undo, any 
 more than you cast a stone into a pool, and then 
 with your hand stay the ever-multiplying circles. 
 We live in a world of laws that cannot be trifled 
 with. " Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall 
 he reap." David sowed shame, appetite and mur- 
 
56 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 der, and one by one they come back on his head. 
 "We recognize this law and own its justice, but too 
 often our lives are so ordered that we are as men 
 that expect that our lives and our deeds will be ex- 
 ceptions to the general law. With God there is 
 mercy and plenteous redemption. But the Sword ! 
 
 '* Wounds of the soul, though healed, will ache, 
 The reddening scars remain 
 
 And make confession ; 
 Lost innocence returns no more. 
 We are not what we were 
 
 Before transgression.^' 
 
 That sword was now piercing the unhappy king's 
 heart as he walked to and fro on the walls of his 
 palace at Jerusalem, and looked wistfully off 
 towards the country that lay beyond the Jordan. 
 Over there, dead or alive, was the most precious 
 possession that David had. Absalom was there. 
 It was three years since David had seen him. Be- 
 cause of the wrong done his sister Tamar, Absalom 
 took the law in his own hands and murdered 
 Amnon at a banquet. Now he was an exile and 
 an outlaw in the land of the king of Geshur. His 
 crime demanded some kind of punishment. David 
 and all the court felt that. He was a criminal, a 
 fratricide, but he was David's son, and that made 
 all the difference in the world. All the pathos of 
 human nature runs through this affection which 
 David had for the brilliant blackguard, Absalom. 
 He could no more be at ease with Absalom a 
 
The Parable of the Woman of Tekoah 57 
 
 roaming fugitive, than he could be happy when 
 Ahimaaz brought him the tidings that Absalom 
 had been slain in battle. In his heart there is a 
 conflict between the instinct for justice and natural 
 affection. Judgment said, " Absalom, you have 
 sinned ; you have slain your own brother ; pay the 
 penalty. Eemain in banishment." But love said, 
 " Absalom, come home, come home ! Without 
 thee the feast is cheerless ! Without thee the 
 halls are silent ! Without thee how poor is the 
 shining armour and mighty array of war ! Other 
 sons are mine, but there is only one Absalom ! 
 Absalom, with all thy faults and sins, thy pride 
 and waywardness, come home ! " '* And the soul 
 of king David longed to go forth unto Absalom." 
 
 With all his gruffness and abruptness of manner 
 the captain of the guard, Joab, had a very delicate 
 appreciation of the workings of a man's heart, 
 especially the heart of David. He saw that David 
 was sad and melancholy, forgetful of the affairs of 
 state because of the absence of Absalom. He did 
 not dare bluntly to tell the king to bring the exile 
 home, for he knew that David had regard for the 
 law of God and the realm. He must be appealed 
 to in some other way. Therefore Joab sends for 
 a wise woman of Tekoah. 
 
 There are some things that a woman can do 
 much better than a man. If an appeal is to be 
 made to the emotions, get a wise woman. Joab 
 sent to Tekoah for a wise woman, not altogether a 
 witch, but a clever sort of diviner, or soothsayer. 
 
58 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 It is one of the terms that has survived through all 
 the periods of man's history, for in continental 
 countries there is a sign which confronts one every- 
 where, " sage femme?'' The crafty Joab told her 
 what she was to do and what she was to say. As 
 in the parable of Nathan and also that of the Lost 
 Prisoner, the plan is to have the king pass sentence 
 on a fictitious case, and then show him that his own 
 case is the same. But Nathan came to rouse the 
 conscience of the king against his feelings; here 
 the purpose is to rouse the feelings of the king 
 against his conscience. 
 
 As a woman that had long mourned for the 
 dead she appeared before the seat of David. The 
 king asked her the cause of her sorrow, and she 
 then told her parable and played her part. She was 
 a widow with two sons. The sons had quarrelled 
 together in the field and, since there was none to 
 part them, one slew the other. Now the relatives 
 were demanding that in keeping with law and 
 custom the remaining son pay for his deed with his 
 life. " So shall they quench my coal which is left, 
 and shall not leave to my husband either name 
 or remembrance on earth." David's answer was 
 in keeping with his generous, impulsive nature. 
 " As the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of 
 thy son fall to the ground ! " Having led him to 
 commit himself that far, the woman with wonder- 
 ful tact and graciousness of manner proceeded to 
 make the application of the parable. David had 
 two sons just like her own. One had killed the 
 
The Parable of the Woman of Tekoah 59 
 
 other, and justice demanded the exile or the punish- 
 ment of the offender. If David could set aside the 
 law in the case of her son, why could he not do it 
 in the case of his own son, Absalom ? She enforces 
 her argument by an appeal to patriotism, the pathos 
 of human life, and the mercy of God. In keeping 
 Absalom away David did wrong to the people of 
 God ; life is so short : we must needs die and are 
 as water poured forth, spilt on the ground. Severity 
 of vengeance could not bring Amnon back to life, 
 but it might keep Absalom forever from the face 
 of his father. Even God did not deal with men as 
 David was dealing with his son, for God devised 
 means that His banished be not expelled from Him. 
 Touched by the entreaty, and perhaps glad for some 
 excuse, David sent for Joab and told him that 
 Absalom might come home. 
 
 " "We must needs die and are as water spilt on 
 the ground which cannot be gathered up again." 
 It's easy to spill water on the ground, but hard to 
 gather it up again. What a figure that is of the 
 transitoriness of human life ! We accept it as a bit 
 of poetry, a winged metaphor ; but to order our 
 lives in the light of its truth, that is a different 
 matter. David could not forgive Absalom after 
 he was dead. There could be no reconciliation in 
 the tomb. It is well for us to look at our duties 
 and consider our alienations in the knowledge of 
 life's uncertainty. We are indeed like water spilled 
 upon the ground. How little it takes to break the 
 pitcher at the fountain of existence and spill the 
 
6o The Parables of the Old Testament' 
 
 mysterious thing that we call life. Once poured 
 forth, you cannot gather it up again. It is too late 
 for forgiveness or reconciliation then. In the name 
 of Christ I ask you to look at your alienations, 
 enmities, wrongs, hard feelings and resentments in 
 this revealing and awe-inspiring light. 
 
 In one of the galleries of the Louvre there hangs 
 a double painting, which appeals to far more eyes 
 and hearts than many a famed Ascension or Trans- 
 figuration. In the first painting is seen an outraged 
 father, with uplifted hand, ordering the wicked son 
 to leave the paternal roof. In the background 
 cower the weeping mother and frightened sisters 
 and brothers. The second scene shows the same 
 cottage and the same humble room and the same 
 father and mother and children. But the father 
 lies still upon the bed, the aloofness of death upon 
 his face. At the side of the bed, with her face 
 buried in her hands, kneels the mother and her 
 children. The cottage door has just been flung 
 open and the returning prodigal stands with his 
 foot on the sill and his hand on the door, as if he 
 had been smifcten into stone. He had come too 
 late. Both father and son bad waited too long. 
 Now there is no place for repentance and no place 
 for forgiveness. The father's life had been poured 
 forth ; now it could not be gathered up again. 
 Life's cord is silver, but it is frail, and when once 
 cut, it cannot be tied together again : life's bowl 
 and lamp is golden, but it is easily broken and 
 shattered to pieces ; life's pitcher is chastely wrought, 
 
The Parable of the Woman of Tekoah 6l 
 
 but when it falls, it is gone; life's wheel to-day 
 draws joy and sorrow out of the hidden deeps of 
 being, but when the wheel is broken at the cistern, 
 never again will it bring the water up. Yet men 
 go on from day to day, neglecting their oppor- 
 tunities, not remembering their Creator, harbouring 
 their enmities and feeding the flames of their dis- 
 agreements as if life's cord were a chain of iron 
 instead of silver, or a lamp of heavy bronze not to 
 be broken, or a pitcher of brass, or a wheel that 
 could never be interrupted in its daily routine. 
 Turn the wheel of duty, trim the lamp of love, fill 
 the pitcher of reconciliation; for to-morrow you 
 may be as water spilled on the ground, to be 
 gathered up no more. 
 
 This brings me to a different kind of alienation, 
 that which exists between God and man. This 
 parable fits itself into the gospel of reconciliation 
 if we think of God as the Father, instead of David, 
 and man the wanderer and exile, instead of Absa- 
 lom. Like Absalom, man is separated and alienated 
 from his Father. You may make poetic sentences 
 and write learned treatises about man as the child 
 of the Infinite Father ; but you do not tell the whole 
 truth until you say that he is a child who has wan- 
 dered from the Father's home, who has been sepa- 
 rated and alienated from the life of God. 'No rose- 
 water theory of human nature suits the dark facts 
 of man's state. Talk with one man who reveres 
 God and obeys His commandments and follows His 
 Eternal Son, and then talk with another who makes 
 
62 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 his God, if any, an abstraction, and is full of ma- 
 lignity against Christ and Christianity. The only 
 way you can explain it is this : one man has been 
 reconciled to God, and the other alienated from 
 God. The natural state of man is alienation. 
 
 But God does devise means that His banished 
 be not forever banished. The soul of the Eternal 
 God yearns to go out to the banished son. David 
 missed Absalom, the shepherd missed the one 
 sheep ; God feels your loss and exile. And because 
 God is love, He has devised means. In this story 
 of David the problem was solved by sinking judg- 
 ment in mercy, by sacrificing the judicial to the 
 paternal. But God could not do that. He could 
 not bring back the exile, the guilty man, as if he 
 were an innocent man. Those who treat man's 
 condition lightly would have God deal with sin in 
 that way. But God is too wise and too kind to do 
 that. The Wood of Ephraim filled with twenty 
 thousand corpses, and sorrow and gloom in every 
 home in Israel, and David moaning, " Would God 
 I had died for thee ! " was the result of a recon- 
 ciliation which ignored justice. For over a century 
 the Edinburgh Beview has had on its cover the 
 Latin epigram, " Judex damnatur cum nocens ah- 
 soVvitur " — " The judge is condemned when the 
 guilty is freed." If God is to forgive man, He must 
 forgive him like a God. If He is to justify, He 
 must still remain just. 
 
 God has devised means. IS'one but God could 
 have provided such a plan. By giving His only 
 
The Parable of the Woman of Tekoah 63 
 
 Begotten Son to die for the sins of the world, God 
 judges sin and yet forgives the sinner. He remains 
 just, and yet the justifier of them that believe in 
 Jesus. Christ, by the blood of His Cross, hath 
 made peace. You hath He reconciled. To-day 
 the messenger of God tells Absalom that he can 
 come home, that God is in Christ reconciling the 
 world to Himself. Have you dealt with sin ? 
 Have you dealt with your separation and aliena- 
 tion from the life of God ? And if not, is it be- 
 cause life is any longer or any less frail than it was 
 when this woman of Tekoah described it as " water 
 spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up 
 again " ? 
 
