ing against the unworthy greed and selfishness which lie at the root of all such strife, on one side or the other. Addressing the crowd, who had heard the request, He gave them, in the following parable, a caution against all forms of covetousness, or excessive desire of worldly possessions.

"Watch," said He, "and keep yourselves from all covetousness. For, though a man may abound in riches, his life does not depend on his wealth, but on the will of God, who can lengthen or shorten his existence, and make it happy or sad, at His pleasure. Let me show you what I mean.

"The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully. And he reasoned within himself, saying, 'What shall I do, because I have no room to stow away my crops?' And he said, 'This will I do. I will pull down my barns and build greater, and I will gather together into them all my crops and my property, and will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much property laid up for many years; take thine ease,

eat, drink, and be merry.'

"But God said unto him, 'Fool, this night thy soul is required of thee, and whose will those things be which thou hast prepared?'

"So," added Jesus, "is he who heaps up treasures for himself, and is not rich towards God. Death, coming unexpectedly, even when latest, strips him of all, if he has only thought of himself and of this world. The true wisdom is to use what we have so as to lay up treasures, by its right employment, in heaven, that God may give us these, after death, in the kingdom of the Messiah."

THE

CHAPTER XLII.

AFTER THE STORM.

HE meal in the house of the Pharisee was a momentous event in the life of Jesus. The fierceness of his enemies had broken out into open rage, so that, as He left, He was followed by the infuriated Rabbis, gesticulating, as they pressed round Him, and provoking Him to commit Himself by words of which they might lay hold. A great crowd had meanwhile gathered, partly on His side, partly turned against Him by the arts of his accusers. The excitement had reached its highest.

With such a multitude before Him, it was certain that He would not let the opportunity pass of proclaiming afresh the New Kingdom of God. It had been called a kingdom of the devil, and it was meet that He should turn aside the calumny. His past mode of teaching did not, however, seem suited for the new circumstances. It had left but small permanent results; and a new and still simpler style of instruction, specially adapted to their dulness and untrained minds and hearts, would at least arrest their attention more surely, and force them to a measure of reflection. Pressing through the vast throng, to the shore of the lake, he entered a fishingboat, and, sitting down at its prow, the highest part of it, began, from this convenient pulpit, as it lightly rocked on the waters, the first of those wondrous parables, in which He henceforth so frequently embodied His teachings.

The Parable or Mashal was a mode of instruction already familiar to Israel since the days of the Judges,3 and was in familiar and constant use among the Rabbis. Its characteristic is the presentation of moral and religious truth in a more vivid form than is possible by mere precept or abstract statement, use being made for this end of some incident drawn from life or nature, by which the lesson sought to

3 Judges ix. 7. Isaiah v. 1. Ezek. xiii. 11, etc.

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be given is pictured to the eye, and thus imprinted on the memory, and made more emphatic. Analogies, hitherto unsuspected, between familiar natural facts and spiritual phenomena; lessons of duty enforced by some simple imaginary narrative or incident; striking parallels and comparisons, which made the homeliest trifles symbols of the highest truths, abound in all the discourses of Jesus, but are still more frequent from this time. Nothing was henceforth left unused. The light, the darkness, the houses around, the games of childhood, the sightless wayside beggar, the foxes of the hills, the leathern bottles hung up from every rafter, the patched or new garment, and even the noisy hen amidst her chickens, served, in turn, to illustrate some lofty truth. The sower on the hill-side at hand, the gaudy weeds among the corn, the common mustard plant, the leaven in the woman's dough, the treasure disclosed by the passing ploughshare, the pearl brought by the travelling merchant from distant lands for sale at Bethsaida or Tiberias-at Philip's court or that of Antipas,-the draw-net seen daily on the lake, the pitiless servant, the labourers in the vineyards around