VI 
 
 The Parable of the Vineyard 
 Isaiah v, i-2j 
 
 IMAGINE, if you will, a priest or a minister of 
 religion arising in the assemblies of the French 
 nation to-day, announcing to the government 
 and the legislators, and passing up and down the 
 streets of Paris to cry aloud to all the people,^ this 
 message of woe and calamity : " France is strong 
 but not righteous ; she is patriotic but does not fear 
 God ; she is rich, but not true. For all this she is 
 to be punished. Her fair kingdom will be overrun 
 and devastated by the enemy, for the anger of God 
 is kindled against the nation." Imagine the storm 
 of rage and protest that would break over his head, 
 the cries of " traitor " and " patricide " that would 
 go up, the scorn and obloquy which would attend 
 him wherever he went, the danger his very life 
 would be in from the rage of the mobs, and you 
 will understand the position of Isaiah, a young 
 prophet, an intense patriot, a lover of Jerusalem, 
 when he informed her king, her counsellors and 
 her people that the proud nation of Judah, still 
 glittering in the glory of Uzziah's great reign, with 
 one of the largest standing armies in the world, 
 with a mighty array of new military inventions — 
 
 64 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 65 
 
 huge pieces of artillery which could batter down 
 any fortifications — and withal, riches, wealth, 
 splendour, prosperity, the show and panoply of 
 power, was corrupt at heart and abounded in op- 
 pression and brutal tyrannies and all unrighteous- 
 ness, and therefore God would deliver her over to 
 her foes ; that He would call a great nation from 
 the north to crush and humiliate her. 
 
 The stern and terrible content of his prophecy 
 may perhaps account for the way in which Isaiah 
 introduces himself and his message of approaching 
 doom. When God sent Nathan to rebuke David 
 for his sin, and pronounce doom upon him and his 
 house, how the sword should never depart from it, 
 Nathan commenced with a parable as gentle as if 
 it had fallen from the lips of the Master of Par- 
 ables Himself. He disarmed the apprehensions of 
 the guilty king and skillfully led him on until he 
 showed him that the sin he had so denounced was 
 his very own. " Thou art the man ! " Isaiah used 
 a like method. He begins with a song, and the 
 burden of the song is the story of a vineyard. 
 " Let me sing for my beloved a song of my beloved 
 touching his vineyard." 
 
 "A friend of his had a vineyard in a very fruitful 
 hill. The hillside was kissed each day by the 
 southern sun, the soil was favourable for the vine, 
 well watered, and, moreover, there were other vine- 
 yards in that same locality which were doing well, 
 and yielding some thirty, some sixty, and some 
 even an hundred fold. As soon as the land was 
 
66 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 his, he sent his servants to dig it and turn up the 
 earth and pick out the stones. Then he went to 
 the nursery of the husbandmen and purchased the 
 choicest vines, no ordinary vines, but the best that 
 money could buy, the vines for which Eschol and 
 Ephraim were noted, "grapes of Eschol" and 
 " grapes of Ephraim," so highly rated that even 
 the gleanings of the grapes of Ephraim, the poor 
 ones left over after the husbandman had sent the 
 best to the market, were considered better than the 
 vintage of other vineyards. These were the choice 
 vines that he set out in his vineyard. Then he 
 hewed out a wine-press so that when the vines bore 
 the purple fruit, he might be ready to press them 
 into the cheering wine. He was not content with 
 an ordinary booth beneath which the watchman 
 could sit and guard the vineyard from the invasion 
 of prowling beast or man, but he erected, at great 
 expense, a permanent tower where he himself 
 might come and sit when the sun had ^ne down 
 on the mountains and look with satisfaction on the 
 growing vines, and anticipate the day when they 
 would bend beneath the heavy clusters of the ri- 
 pened fruit. But when the time came for the 
 vineyard to bear fruit, lo, it bore wild grapes — 
 sour, bitter, useless. He had done all he could for 
 the vineyard, and the net result of all his expense 
 and care was wild grapes. There was nothing to 
 do but abandon the place : the hedge that enclosed 
 it was torn down, the tower was demolished, the 
 vines were uprooted, and the vineyard was left to 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 67 
 
 the company of briers and thorns and brambles. 
 ^o one could charge the owner of the vineyard 
 with having left undone anything w^hich the sci- 
 ence of viniculture could suggest, and no one could 
 blame him for abandoning the vineyard when it 
 brought forth wild grapes. 
 
 Thus far, all has been unobjectionable, only a 
 fair idyl of husbandry and field life. Then, sud- 
 denly, the prophet turns and drives the parable 
 home. " For the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts 
 is the House of Israel, and the men of Judah his 
 pleasant plant ; and he looked for justice, but be- 
 hold, oppression ; for righteousness, but behold, a 
 cry ! " He looked for the sweet grapes of justice 
 and righteousness and charity and purity, but be- 
 hold, the wild grapes of sin and iniquity ! " Woe 
 unto them that join house to house and field to 
 field, that buy up all the land and all the houses in 
 the country till the poor man is their slave ! "Woe 
 unto them that drink and dance, but regard not 
 the works of the Lord ! Woe unto them that 
 draw iniquity with cords of falsehood and sin with 
 a cart rope ! Woe unto them that call evil good, 
 and good evil ! Woe unto them that justify the 
 wacked for a bribe ! Therefore hell hath enlarged 
 its desire and opened its mouth without measure, 
 and their glory and their pomp and their multi- 
 tude descend into it. Therefore is the anger of 
 God kindled against His people, and He will lift 
 up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss 
 for them from the end of the earth." 
 
68 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 Against this destruction of the vineyard what 
 protest could be made? The nation had been 
 chosen and planted by the hand of God. Like 
 stones from the soil, He had driven out their ene- 
 mies. Signs, prophets, wonders, rain and dew, 
 blessings and judgments, warnings and prayers, 
 pleadings and entreaties, love and wrath, patience 
 and labour, had been expended upon Israel, and 
 yet her vineyard brings forth nought but the wild 
 grapes of private dissoluteness and public oppres- 
 sion and tyranny. 
 I " What more could have been done in my vine- 
 I yard that I have not done in it ? " The question 
 that God through His prophet asks the about to 
 be rejected nation is one that you and I do well to 
 consider. The results of vice and ungodliness here 
 in this world all can see to be truly fearful, and 
 the judgments pronounced upon the ungodly and 
 the impenitent in the world to come rumble like 
 reverberations of thunder in the Bible, and flash 
 like jagged forks of lightning on the horizon of the 
 ^'' . soul. In view of this, w^e have a perfect right to 
 \ ^^ • ask, " Has God done all that He might have done 
 to keep me from sin and its consequences here and 
 hereafter?" Open or unconfessed, the charge is 
 sometimes brought against the Christian system, 
 that while it sets itself forth as a revelation from 
 God and of God's plan and device for man's salva- 
 tion, nevertheless God, in view of the issues of 
 eternal life and eternal death, in view of the prone- 
 ness of human nature to vice and its repugnance 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 69 
 
 to virtue, might have done more than He has 
 done. 
 The lines of an old hymn sang of the atonement, 
 
 " He saw me ruined in the fall, 
 He flew to my relief." 
 
 But thousands of years elapsed before Christ, the 
 Eternal Son of God, became flesh, and the gospel 
 of repentance and redemption was preached unto 
 men. Why that long delay ? If Christ was to re- 
 deem man, why did He not come after the first ap- 
 pearance of sin in the world ? Why was this long 
 history of sin and vice and cruelty and ignorance 
 permitted to unfold itself ? Could God not have 
 done better than that ? With man time is neces- 
 sary if he is to work out a given plan or effect a 
 given object. He must have time and he must 
 contrive to bring about what he desires. I can see 
 how if man were going to effect some plan of re- 
 demption, he would need time and he must use dif- 
 ferent means. But God is not man. Why with 
 Him this long delay, this tedious process of devel- 
 opment and instruction? In the letter to the 
 Galatians Paul said that " when the fullness of the 
 time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a 
 woman, born under the law that he might redeem 
 them that were under the law, that we might re- 
 ceive the adoption of sons." It is not difficult to 
 see how there had been a fullness of times when 
 Christ came into the world. Man learned that he 
 could not save himself ; the seed of evil was given 
 
yo The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 opportunity to bear its evil fruit ; the law was a 
 schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ ; it kept 
 before men's minds their sinful estate and the need 
 of some kind of redemption ; it goaded man's con- 
 science, and thus prepared him for the preaching of 
 the Gospel. In the heathen world also there was 
 a preparation. God had not left Himself without 
 a witness, and in spite of their follies and bru- 
 talities the heathen religions were what Paul calls 
 *' feeling after God." They had the longing for 
 and the expectation of a better day. Thus, one has 
 written of Stoicism that it was a " sigh after Chris- 
 tianity." "When Christ came, the conquests of 
 Alexander had spread the Greek language over the 
 world and the apostles could either speak and write 
 Greek themselves, or have translated into that com- 
 mon language their ideas. "When Christ was born, 
 the Roman empire had spread its discipline and its 
 organization and its political systems over a great 
 part of the world : the means of travel had been 
 developed to a state unequalled again in the world 
 until the nineteenth century. Therefore, when the 
 disciples went forth to preach, they travelled over 
 the splendid Roman roads and enjoyed the privi- 
 leges of the ordered civilization which Rome had 
 given to the world. Thus, both in the Jewish 
 world and in the heathen world, it was a fullness 
 of times. " Heathenism is the starry night, full of 
 darkness and fear, but of mysterious presage also, 
 and anxious waiting for the light of day ; Judaism 
 the dawn, full of the fresh hope and promise of the 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 71 
 
 rising sun ; both lose themselves in the sunlight of 
 Christianity, and attest its claim to be the only true 
 and perfect religion for mankind." 
 
 All this we can see when we look back over the 
 ages ; but why that kind of preparation was neces- 
 sary, why God chose to save by that long and his- 
 toric process, that no man can answer; and cer- 
 tainly no man can object to the plan, any more 
 than the thing formed shall say to the hand that 
 formed it, " Why hast thou formed me thus ? " 
 God sees the beginning and God sees the end. We 
 see only this little segment of time, and it would be 
 rash for us to say that God might have done dif- 
 ferently and might have done better, unless we 
 ourselves have the advantageous position that God 
 has. Our objections and exceptions to what God 
 does for His vineyard, the human race, are due to 
 the limitation of our powers. We want to judge 
 God's work as if it were our work. 
 
 Suppose that I went down to the Navy Yard and 
 found there a ship in the process of construction. 
 I know nothing of the purpose for w^hich the ship 
 is being built, whether it is to be a vessel of 
 war, or pleasure, or to carry passengers, or sail the 
 seas with the wares of the world. What right 
 would I have to say to the builder and designer, 
 " Why did you not do it thus ? " or " Why was 
 this put in this place instead of yonder ? " The 
 builder would not need to answer my objections, 
 but he could tell me to wait until the ship was fin- 
 ished and was launched to do the work for which 
 
f/fi^: 
 
 72 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 it had been built. Only God sees the consumma- 
 tion ; and until you and I see that consummation 
 divine of God's glorious plan, the mystery hid from 
 the foundations of the world, we can claim no right 
 to find fault with what has been done. 
 
 Men are impatient and want things done with 
 precipitation. But the Author of nature and the 
 Author of grace chooses His own way and His 
 own time. In the eloquent words of Guizot, " The 
 ways of Providence are not confined within narrow 
 limits ; He hurries not Himself to display to-day the 
 consequences of the principle that He yesterday 
 laid down; He will draw it out in the lapse of 
 ages, when the hour is come ; and, even according 
 to our reasoning, logic is not the less sure because 
 it is slow. Providence is unconcerned as to time ; 
 His march (if I may be allowed the simile) is like 
 that of the fabulous deities of Homer through space : 
 He takes a step, and ages have elapsed." 
 7:e^,i Then, another looking at Christianity not in its 
 historic unfolding, but in its dissemination over the 
 earth, finds fault with the lack of universality in 
 that dissemination. Some favoured nations re- 
 ceived the Gospel ; many did not. Some to-day 
 have all the advantages of the established church 
 with its perpetual services and its call to repent- 
 ance, but vast tracts of the world have not yet re- 
 ceived the ambassador of the Cross. Is it conceiv- 
 able, we are asked, that this heavenly treasure, the 
 news of salvation and eternal life, should be given 
 to one people and not to another, or that it should 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 73 
 
 be committed to earthen vessels, and that the repe- 
 tition of it should be left to the varying zeal and 
 piety and obedience of the Christians who had re- 
 ceived the Gospel ? Does it not seem most reason- 
 able, most necessary, to suppose that such tidings 
 as the Gospel declares itself to be should be 
 preached everywhere, not given to a few, nor left 
 for its repetition and propagation to the initiative 
 and energy of those who were fortunate enough to 
 receive it first ? 
 
 This objection to the plan of God loses much of 
 its force when we reflect that it is an objection 
 which does not bear exclusively upon Christianity, 
 but upon the whole order of the world. Nations 
 grow up at a disadvantage with other nations. 
 The Hottentots and the Tartary tribes and the in- 
 habitants of the regions of ice and snow in the far 
 north or far south are in less favourable circum- 
 stances than England, France, America. In the 
 spread of civilization, in the spread of the Gospel, 
 one nation has been chosen and the other left. The 
 same is true of individuals : one is born blind, or 
 maimed, or he is weak and sickly, unattractive in 
 person ; another is strong and healthy and rich and 
 powerful. God sets one up and brings another 
 down. The favours of this life are not equally 
 distributed. Men are not created equal, nor in 
 equality do they live out their earthly term. So 
 far as we are able to see. Providence is capricious 
 in the distribution of its favours and blessings. So 
 that if it be advanced against Christianity that it 
 
74 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 ought to have been given to all nations and all 
 peoples, and through a common medium, and not 
 having been given that way, therefore it cannot be 
 true, we may say that the same difference and par- 
 tiality may be observed in nature and in common 
 experience. The Laplander does not get as much 
 sunshine as I do, nor does the dweller in the Afri- 
 can desert get as much rainfall as I do ; but I 
 would be a fool to refuse to enjoy the sunshine and 
 the rainfall for that reason ; and if Christianity is 
 capable of blessing me and saving me, I would be 
 foolish to reject it because it was not preached 
 until nineteen centuries ago, or because to-day 
 there are thousands in China and Africa who have 
 not so much as heard the name of Christ. 
 
 But even were it not so that the gospel procla- 
 mation is lacking in universality, and instead of 
 that being the case, it was to-day preached among 
 every people and race and kindred, still you would 
 not. have rid yourself of this alleged difficulty, a 
 lack of equality. You might choose a hundred 
 men here in Philadelphia, and offer them the same 
 Gospel in the same loving terms in which the dis- 
 ciples of Jesus proclaimed it and offered it freely 
 unto men. But is there absolute equality ? Are 
 they all on the same footing ? How different is 
 their temperament, their mental make-up ! One 
 man sees difficulties which do not suggest them- 
 selves to another. One has a native keenness of 
 things spiritual, and the other a native dullness. 
 One's life and surroundings have been of a nature 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 75 
 
 favourable to the receiving of the Gospel ; another's, 
 so far as we may judge, altogether unfavourable. 
 I was born in a Christian home. I learned to 
 name the name of Christ as soon as I could speak ; 
 through Him the first fond prayers my lips of 
 childhood framed were offered unto God. I had 
 the influence and example of a godly home ; I 
 heard Christianity sung and prayed and read and 
 explained out of Bible and catechism and psalm 
 book, and I saw it lived. I beheld it drawn out in 
 living and unforgetable characters, and never for a 
 single moment had occasion to doubt the sincerity 
 of those who professed it, the reality, or its blessed 
 influence upon their lives and the lives of others. 
 Although not inevitable, for others similarly situ- 
 ated have not believed in Christ or become Chris- 
 tians, it was natural that I should have become a 
 Christian and also a minister. But here is another 
 man, and how different has been his experience. 
 Where I heard hymns and prayer and psalms, and 
 words of wisdom and of kindness, he heard only 
 oaths and curses and words of strife and bitterness ; 
 or where I saw the doctrine drawn out in living 
 characters, he saw the doctrine he is now asked to 
 believe perverted and debased and caricatured in 
 hypocritical and worldly lives. Will you say that 
 he and I are on an exact equality when you come 
 to us and say, " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ " ? 
 But I will not give up my faith and throw away 
 my Christianity merely because, while I was born 
 in such a home and witnessed such an example of 
 
76 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 the Christian faith, some other was born and reared 
 in circumstances totally different and altogether 
 less favourable. Christianity may be false, but you 
 must furnish some other reason before I believe it 
 to be false. 
 
 In all these objections, too, one thing is con- 
 stantly lost sight of : God will not do an injustice. 
 The Judge of all the earth must do right. Men 
 will be judged according to their light and the 
 circumstances of their present and their past will 
 be considered in a way that we cannot understand. 
 " According to that a man hath, and not according 
 to that he hath not," that is the standard which must 
 be taken into the account when we think of the dif- 
 ferences between the man in a Christian land and 
 the man in the heathen land, or even between two 
 men in Christian lands and living in the same con- 
 ditions of society and knowledge, yet, by reason of 
 nature or birth or training, occupying a place of 
 advantage and disadvantage as regards the accept- 
 ance of Christianity. We shall be judged according 
 to the circumstances in which we have been placed, 
 and not according to the circumstances in which we 
 might have been placed. 
 
 But if so much depends upon our attitude towards 
 Christ and the revelation of the Bible, would God 
 not have written that revelation on the heavens so 
 that all men would have read it and believed it ? 
 Would God not have broken through all these 
 differences of race and epoch and age and training 
 and temperament and forced the acceptance of that 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 77 
 
 revelation upon all men ? If He really desires that 
 all should be saved and come to the knowledge of 
 the truth, why does He, for He is God and can do 
 what He wills, why does He not see that they are 
 saved and that they do come to the knowledge of 
 the truth ? Why does He let these differences 
 stand in the way, or why does He leave the matter 
 so much in the hands of men ? You might as well 
 ask why did God permit man to fall at all ; why 
 did He permit sin to come into man's life ; in short, 
 why did He allow Himself and man, too, to be con- 
 fronted with this whole mysterious problem of re- 
 demption ? To answer that you would need to be 
 God yourself. But since man did fall, since the 
 race is apostate, since sin does mar and ravage 
 humanity, and since man is to be saved by Jesus 
 Christ, it is not unthinkable, but altogether reason- 
 able, that faith should not be forced upon him, but 
 be the act of his own free will, cooperating with 
 the sovereign will of God. So Hugo Grotius has 
 written, " It is the will of God that those things 
 which He would have us believe, so that faith should 
 be accepted from us as obedience, should not be so 
 very plain, as those things we perceive by our 
 senses, and by demonstration ; but only so far as it 
 is sufficient to procure belief, and persuade a man 
 of the thing, who is not obstinately bent against it, 
 so that the Gospel is, as it were, a touchstone to 
 try men's honest dispositions by." The man who 
 examines the Gospel with the hope of finding it 
 not true will generally discover it to be so. 
 
yS The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 In his famous analogy Butler uses the illustra- 
 tion of the servant and the master. If a master 
 wants the servant to do a given thing, he takes 
 pains to make it clear beyond all peradventure of 
 a doubt what he wants him to do, and arranges 
 also that there shall be no doubt as to the authority 
 of the orders sent him. Why does not God give 
 His wishes in such a way and accompanied by such 
 marks of their origin and authority that man would 
 never have any doubt ? Or here is a general send- 
 ing instructions to an officer in the midst of the 
 battle. In the critical hours of the battle of 
 Shiloh General Grant sent orders to General Lew 
 Wallace to bring up his veteran division, and by a cer- 
 tain road. But that officer asseverated that it was 
 not made clear to him by what road he was to ad- 
 vance, and in doubt, he chose the wrong road, and 
 thus was absent from the field when his presence 
 would have decided the issue. If there is any 
 doubt as to the meaning of the master's orders, or 
 any doubt as to the meaning of the general's orders, 
 the master and the general commanding the army 
 are to be held responsible, and not the servant or 
 the officer. And so it is sometimes said that if all 
 these momentous issues of life and death, of virtue 
 and vice, hinge upon my acceptance or my rejection 
 of Christianity, then surely God would have ar- 
 ranged it that there could have been no such thing 
 as a shadow of a doubt as to the origin of Chris- 
 tianity or as to its meaning when it is proclaimed 
 to men. But men do doubt ; men are perplexed ; 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 79 
 
 men have their moments of uncertainty, and many 
 reject Christianity altogether. 
 
 But the comparison breaks down, for God does 
 not deal with us as a master deals with a servant, 
 or as a general deals with an officer. With the 
 master and the general, the thing being done is the 
 main thing ; with God the doing of it, the way in 
 which it is done. When the master commands the 
 servant, he has his mind on the accomplishment of 
 the task in the house or the field ; when the general 
 sends the order to the officer, he has in mind the 
 disposition of that regiment or that division ; the 
 master cares nothing about the mind of the servant, 
 and the general cares nothing about the mind of 
 the officer, so long as the work is done, so long as 
 the regiment is placed where it ought to be placed. 
 But with God it is not so. I am His child. He 
 considers not only the thing done, but the doing of 
 it. He would have His will done, but in harmony 
 with my will and my loving and trusting submis- 
 sion to His will. He does not compel me to act, 
 but He asks me to believe. He does not order me 
 to go, but He says, " Come unto me ! " I thank 
 God that it is so, that God has reserved a place for 
 faith and trust in His world, and that, although 
 there are many things that trouble me and perplex 
 me, many things that I, in my limitations, could 
 wish He had made clearer, yet He has given me 
 abundant proof and evidence that He is worthy of 
 my love and trust, and that I will try to give Him. 
 I could ask for nothing more. 
 
8o The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 To go back to the figure of the parable, the hus- 
 bandman had done all that he could do for the vine 
 to make it yield fruit, to save it from the axe and 
 the consuming flame. But has God done all that 
 He could do to save man from the penalty of sin, 
 the wages of sin, which is death ? If these judg- 
 ments to come were only made a little clearer — for 
 even a minister, when he touches upon that solemn 
 theme, must wish that there were a diflPerent kind 
 of evidence both for his own sake and the sake of 
 those to whom he preaches — then men would turn 
 from their sins and repent and believe on Christ. 
 Through your Bible and through your sermons 
 there runs that ground swell of retribution and 
 judgment to come. I do not say that it might not 
 be so, or if so, would be anything but just ; but if 
 it is so, ought there not to be other evidences and 
 proofs ? Might we not be permitted to look into 
 that world beyond and behold the redeemed in 
 their white and blessed array, serving Him and 
 h3rmning Him night and day, no tears, no doubts, 
 no sin, no curse, no night, no death, and see the lost 
 and condemned spirits suffering their fearful doom ? 
 
 *^ Ah, Christ ; that it were possible 
 For one brief hour to see 
 The souls we loved, that they might tell us 
 What and where they be." 
 
 I am glad that I do not need to answer that ob- 
 jection to the Gospel, for Jesus Himself has sol- 
 emnly and finally answered it. The beggar died 
 
The Parable of the Vineyard 8i 
 
 and was received into bliss. The rich man died 
 and went to hell. And in hell, being in torments, 
 he lifted up his eyes and seeth Abraham afar off, 
 and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, 
 " Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send 
 Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in 
 water, and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in 
 this flame." But Abraham answered that this 
 could not be done, that a gulf was fixed between 
 him and Lazarus, and one could not pass to the 
 other. He must suffer, but he deserved to suffer. 
 Then Dives thought of his five brothers, living the 
 same kind of life that he lived and bound for the 
 same place of torment. " If Lazarus cannot help 
 me, if it is too late for that, then send him to my 
 father's house and let him warn my brothers. They 
 won't pay any attention to the prophets and the 
 law of Moses ; no more than did I. But, Abraham, 
 if one went unto them from the dead, I think they 
 would repent." You can imagine the ghostly visit- 
 ant, leaving the world of spirits and suddenly ap- 
 pearing in the hall where the five brothers of Dives, 
 their grief for him quickly forgotten, sat arrayed in 
 purple and fine linen, faring sumptuously. You 
 can see them blanch at his sudden entrance to their 
 midst, and the glasses fall from their nerveless 
 grasp and are shattered on the pavement, as Laz- 
 arus says to them, " Your brother is in hell and in 
 torments. He has sent me to warn you of his end 
 and to tell you to repent." How terrible such a 
 visitation ! Who would not repent if he had such 
 
82 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 a warning as that ? But Jesus said, " Ko ; if they 
 hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they 
 repent though one rose from the dead." 
 
 We need no ghostly visitant from heaven or 
 from hell, nor would heed one if he came. God 
 has done all for us that He can do, all that is neces- 
 sary, all that is kind and wise. He has sent us His 
 messengers ; He has given us His oracles ; He has 
 given us rain and sunshine ; meat and drink ; friends 
 to love and be loved by, and all things richly to 
 enjoy. He has given us His only begotten Son. 
 Could He have given anything more valuable ? 
 Could Christ have been more lovely than He was ? 
 Could He have improved upon the Parable of the 
 Lost Sheep or the Lost Son ? Could He have loved 
 His disciples more tenderly than He did love them ? 
 Could He have prayed more earnestly in the gar- 
 den ? Could He have died a more shameful and 
 painful death ? Oh, the depth of the riches both 
 of the wisdom and the knowledge of God ! What 
 more could God do ? 
 
VII 
 
 The Parable of the Faithless Wives 
 
 Ezekiel xxiii. 
 
 THEY might have learned it in another 
 way, but that was the way they had 
 chosen — the way of sin and suffering and 
 judgment. By one way or by another, by the way 
 of obedience and faith and good works, or by the 
 hard and bitter way of rebellion and sin and retri- 
 bution, men and nations must learn that God is the 
 Lord. That is life's greatest lesson. 
 
 Musing One October evening amid the ruins of 
 the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were sing- 
 ing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, Edward Gib- 
 bon first conceived the design of writing the " De- 
 cline and the Fall of the Roman Empire." To 
 Ezekiel, as he sat among the captives on the banks 
 of the rivers of Babylon, the heavens were opened 
 and he saw visions of God. In metaphors of flam- 
 ing splendour, but almost impenetrable mystery, 
 he tells us what he saw. After the vision came 
 the Voice commissioning him to go and speak to 
 the defeated and crushed, but still rebellious people 
 of Israel. It was not his, like Isaiah, to hold up 
 the hands of faltering kings and call the nation to 
 
 83 
 
84 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 repentance and heroic resistance. It was too late 
 for that : the blow had fallen. The visible king- 
 dom and empire of Israel had passed forever and 
 its inhabitants had been carried into captivity. It 
 was his to contemplate the ruin ; to stand amid the 
 smoke and ashes of Hebrew nationality, and hear 
 God's verdict on the Decline and Fall of the He- 
 brew Monarchy, and repeat that verdict to the 
 people. 
 
 With a multitude of signs and allegories and 
 parables he delivers himself of his message. In 
 this chapter he speaks to the nation in the parable 
 of the faithless wives. There were two women, 
 daughters of one mother and wives of one husband. 
 The name of the one was Oholah and the name of 
 the other Oholibah. By these names the prophet 
 means the northern kingdom of Samaria and the 
 kingdom of Judah. It was a favourite method of 
 the prophets to set forth the relationship of God to 
 His people under the similitude of the marriage 
 bond. "I thy Maker am thy Husband." Both 
 of these sisters proved false to their marriage vows. 
 They played the harlot with Assyria and Egypt 
 and Babylon. They were caught with the pomp 
 and splendour of these powerful empires and for- 
 sook their Lord and the worship of Jehovah to fall 
 down before the idols of the foreign nations. That 
 bias towards idolatry which runs through the his- 
 tory of the chosen people since they came up out 
 of Egypt finally issued in complete rejection of 
 the worship of Jehovah and base acquiescence in 
 
The Parable of the Faithless Wives 85 
 
 all the abominations of the kingdoms about them. 
 The doom against which law and prophets had 
 warned the nation since the day of the thunders of 
 Sinai was not long delayed. These faithless sisters 
 were delivered into the hands of their lovers. It 
 was the irony of history that they were spoiled and 
 ravaged by the very kingdoms that had seduced 
 them to do evil. First the northern kingdom of 
 Samaria was taken by Sargon and that goodly land 
 became a dwelling-place of lions. Her sister, Judah, 
 refused to be warned by her fate, and persisting in 
 her iniquity, was devastated and overrun, first by 
 Egypt, and then by Babylon. Now her walls were 
 fallen, her glorious temple a heap of rubbish, her 
 holy vessels ministered to the appetites of heathen 
 kings, and her inhabitants were scattered over the 
 face of the earth. " And ye shall know that I am 
 the Lord." 
 
 The eloquent voice of Ezekiel has been hushed 
 for centuries and the nations whose doom he took 
 for his text, and the other nations which were the 
 ministers of God's vengeance, are buried beneath 
 their own ruins. But God still lives, and the his- 
 tory of the world at that time has been repeated 
 in the ages intervening, is being repeated to-day, 
 and will be repeated until God puts a period to the 
 long sentence of time. The sin of Israel and Judah 
 God spake of as infidelity. The grave-digger of 
 nations, of churches, of immortal lives, is infidelity, 
 faithlessness to God. 
 
 Let us look, first, at the infidelity of the nation. 
 
86 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 To-day we distinguish between the Church and the 
 nation. As a nation what are our vows, and to 
 what standards of life are we pledged ? And what 
 are the signs of our fidelity thereto, or our faith- 
 lessness? As the man sometimes awakens to his 
 responsibility under the stress of deep affection, or 
 great sorrow, or pain, so the nation may come to 
 itself only in the time of trial and suffering, and 
 realize for the first time that it has a soul, that 
 there are deep realities to which it may prove true 
 or prove false. Above the tumult of the world- 
 conflict, and above the cries of bodies in pain, and 
 souls in agony, we hear very distinctly to-day the 
 sob of the national soul, the nations conscious of 
 themselves, and in pain and darkness struggling for 
 existence and for victory. This nation awoke to 
 self-consciousness, began to feel that it possessed a 
 soul, in the dark days of the Civil War. It then 
 became evident that there were ideas and principles, 
 the defense of which, the vindication of which, were 
 more important than national existence itself, and 
 that it was better for the nation to die in defense 
 of the right than to live in ignoble compromise 
 with evil. But the danger is that in times of peace 
 and prosperity the nation should forget that it has 
 a soul, and seduced by wealth and pleasure and 
 pomp, should prove faithless to the vow of its 
 union. 
 
 The history of states may be summed up in those 
 lines suggested by the survey of the ruins of 
 Eome, — 
 
The Parable of the Faithless Wives 87 
 
 ^^ There is the moral of all human tales ; 
 Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, 
 First freedom, and then glory — when that fails — 
 Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last. 
 And history, with all her volumes vast. 
 Hath but one page." 
 
 Is there any reason to expect that the tale of our 
 national life will prove an exception to this one 
 page of all history ? None whatever. Precisely the 
 same symptoms may be discerned in our national 
 life — a departure from an early simplicity, a loosen- 
 ing of the bonds of religion, the increase in luxury, 
 the passion for entertainment and amusement, the 
 passing of family religion, the pollution of the 
 marriage tie and the desecration of the home, the 
 worship of the body. One does not need to be a 
 prophet to mark the change that spreads over our 
 national life, for even the editor of the chief finan- 
 cial journal of the country has recently written, 
 " What America needs more than railways exten- 
 sion, and western irrigation, and low tariff, and a 
 bigger wheat crop, and a merchant marine and a 
 new navy, is a revival of piety." Experts may 
 frame their constitutions and legislatures may mul- 
 tiply unto themselves laws, the suffrage may be 
 made universal, but all will be in vain unless the 
 foundation be secure. The foundation stone of 
 national life is character, and the strength of char- 
 acter is the fear of God. The nations that forget 
 God shall be cast into hell. That is not only 
 
88 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 prophecy and theology ; it is experience, it is his- 
 tory. "Except the Lord build the house they 
 labour in vain that build it. Except the Lord 
 keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain." 
 
 Down in Maryland to-day, not far from the 
 Potomac, there flows under graceful stone arches 
 and between hillsides where the autumn leaves lie 
 thick, a stream which fifty years ago ran crimson 
 to the great river, for on its banks men defended 
 unto the death the ark of the nation. To-day, if 
 you go there, you may see on the banks of that 
 stream the bronze figure of a volunteer soldier. 
 He was meant to represent, and he does well 
 represent, the members of a regiment made up of 
 men who loved their country and feared God. In 
 the set of his shoulders, in the great hands that 
 grasp the musket, in his firm set mouth, his clear, 
 frank face untainted by vice, and in the earnest 
 deep hollowed eyes, it is easy to behold a man of 
 living faith in God, and whose faith issued in 
 heroic deeds. By such men, in peace or in war, 
 this nation has been kept inviolate. May God 
 keep us faithful to Him, true to those principles of 
 righteousness and justice which are the glory and 
 the defense of the state. 
 
 " The tumult and the shoutiug dies ; 
 The captains and the kings depart : 
 Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice. 
 An humble and a contrite heart. 
 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
 Lest we forget, Lest we forget.'' 
 
The Parable of the Faithless Wives 89 
 
 Let us turn now to the fidelity of the Church. 
 The Church has taken the place of the nation. 
 What God says to His people in the Old Testa- 
 ment is the message for His Church in the New. 
 For this reason the figure of the parable is one 
 that was adopted by the Christian apostles. They 
 liked to conceive of the Church as the Bride of 
 Christ. John spake of the Church as the Bride of 
 the Lamb and saw the Holy City coming down 
 from God like a bride adorned for her husband ; 
 and Paul told men to love their wives even as 
 Christ loved the Church. The vital thing in civili- 
 zation is the Church. And in the consideration of 
 the Church, the paramount question is not her 
 numbers, her wealth, her growing or her fading 
 influence, or the ways and means of her propa- 
 ganda — those questions that amuse conventions 
 and clutter the magazines and current fiction — but 
 this : Is the Church loyal to her Master ? Is she 
 faithful to her Husband ? 
 
 One of the great epics of classic literature centers 
 about a woman who was separated from her hus- 
 band. He had gone oif to a foreign war. Now 
 the months have passed by ; no word had come of 
 the missing Ulysses tossed up and down on the 
 waves of the ocean and tempted by sirens. The 
 multitude of suitors pressed about Penelope as she 
 sat surrounded by her maids " laying her hands to 
 the spindle and holding the disstafiF," and urged 
 their claims upon her, but she was faithful to her 
 absent Lord. 
 
go The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 " True to a vision, steadfast to a dream, 
 Indissolubly married to remembrance.^' 
 
 At length Ulysses himself in the guise of a beggar 
 appeared one day among the suitors, took his own 
 great bow and bent it, revealed himself as the lost 
 husband, and the fidelity of Penelope was rewarded. 
 To me that is a picture of the Church in the world. 
 She is the blood-bought Bride of Christ and all 
 about her is the multitude of tempters and suitors 
 who would shake her loyalty to her Lord and master. 
 As Israel and Judah were tempted by the glitter 
 and splendour of the nations about them, the 
 Church has always been subjected to the alarms 
 and allurements and rewards of some other than 
 Christ. In Eoman Catholicism that was manifest 
 in the Church reaching out for the empire of the 
 world ; in Protestant Christianity in the Church 
 reaching out for the wisdom of the world and sub- 
 stituting it for the wisdom and the plan of God. 
 Voices, then, prophetic, apostolic, historic, cry to 
 the Church, as once the Lord of the Church spake 
 to the Church of Smyrna, '' Be thou faithful unto 
 death ! " If ever there was an age when the Church 
 needed the summons of that challenge, this is the 
 age. The heathen world and the unconverted 
 Christian world, sometimes ignorantly and some- 
 times willfully, confuse the nation w4th the Church, 
 the quarrels and disputes of kingdoms with the in- 
 fluence of religion. But, to quote the eloquent and 
 noble sentences of Paley in his chapter on the in- 
 fluence of Christianity, " The influence of religion 
 
The Parable of the Faithless Wives 91 
 
 is not to be sought for in the councils of princes, in 
 the debates or resolutions of popular assemblies, in 
 the conduct of governments towards their subjects, 
 or of states and sovereigns towards one another, of 
 conquerors at the head of their armies, or of parties 
 intriguing for power at home, but it must be per- 
 ceived, if perceived at all, in the silent course of 
 private and domestic life. The kingdom of heaven 
 is within us. That which is the substance of re- 
 ligion, its hopes and consolations, its intermixture 
 with the thought by day and by night, the devotion 
 of the heart, the control of appetite, the steady di- 
 rection of the will to the commands of God, is 
 necessarily invisible. Eeligion operates most upon 
 those of whom history knows the least. It cannot, 
 therefore, be thought strange that this influence 
 should elude the grasp and touch of public history ; 
 for what is public history but a register of the suc- 
 cesses and disappointments, the vices, the follies, 
 and the quarrels of those who engage in conten- 
 tions for power ? " 
 
 To that separate and invisible kingdom of Christ 
 the Church must bear its witness. While men talk 
 about the failure of Christianity and worst of all, 
 weak-minded Christians chatter about Christianity 
 never having been tried, the true and faithful 
 Church heeds but one voice speaking through the 
 confused babel of sounds, " March on ! Go ye into 
 all the world and preach the Gospel unto every 
 creature. Leave the failure of Christianity to me ! " 
 
 The true Church must be faithful to the Cross of 
 
92 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 Christ. It is the wisdom of God set over against 
 the wisdom of the world. How many and how 
 alluring are the substitutes which the Church has 
 been tempted to accept for the great doctrine of 
 the Cross. If there were lacking any evidence as 
 to man's alienation from God, it would be supplied 
 in his rejection of the teaching of the Cross, or, if 
 he does receive it, in his efforts to make it mean 
 something else than it does mean, to make it coin- 
 cide with the wisdom through which the world 
 never knew God. I went some time ago to visit a 
 patient in a room in one of the Catholic hospitals. 
 Looking up from the bed of the sufferer my eye 
 fell on the crucifix. There was the Great Sufferer, 
 wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our 
 iniquities, pain's only relief, sin's only antidote, 
 death's sole conqueror. Yes, in the straits of life, 
 the Cross makes its ancient appeal. It tells the 
 sufferer of One who suffered for him. It whispers 
 peace to the soul that is tossed on the sea of re- 
 morse and guilt. When we go down into that 
 dark valley where, no matter how large has been 
 the company of our friends and lovers and relatives 
 in life, we must each of us travel alone and unat- 
 tended, and when all other lights have flashed and 
 gone out, the Cross still sheds its beams upon our 
 way. The world preaches its wisdom, and men 
 who scorn the Cross seek after that wisdom, but 
 we preach Christ crucified. The Cross is no re- 
 specter of persons. It commands the thief, the 
 murderer, the pure sage and the chaste philosopher 
 alike to prostrate themselves in the dust and cry 
 
The Parable of the Faithless Wives 
 
 93 
 
 " God be merciful to me a sinner ! " But it con- 
 demns only that it may save. It is possible to say 
 a great many things that are true and beautiful con- 
 cerning the Cross and yet leave unsaid the chief 
 thing, the thing that engaged the thought and 
 created the enthusiasm of the first heralds of the 
 Cross, that on the Cross Christ gave Himself a 
 ransom for the sins of many. Do you tell me of 
 useful and honourable lives of men and women 
 who do not receive the doctrine of the Cross ? I say 
 without the least hesitation that their morality is 
 on a far louver level than that of those who do 
 receive the doctrine of the Cross, for the favourite 
 virtue of our Lord was humility, and none but the 
 humble and contrite in spirit can accept the teach- 
 ing of the Cross. Do you tell me of churches 
 whose ministry is cultured and earnest, whose 
 membership is to be commended, their prayers and 
 their alms going up for a memorial before God, 
 and yet these churches do not preach the Cross ? I 
 have no hesitation in saying that these churches 
 exist only because there are churches which do 
 preach the Cross. They shine in the reflected light 
 of the churches which preach Christ crucified. 
 Fling out that banner ! lift it high over the temples 
 of learning, over the marts of trade, over the fields 
 of battle ! It sanctifies the bane and the blessing, 
 the pain and the pleasure of life, and towering over 
 all the wrecks of time, and gathering round its 
 head all the radiance of the sacred story, shines 
 ever in the heavens to light the way of this lost 
 and fallen world back to the Father's House. 
 
VIII 
 
 The Parable of the Two Eagles 
 and the Vine 
 
 Ezekiel xvii. 
 
 " A ND all the trees of the field shall know 
 Zjk that I the Lord have brought down the 
 
 X -A- high tree, have exalted the low tree, 
 have dried up the green tree, and have made the 
 dry tree to flourish. I, the Lord, have spoken and 
 have done it." 
 
 What a magnificent epitome of human history ! 
 The prophet Ezekiel had been taken down into 
 Babylon when Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Baby- 
 lon, carried away into captivity the last king of 
 Judah, Jehoiachin. The prophecy with which we 
 have to do in this chapter was uttered during the 
 seven years between that event and the final de- 
 struction of Jerusalem, and the crushing of Zede- 
 kiah's rash and perfidious rebellion. To his cap- 
 tive countrymen living on the banks of the Chebar, 
 the harp of their national life hanging voiceless on 
 the willows of captivity, Ezekiel is sent to speak 
 the parable of the Two Eagles and the Vine. 
 "Speak a parable unto the House of Israel and 
 say, ' Thus saith the Lord.' " 
 
 A great eagle, with great wings, and full of 
 feathers, which had divers colours, came unto 
 
 94 
 
The Two Eagles and the Vine 95 
 
 Lebanon and cropped off the highest branch of the 
 cedar and carried it into a land of traffic and set it 
 in a city of merchants. He took also of the seed 
 of the land and planted it in a fruitful field and 
 placed it by great waters. And it grew and be- 
 came a spreading vine of low stature, whose branches 
 turned towards him. But there was another great 
 eagle, with great wings and many feathers, and be- 
 hold, this vine did bend her roots towards him. 
 For that reason, its bending away from the first 
 great eagle and towards the second, the vine is to 
 be pulled up by the roots, its fruit cut off, and its 
 leaves withered as by the scorching breath of the 
 east wind. 
 
 The parable as Ezekiel delivered it was part his- 
 tory and part prophecy. His contemporaries would 
 have no difficulty in understanding him and all his 
 metaphors. Nor to any one familiar with the last 
 scenes in the drama of Jewish history, as related in 
 the Book of Kings, is there anything recondite or 
 obscure, even if the prophet himself had not taken 
 the pains to explain what he meant. The first 
 great eagle with great wings and divers coloured 
 feathers was the great king of Babylon, Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, whose kingdom was the dominant 
 empire of the world, for it had succeeded to the 
 sceptre of the Assyrians, and but a few years prior 
 to this prophecy, on the field of Carcemish, had 
 crushed the armies of Egypt. He had taken into 
 captivity the highest branch of the cedar of Leb- 
 anon, the last of the royal line of Judah, Jehoiachin, 
 
96 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 and had set him and his people in Babylon, the 
 city of merchants and the land of traffic. But in 
 the place of this last king of Judah, Nebuchad- 
 nezzar set up Zedekiah, expecting that he would 
 rule as his agent and do his will. This was the 
 low, clambering vine of Zedekiah's kingdom as con- 
 trasted with the mighty cedar of true and former 
 Jewish royalty. Then the second eagle appeared 
 on the scene. This was the kingdom of Egypt, 
 defeated in battle, but not altogether subdued. 
 The vine, Zedekiah's kingdom, began to bend 
 towards this eagle. The old device of Egyptian 
 alliance was resorted to in order to throw off the 
 yoke of the conqueror. jSTebuchadnezzar could not 
 tolerate such dangerous alliance. It would be like 
 Ireland making to-day an alliance with Germany. 
 With his armies he marched against Jerusalem. 
 The Egyptian army sent north to succour the city 
 was unable to save it, and I^ebuchadnezzar took 
 Jerusalem, ravished it and stripped it of its glories 
 and its spoils, left the glorious temple of Solomon 
 a heap of smoking ruins ; and the treacherous 
 Zedekiah, with his eyes burned out, he carried in 
 an iron cage to grace his triumph in Babylon. 
 But, lest the people should despair, Ezekiel closes 
 his parable by a picture of the future glory of 
 Judah, when she shall again be a mighty cedar in 
 whose shade shall dwell all peoples of the earth. 
 After the world empires had done their will and 
 had served their day and their purpose, God will 
 consummate history with His own everlasting king- 
 
The Two Eagles and the Vine 97 
 
 dom, the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 The parable began with the history of the doings 
 of the kings of the world empires, Babylon and 
 Egypt, and the conquered king of Judah. It ends 
 with a declaration that the whole earth shall know 
 that God had done everything. Nebuchadnezzar 
 and the king of Egypt and Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, 
 the kings of Judah, thought that they were doing 
 it ; they knew not that they were doing the will of 
 God, though they did but their own will. But God 
 was merely using them as agents to carry out His 
 own sovereign will. If the high tree of a world 
 empire was brought crashing down into the dust 
 by the sword of some new conqueror, it was the 
 sword of the Lord that did it. And if a low and 
 hitherto despised tree of national life was exalted 
 into dignity and power, it was the hand of the 
 Lord that had done it. If a tree that was green 
 with its wealth and prosperity and splendour sud- 
 denly became dry and withered, it was the breath 
 of the Lord that had smitten it ; and if a dry and 
 withered branch blossomed forth in the greenness 
 of vigour and power, it was the will of God that 
 had wrought the change. 
 
 This parable, uttered in the day when world 
 empires, great eagles of prey, pinioned with ma- 
 terial pomp and glory, were striving with one 
 another ^nd rising each on the ruins of the con- 
 quered and fallen, speaks to us to-day with unusual 
 appositeness, for we witness just what Ezekiel and 
 
98 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 his contemporaries were witnessing, a mighty con- 
 flict among the empires of the world for the mastery 
 and the spoils of the world. We shudder at the 
 slaughter ; we grieve at the lack of mercy ; we 
 mourn for humanity; we tremble for the ark of 
 the Church of Christ. But we forget that it has 
 ever been so, the flood of man's pride and anger rush- 
 ing to and fro over the earth, engulfing this kingdom, 
 sweeping away that institution, ruthless, and to us 
 meaningless and unguided. But God sitteth on the 
 flood. He ruleth among the armies of heaven and 
 doeth His will among the inhabitants of the earth. 
 It would seem, at first thought, that our belief in 
 God would carry with it all these considerations, 
 and so it does. But it is necessary for us to clear 
 the atmosphere from time to time, and avail our 
 troubled souls of those very considerations which 
 go with a belief in God. In regard to this world 
 in which we live, there are only two positions 
 where we may take our stand. We must choose 
 between a world with a God and a world without 
 a God : between a world in which whatsoever 
 comes to pass does so with the knowledge and the 
 permission of God, and in some way finds a place 
 in His purpose and plan, and a world where every- 
 thing just happens so, with no governing will or 
 plan or purpose back of it all. In the words of a 
 recent writer, "Between freedom and fate, be- 
 tween a personal God and blind chance, between 
 faith in prayer and trust to luck, we are bound to 
 choose. Only the short-sighted and superficial 
 
The Two Eagles and the Vine 99 
 
 mind can find a resting-place between these two 
 opinions." If we take the latter position, then life 
 has no problems and no questions. We have come ; 
 we are here ; we shall go hence ; we shall have 
 joy and we shall have pain. But how ? or why ? 
 That we need never ask, for we eliminated all pur- 
 pose and all intelligence by dismissing the thought 
 of God ; nor is the day to be saved by substituting 
 for God a law of development that will lead on to 
 higher things, for we cannot allow a law that 
 works to intelligent ends without also allowing a 
 lawgiver. But if we do believe in God as a moral 
 being, as the moral governor of the universe, then 
 it follows that we must believe that He rules and 
 governs all His creatures and all their actions, and 
 that His plan is beneficent and just. 
 
 The mere fact that men have had that belief 
 and hope that intelligence and goodness guide and 
 control the destinies of the world, and that through 
 it all there runs the increasing purpose of God, is 
 in itself a strong presumption in favour of such a 
 plan and such an end. That the world moves on 
 to the sun-girt heights of perfection has been the 
 promise of all religions, the burden of all prophecy, 
 and the spirit of all poetry. Whether it has been 
 the Eepublic of Plato, the Atlantis of Bacon, or 
 the Utopia of Moore, or the great dreams of He- 
 brew prophecy and New Testament revelation, the 
 Holy City coming down from God out of heaven, 
 or the angry protests which go up against the 
 present state of the world, the spirit back of it all 
 
loo The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 has been the conviction that there is a great and 
 noble consummation for humanity and that the 
 world ought to move on, must move on, is ever 
 moving on, to that consummation. In spite of 
 hope ever deferred, in spite of the long processions 
 of wars and cruelties and oppressions and abomi- 
 nations which pass under the title of history, man- 
 kind has refused to be stripped of the expectation 
 for the future. The tears through which his eyes 
 have beheld afar off the City of God, the reign of 
 justice and mercy and love, have only served to 
 make its towers and gates and turrets shine with 
 a glory more resplendent 
 
 * ' There is something here 
 Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, 
 Something that gives our feeble light 
 A high immunity from Night, 
 Something that leaps life's narrow bars 
 To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven ; 
 A seed of sunshine that can leaven 
 Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, 
 And glorify our clay 
 With light from fountains older than the day. 
 
 *' A conscience more divine than we, 
 A gladness fed with secret tears, 
 A vexing forward reaching sense 
 Of some more noble permanence ; 
 A light across the sea, 
 
 Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, 
 Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate 
 years. '^ 
 
The Two Eagles and the Vine lol 
 
 But not only is there the idea and the hope of a 
 divine plan and happy end in the mind of man, but 
 in history there is evidence of it. In his great vi- 
 sion this same prophet saw the four living creatures, 
 attended by the four wheels, moving forwards, 
 backwards, laterally, at once, because it was a 
 wheel within a wheel. At first glance, the history 
 of the world seems to be just a rush and roar and 
 clash of wheels within wheels, getting nowhere, 
 guided by no intelligence, accomplishing no end. 
 But if we look at history in the light of our faith in 
 God, we shall have little difficulty in discovering 
 that the spirit of the living creature is in the 
 wheel, that the wheels are full of the eyes of pur- 
 pose and intelligence, and that the general move- 
 ment of the chariot of Providence is straight on. 
 The whole course of history seems to have been 
 the voluntary effort of man, the ambitions of this 
 world empire or that empire, the evil designs of this 
 king or that adventurer, the pressure of economic 
 forces, the conflict of race antipathies, the collision 
 of plans of dominion. But just as God used the 
 king of Babylon and the king of Egypt to carry 
 out His purposes in Israel, so all the movements of 
 history are not without His permission, and do not 
 fail to register His will. As St. Paul put it in his 
 eloquent speech to the philosophers on Mars Hill, 
 " He hath made of one blood all nations for to 
 dwell on the face of the earth, and hath deter- 
 mined the times before appointed, and the bound 
 of their habitation." Just how far Kome was to go, 
 
102 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 just how far the British Empire is to extend, just 
 how the map of Europe through the rivalries and 
 ambitions of rulers and politicians to-day is to be 
 changed. Unthinkable, you say ? But if you think 
 God, if you begin with Him, is anything else but 
 that thinkable ? Either of these two it must be, 
 God doing what Paul says, determining before- 
 hand the movements and the bounds of men and 
 nations, or God just sitting aside and watching the 
 world performance. It means a great deal to com- 
 mence your creed with the declaration, " I believe 
 in God the Father Almighty." 
 
 A further evidence of the will of God in history 
 is shown by the way in which great issues have 
 turned upon little happenings that seemed to be 
 altogether fortuitous. So far as man's efforts and 
 designs were concerned, the working out of the 
 Divine plan was very often the result of chance. 
 Pharaoh happened to dream one night, and the 
 chief butler happened to remember Joseph, and the 
 result was the setting in motion of the events 
 which led to the Egyptian captivity. The daughter 
 of Pharaoh happened to go down to bathe at the 
 place where Moses lay hidden in the reeds in the 
 Nile, and out of that came the preservation and 
 the preparation of Moses for the leadership of his 
 people. Euth happened to go into the field of 
 Boaz and thus became the wife of Boaz and the 
 ancestress of our Lord. Ahasuerus, king of Persia, 
 was unable to sleep one night and had his secre- 
 taries entertain him by reading the royal records, 
 
The Two Eagles and the Vine 103 
 
 and thus learned how Mordecai had saved his life, 
 and that had its part in the saving of the life of 
 the whole Jewish people. When Columbus was 
 feeling his way over the unknown ocean, it was the 
 flight of bu^ds that made him turn his ships to 
 the south, and to the southern continent. Roman 
 Catholicism and Spanish civilization were turned 
 to the isles of the sea and the southern continent, 
 and the great continent to the north was reserved, 
 in greater part at least, for English civilization and 
 Protestantism. It rained the night before Water- 
 loo, making the ground so soft that I^apoleon could 
 not get his guns into position until eleven o'clock. 
 "A cloud traversing the heavens out of season 
 sufficed to make a world crumble." These are but 
 a few of those strange events, which, so insignificant 
 in themselves, yet under Him who 
 
 *^ Views with equal eye, as God of all, 
 A hero perish, or a sparrow fall," 
 
 are fateful to decide the issue of nations. "As 
 fragments fit themselves into the finished mosaic, 
 so what to us are chance and trivial events fit 
 themselves into the Divine plan." 
 
 Once more we can trace the plan of God in the 
 use He has made of men. In nature God works 
 immediately ; in human affairs, mediately, that is, 
 through human agents. In the introduction to his 
 " Pioneers of France in the New World " Francis 
 Parkman writes: " The springs of American civili- 
 zation, unlike those of the elder world, lie revealed 
 
104 ^^^ Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 in the clear light of History. In appearance they 
 are feeble ; in reality, copious and full of force. 
 Acting at the sources of life, instruments otherwise 
 weak become mighty for good and evil, and men, 
 lost elsewhere in the crowd, stand forth as the 
 agents of destiny." Both good men and bad men, 
 obscure and celebrated, have been the agents of 
 destiny. Cyrus did not know God, yet God used 
 him to overthrow Babylon and liberate the Jews. 
 "He is my shepherd and shall perform all my 
 pleasure. I have called thee by name: I have 
 girded thee, though thou hast not known me." 
 Men do not need to know God to be used as His 
 agents in carrying out His will. We cannot read 
 the lives of Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Paul, Peter, John, 
 Luther, Columbus, Calvin, Cromwell, Lincoln, with- 
 out feeling that a Power higher than they was 
 girding them and using them, and that they w^ere 
 only executing the decrees of God. Whether, as is 
 to-day the case with the rulers in the European 
 nations now at war, men claim that they are the 
 agents of God, or whether, like Cyrus, they knoAv 
 nothing of God, or like the eagle kings of Babylon 
 and Egypt, think their own will superior to, and 
 independent of, any other will, if there is a God and 
 God has a plan, all of them do but further His 
 purpose and praise Him, whether with their wrath 
 or with their devotion. " Great men are the in- 
 spired texts of the book of revelation, a chapter of 
 which is completed from epoch to epoch, and by 
 some called history." 
 
The Two Eagles and the Vine 105 
 
 Finally, in the judgment upon the nations, we 
 see the evidence of God's plan and God's reign. 
 He doeth terrible things in righteousness. What 
 is the history of the world but the judgment of the 
 world? "I will dig thy grave because thou art 
 vile " was the sentence which God through His 
 prophet delivered to Nineveh. In surveying the 
 past, we are confronted by two facts : first, the fact 
 of sin ; the nations have all been vile ; second, the 
 fact of brevity ; the kingdoms and empu^es of this 
 world have followed one another in quick succes- 
 sion to the grave ; the conqueror from without, the 
 internal strife and the corruption from within — 
 these have brought every kingdom low. Where 
 are these eagle empires of Babylon and Egypt, 
 wheeling and screaming over the carcasses of na- 
 tions they have conquered and dismembered? 
 Where are the winged lions of Nineveh? The 
 chariots of the Hittites ? The navies of Phoenicia 
 and triremes of Carthage ? The phalanx of Thebes 
 and the hoplites of Greece ? The legions of Eome ? 
 The treasures of Spain ? 
 
 *^ In outlines dim and vast 
 Their mighty shadows cast 
 
 The giant forms of empires on their way 
 To ruin : one by one 
 They tower and are gone ! " 
 
 Why did they go ? Was it only a question of 
 time, of age, of national decrepitude ? Or did the 
 matter of sin and of judgment enter into their fall ? 
 
io6 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 Is it true, or is it not true, that all earthly govern- 
 ment is brief and unstable, because it is vile ? 
 " What are all our histories," said Cromwell, " but 
 God manifesting Himself that He hath shaken and 
 tumbled down and trampled under foot whatso- 
 ever He hath not planted?" "The sins of this 
 guilty nation will never be washed away save by 
 blood," prophesied John Brown as they led him 
 out to be hanged. And in less than five years 
 Abraham Lincoln, in the sublime Second Inaugural, 
 made intercession and confession for the whole 
 people, when he said, "If we shall suppose that 
 American slavery is one of those offenses which, 
 in the Providence of God, must needs come, but 
 which, having continued through His appointed 
 time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives 
 to both North and South this terrible war as the 
 woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall 
 we discern therein any departure from those divine 
 attributes which the believers in a living God al- 
 ways ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fer- 
 vently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war 
 may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it 
 continue until all the wealth piled by the bond- 
 man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited 
 toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood 
 drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn 
 with the sword, as was said three thousand years 
 ago, so still it must be said, ' The judgments of the 
 Lord are true and righteous altogether.' " 
 In his autobiography Andrew D. White tells of 
 
The Two Eagles and the Vine 107 
 
 a visit he made at Columbia, South Carolina, some 
 few years after the war. Visiting the State Legis- 
 lature, he saw the presiding officer, a mulatto, order 
 a white gentleman, a gentleman of the Old South, 
 to take his seat. " To this it had come at last. In 
 the presence of this assembly, in the hall where 
 disunion really had its birth, where secession first 
 shone out in all its glory, a former slave ordered a 
 former master to sit down and was obeyed. I be- 
 gan to feel a sympathy for the South, and this feel- 
 ing was deepened by what I saw in Georgia and 
 Florida ; and yet, below it all, I seemed to see the 
 hand of God in history, and in the midst of it all 
 I seemed to hear a deep voice from the dead. To 
 me, seeing these things, there came reverberating 
 out of the last century that prediction of Thomas 
 Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, who, after depict- 
 ing the offenses of slavery, ended with these words 
 worthy of Isaiah— divinely inspired if any ever 
 were — 'I tremble when I remember that God is 
 just ! ' " 
 
 In the fullness of times God shall bring history 
 to its climax and set up the everlasting kingdom of 
 Jesus Christ. When that is done the whole earth 
 shall know that " I the Lord have brought down 
 the green tree and have exalted the low," that all 
 the confused movements of time have been con- 
 trolled by an eternal purpose. If you and I had 
 gone to Mount Lebanon where the labourers were 
 felling the trees and sawing the lumber for the 
 temple, or to the quarries where they cut out the 
 
io8 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 stone for walls and foundations, we should have 
 seen only a tumult and heard only a confused mur- 
 mur of industry. But if we had stood on Mount 
 Moriah at Jerusalem, we should have seen the 
 meaning of it all ; we should have seen the massive 
 timbers and the great blocks of stone, in holy 
 silence, without the sound of hammer or axe or 
 any tool of iron, each fitted into their place in the 
 temple of God. To-day we see the tumult and 
 hear the noise and the crashing of stately cedars, 
 the sound of hammer and chisel and warlike tool 
 of iron, lifted by godly or ungodly arm. God 
 hides His temple and treasures up His designs in 
 the unfathomable mines of His sovereign will. 
 But at last the meaning and the plan and the pur- 
 pose of it all, for the world, for your life, for my 
 life, will be made clear. Silently and majestically 
 all the timbers and the stones which have been 
 prepared through time shall fit themselves into the 
 finished temple, the Holy City of God, the Ever- 
 lasting Kingdom of Jesus Christ ! 
 
IX 
 
 The Parable of the Ploughman 
 
 Isaiah xxviiu 2j-2g 
 
 THIS Parable of the Ploughman follows 
 the prophecy of judgment and chastise- 
 ment upon Israel. The vanity of their 
 trust in foreign alliances instead of upon the Lord 
 will be demonstrated when their covenant with 
 death has been annulled and their agreement with 
 hell has fallen. The bed of human devices will be 
 found shorter than the recreant nation can stretch 
 itself on, and the covering of human counsels too 
 narrow for the nation to wrap itself in. Isaiah has 
 heard the decree of destruction and pictures the 
 overflowing scourge of judgment onrushing like a 
 torrential river through the devoted land. He ad- 
 mits that this is a strange work for God to perform 
 against His own people, and that the natural tend- 
 ency of the nation will be to scoff against such 
 a prophecy of destruction. The burden of their 
 scoffing was not that the nation had no need for 
 chastisement, nor that God had no power to judge, 
 but that the destruction of the Holy City and the 
 dispersion of the people would be in direct contra- 
 diction to His purpose and plan for the nation. 
 
 109 
 
no The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 Had not God chosen the nation and planted it like 
 a vine ? 
 
 *^ Thou broughtest a vine out of Egypt ; 
 Thou didst drive out the nations, and plantedst it. 
 Thou preparedst room before it, 
 And it took deep root and filled the land. 
 The mountains were covered with the shadow of it, 
 And the boughs thereof were like cedars of God. 
 It sent out its branches unto the sea. 
 And its shoots unto the Eiver. 
 Why hast Thou broken down its walls, 
 So that ail they that pass by the way do pluck it ? 
 The boar out of the wood doth ravage it. 
 And the wild beasts of the field feed upon it." 
 
 That complaint of the Psalmist, evidently written 
 after the coming of the judgments which Isaiah 
 foretold, shows how difficult it was for the Israel- 
 ite to reconcile what had happened to the nation 
 with God's plan and purpose for it as witnessed by 
 His election of Israel in the beginning, and the 
 repeated announcement of His gracious intention 
 towards the Chosen People. If this was the state 
 of mind after the destruction of the Holy City and 
 the visitation of fearful judgments, we do not 
 wonder that many scoffed at the proclamation of 
 the coming of the whirlwind and tempest of retri- 
 bution and woe. They would say to Isaiah, ^' Your 
 decree of destruction is not in harmony with God's 
 choice of Israel in the beginning and His care for 
 the nation during all the centuries of its existence." 
 It was in anticipation of this objection that 
 
The Parable of the Ploughman 1 1 1 
 
 Isaiah speaks to them the Parable of the Plough- 
 man. He makes bold to liken God in His dealing 
 with men to the ploughman in his dealing with 
 the soil, the seed and the grain : and the point of 
 the comparison, though it yields other by-products 
 of truth, is in this : that as the ploughman must 
 carry out a diversity of operations — ploughing, 
 harrowing, sowing, threshing, grinding — before 
 the " wholesome grain and pure " appears, so the 
 Wise and Eternal Husbandman, in fulfilling His 
 purposes with nations and with individuals, carries 
 on a diversity of operations : sometimes He breaks 
 up the soil with the plough of preparation; and 
 sometimes He harrows with the sharp teeth of 
 suffering, or threshes with the relentless flail of 
 afiliction ; and sometimes He scatters broadcast on 
 the prepared soil the germinating principles of 
 truth and righteousness; but always His opera- 
 tions, like those of the ploughman, have a definite 
 end in view, the production of the pure grain of 
 character. It would be foolish to judge of the 
 ploughman's purpose by watching him wound the 
 protesting glebe with his ploughshare, or beat the 
 sensitive grain with his flail ; nor can we judge 
 rightly of God — God in the history of nations, 
 God in the history of redemption, God in that his- 
 tory which to you and me must ever be the most 
 interesting and most important of all histories, the 
 history of our own lives — unless we take into con- 
 sideration the whole plan and method of God. He 
 has diversities of operations, but the Spirit which 
 
112 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 runs through them all is one and the same, — al- 
 mighty, all-wise, all-beneficent. 
 
 ' ^ Blind unbelief is sure to err, 
 And scan His works in vain. 
 God is His own interpreter 
 And He will make it plain." 
 
 As introductory to this study of the wisdom and 
 graciousness of God's dealings, we may take the 
 reason which the prophet appends to his study of 
 the operations of the ploughman : " for his God 
 doth instruct him aright and doth teach him." 
 The lowliest of occupations, that of the ploughman, 
 is carried on by the inspiration of God. Poetry 
 has made the ploughman a figure of sentiment and 
 mystery ; democracy has made him a symbol of 
 honourable and necessary toil, how even the king 
 is servant to the field. But Isaiah's thought of the 
 ploughman is not that of Thomas Gray as he saw 
 him one evening near Stoke Poges, "homeward 
 wend his weary way," and, for all he knew, " a 
 village Hampden, a mute inglorious Milton " lost 
 and buried within him ; nor is his thought of the 
 ploughman that of the political orator who likes 
 to tell how he once followed the plough, and thus 
 followed in the footsteps of Elisha, Cincinnatus, 
 Lincoln. When Isaiah speaks of the ploughman, 
 he has before him the plain, unadorned, ordinary 
 figure of the lowly husbandman on the hills of 
 Judea, going through the different processes of 
 agriculture. 
 
The Parable of the Ploughman 113 
 
 Who taught him to plough ? Who taught man 
 to take a seed and cover it up in the earth that he 
 had previously prepared by ploughing and harrow- 
 ing, with the sure confidence that one day the 
 tender shoot would appear, and that out of that 
 cold, damp grave of the buried grain there would 
 come a resurrection of new life ? We marvel at 
 the gift, the talent, the inspiration of the orator, 
 the poet, the prophet and the apostle, the painter, 
 the architect and the builder, the inventor and the 
 statesman. Whence came their gift ? Who taught 
 them to roll out their psalms and speak their fiery 
 oracles ? Who instructed them how to paint, plan, 
 build? Suppose I am ambitious to become an 
 artist. I enroll myself as a student in the Acad- 
 emy of Fine Arts. I listen to the instruction of 
 skilled teachers and I view the works of accom- 
 plished artists. After much toil and thought I 
 might be able to draw what would be at least a 
 fair likeness of this church beneath whose roof we 
 now sit. If I happened to have unusual talent, I 
 might in time produce something that would be 
 worthy of your attention, perhaps of your admi- 
 ration. You say my teachers taught me. Yes, but 
 it had to be there before they could draw it out. 
 And if they did teach me, who taught them ? It 
 makes no difiPerence whether you stand in rapt 
 wonder before a masterpiece of Turner, or Keyn- 
 olds or Watts, or look at the daubing of the latest 
 apprentice, you are confronted by that mystery of 
 a gift that is in man, and that man himself can stir 
 
114 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 up, can develop, can hand down from generation 
 to generation, but never can originate. 
 
 What Isaiah, himself one of the most gifted of 
 men — for who shall match what Robert Burns 
 called his " wild, seraphic fire " ? — says of the 
 Judean ploughman, we might ask of any of the 
 actors in the occupations of human life, high or 
 low. Who taught the sailor to sail and to steer ? 
 The miner to dig ? The mechanic to contrive ? 
 The goldsmith to refine ? The miller to grind ? 
 All the occupations of life presuppose a gift and a 
 Giver. The skilled workman and master mechanic 
 of the tabernacle was Bezalel. Of him Moses said, 
 " The Lord hath called Bezalel, the son of Uri, and 
 he hath filled him with the Spirit of God, in 
 wisdom, and in understanding and in knowledge, 
 and in all manner of workmanship ; and to devise 
 skillful works, to work in gold and in silver, and 
 in brass, and in cutting of stones." But is not this 
 true of all kinds of tabernacles and all kinds of 
 workers? Civilization has its dark and fearful 
 spots of corruption and wickedness, and too often, 
 when we think about the world and its relationship 
 to God, we see only those dark places. We see 
 the great engine of war hurling tons of metal to 
 destroy and maim and crush and wound, and we 
 exclaim, " How dreadful is this ! Surely if there 
 were a God in heaven this cruel war could not 
 be ! " But we forget the wonder of the mind that 
 devised the engine of destruction, the wisdom and 
 the discretion which, although turned into a wrong 
 
The Parable of the Ploughman iij* 
 
 channel and devoted to sad ends, nevertheless bears 
 eloquent testimony to the mind that is in man, a 
 power which he ofttimes abuses, but which speaks 
 ever of a God who has instructed man aright, and 
 made him upright, though man, in the blindness 
 of his fallen nature, has sought out many foolish 
 and wicked devices. We shudder with horror 
 when we read of a ship that sails under the seas, 
 and stealing upon its unsuspecting and unprotected 
 prey, delivers its death-blow, and hundreds find 
 an ocean grave. But in our horror at man's in- 
 humanity to man, from age to age making count- 
 less thousands mourn, let us not forget the wonder 
 of the mind that could devise such a means of de- 
 struction and could execute its purpose with such 
 fearful precision. The garment of civilization that 
 man has been weaving through the centuries is 
 fearfully and yet wonderfully made, and in every 
 stitch and thread proclaims that man is dependent 
 upon a Higher Power. Eange, if you will, through 
 all creation, and examine this marvellous fabric of 
 life, and everywhere you will discover something 
 not only worthy of a God, but something which 
 demands a God and presupposes His instruction and 
 His gift. It may be the ploughman guiding the 
 shining share through the soil, or it may be the 
 poet who sings in immortal melody about the 
 ploughman, or the prophet who takes him for the 
 theme of his parable, or it may be the conies, who, 
 though a feeble folk, have their homes in high 
 safety among the rocks, or the bird that builds her 
 
1 16 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 nest so that it swings from the topmost bough and 
 yet the jBercest wind cannot tear it from the branch 
 nor unhouse its little occupants ; but whether it be 
 the poet's song or the prophet's parable, or the 
 ploughman's toil, or the bird's airy architecture, it 
 is the Lord God who doth instruct them to dis- 
 cretion and doth teach them. 
 
 But we have pursued this interesting by-path of 
 the parable far enough. Let us now return to the 
 highway of its teaching, namely, the plan and the 
 wisdom of God's providential dealings with man. 
 Our minds become so intent upon our own plans 
 and enterprises that w^e forget that God too has a 
 plan and that we live in the midst of the carrying 
 out of a great drama which had its beginning 
 when the world was created, and which shall have 
 its ending with the dissolution of the world. God, 
 says the prophet, is wonderful in counsel and ex- 
 cellent in wisdom. The one thing that made the 
 people of Isaiah's day doubt that God had a plan 
 was the revelation that He was to judge and pun- 
 ish them. So long as Israel was rich and prosper- 
 ous they had no wish to question the wise and 
 beneficent plan that w^as being worked out in their 
 nation. But when they are told that a river of 
 destruction is to flow over the land again and 
 again, that the monuments of their national glory 
 will be levelled to the dust, and that the people will 
 be sent into captivity, they begin to ask if there 
 is a God and if His plan is good and just. 
 
 That doubt of ancient Israel has its counterpart 
 
The Parable of the Ploughman 1 1 7 
 
 in the lives of men to-day. Our faith is undis- 
 turbed when all is well with us, and health and 
 prosperity and happiness wait at our gate. But 
 when the wind shifts into the northeast, when we 
 lose our money, when our best laid plans " gang 
 aft aglee," when sickness and loneliness, sorrow 
 and pain come to visit us, then faith often ceases 
 to be a psalm of praise, and becomes a problem. 
 It is not difficult to persuade ourselves, after the 
 unpleasant visitation has passed, of the good results 
 of the visit, how we learn humility, patience, sym- 
 pathy. The Psalmist said, " It was for my good 
 that I was afflicted." The stricken Hezekiah said 
 after he had recovered from his disease, " By these 
 things men live." In some little degree, then, at 
 least by way of retrospect, men are able to per- 
 suade themselves of the beneficence of the provi- 
 dences which a somewhat out of fashion piety used 
 to call " sorrowful." 
 
 But just how and why it is that all things, even 
 the worst, work together for our good in this life, 
 and in the next for a far more exceeding weight 
 of glory, that we must leave to the empire of faith. 
 We must believe that God works towards an end 
 not less faithfully than the ploughman who has 
 been instructed by Him. Only the foolish man 
 will ask to have this demonstrated to him. It 
 does not belong to the category of things demon- 
 strable. It eludes the grasp of the hand, but 
 leaves its conviction to sustain and cheer the meek 
 and the humble. When Mary saw the risen Lord 
 
1 18 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 t>n the morning of the Kesurrection, she supposed 
 Him to be the Gardener. And such indeed He 
 is. Our Lord is a Gardener. Mary's supposi- 
 tion is the Christian's confidence. Digging, prun- 
 ing, transplanting, watering, all that the plants 
 and trees of the garden need that they bring forth 
 fruit, that life does for man, and faith tells us that 
 back of life is the Living God Himself. Awake, 
 O north wind, and come thou south, and blow 
 upon my garden that the spices thereof may flow 
 forth ! 
 
 As the prophet speaks of this ploughman, he re- 
 minds his hearers how differently he deals with 
 different crops. The wheat, barley, fitches and 
 cummin he plants in different ways and harvests 
 and threshes in different wa^ys. " The fitches are 
 not threshed with a sharp threshing instrument, 
 neither is a cart-wheel turned about upon the 
 cummin; but the fitches are beaten out with a 
 staff, and the cummin with a rod." If this is the 
 careful method of the ploughman, are we to ex- 
 pect less of the ploughman's God ? My neighbour 
 to-day needs joy and I to-day need sorrow, and 
 according to our needs God deals with us. He 
 does not visit men as one indistinguishable mass 
 of beings, but apportions His gifts to the individual 
 needs. And that diversity of operations upon men 
 should convince us of the wisdom and the goodness 
 of God. It was the reflection of the Psalmist that 
 He knoweth our frame and remembereth that we 
 are dust. Before He sent you that load to bear, 
 
The Parable of the Ploughman 119 
 
 that grief to carry, that work to perform, God 
 considered your frame, just what you were able 
 to bear and what sort of a burden was necessary 
 for you. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. 
 In this study of husbandry all the divers oper- 
 ations of the farmer were carried out with one 
 ruling motive, the garnering of the grain. He did 
 not plough for the sake of ploughing, nor harrow 
 for the sake of harrowing, nor plant for the sake 
 of planting, nor thresh for the sake of threshing, 
 but to store away the harvest in his barns. Has 
 God a like purpose ? Sometimes we faint beneath 
 the burden of this heavy unintelligible world. For 
 its rivers of sorrow and its fountains of woe, for 
 its ebb and flow of the tide of righteousness, for 
 its dense clouds of passion and ignorance, for its 
 savage outbursts of bestiality and brutality, for 
 its love of the darkness and its hatred of the light, 
 for its pathetic groping through long centuries in 
 the night of error in order to stumble upon the 
 truth it so much needs, for its bloody and senseless 
 Armageddons, for all this we are disquieted when 
 we think upon God. What is the end towards 
 which He doth work ? What is the purpose which 
 guides and controls His Hand ? When we think 
 of mankind and the history of the world, are we 
 not often taking upon our lips the sigh of the 
 stricken Job, " Oh, that I knew where I might 
 find Him ! Behold, I go forward, but He is not 
 there ; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him ; 
 on the left hand where He doth work, but I cannot 
 
120 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 behold Him : He hideth Himself on the right hand 
 that I cannot see Him ! " 
 
 It is indeed possible for us to fortify ourselves 
 by the study of the past and find the evidences of 
 His ways in His dealings with men and nations of 
 yesterday and in the general progress of mankind. 
 But when it comes to a demand for an answer to 
 the question, " To what end does God deal with the 
 nations ? To what end does He deal thus with 
 me ? " we have no recourse but that of faith. All 
 that we can do is to trust Him for His goodness. 
 *' But He knoweth the way that I take : when He 
 hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold." The 
 lesson that Isaiah draws from the work of the 
 husbandman Job draws from the operations of the 
 goldsmith. It is not that God ploughs and breaks 
 and threshes that troubles me. But this : Does He 
 do it for my good and for a happy end ? It is not 
 that I am tried in the fire that troubles me, but 
 this : Shall I one day come forth as gold ? 
 
 In his celebrated argument for the immortality 
 of the soul and the resurrection of the body, Paul 
 flung out this challenge : "If, after the manner of 
 men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what 
 ad vantage th it me, if the dead rise not?" The 
 whole struggle of life, its never ceasing battle with 
 the beasts of temptation and doubt and sorrow and 
 pain, seemed to Paul terribly meaningless and 
 empty, unless the struggler is to be crowned by a 
 blessed immortality. If that is all — to be born, to 
 struggle for a little in the arena of life, and then 
 
The Parable of the Ploughman 121 
 
 die and go back to nothingness — life is a cruel 
 tragedy. Farewell all honourable conduct and 
 striving ! Farewell the Christian virtues and the 
 mind of Christ ! Farewell the delights of the mind 
 and the imaginations of the spirit ! Let us eat and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die ! Paul there declares 
 that he cannot hold to God and His goodness un- 
 less another life follows this life. The ploughman 
 ploughs in vain unless we are to have those man- 
 sions of which Jesus spake. The refiner's furnace 
 burns in vain unless after the furnace trials of this 
 mortal existence we are to come forth as gold. 
 The afflictions common to all men in this life are 
 not to be reconciled with the fact of God unless they 
 do indeed work for us an eternal weight of glory. 
 
 <( 
 
 n 
 
 My own dim life should teach me this, 
 That life should live forevermore, 
 Else earth is darkness at the core, 
 And dust and ashes all that is. 
 
 This round of green, this orb of flame, 
 Fantastic beauty ; such as lurks 
 In some wild poet, when he works 
 Without a conscience or an aim. 
 
 " What then were God to such as 1 1 
 'Twas hardly worth my while to choose 
 Of things all mortal, or to use 
 A little patience ere I die. 
 
 ** 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, 
 Like birds the charming serpent draws, 
 To drop head-foremost in the jaws 
 Of vacant darkness and to cease." 
 
122 The Parables of the Old Testament 
 
 These doubts and fears are laid by the voice of 
 Christ. " Ye believe in God, believe also in me." 
 Sometimes we seem to reverse that order and be- 
 lieve in God because we have believed in Christ. 
 How often did He reassure us as to the good-will 
 of our Father in Heaven! How often and how 
 beautifully did He remind us of the value God 
 placed upon a single soul ! Yes, we are worth 
 more than many sparrows, and because Christ has 
 come and loved us and died for us, we believe that 
 this that we see and experience here upon earth 
 cannot be all, that the final explanation of life is 
 that of the next stage of existence. What it is, 
 eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, and its mys- 
 teries and glories have not entered into the heart 
 of man. But I wait upon the Lord. If it were not 
 so, I believe that Christ would have told me. I 
 shall be satisfied when I awake with His likeness. 
 
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 Seen in History and in Scripture as Pre-Millennial 
 and Imminent. With an Introduction by Bishop 
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EARLIER WORKS IN DEMAND 
 
 EDf^ARD A. STEINER Auth,r •/ « On the Trail 
 
 -^———————-^^——— of the Immierant" 
 
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 The Story of My Life in America. Illustrated, 
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 tian JVork. 
 
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 My Daily Meditation 
 
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SERMONS—LECTURES— ADDRESSES 
 
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 Airs Love Yet All's Law 
 
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 Instruments and Ends in the Kingdom of God. 
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 of Morality. V. The Control of Social Advance. VI. 
 "Every Kindred, and People, and Tongue." 
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 Lectures and Orations by Henry Ward 
 Beecher 
 
 Collected by Newell Dwight Hillis. l2mo, net $1.20. 
 
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 pelling." — Christian World. 
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 The Prodigal and Others 
 
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 It makes a preacher feel like preaching once more on this 
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 — and older ones, too. Dr. Broughton does not hesitate to 
 make his utterances striking and entertaining by the intro- 
 duction of numerous appropriate and homely stories and il'ns- 
 trations. He reaches the heart."— -K??^*«zf and Expositor. 
 
 
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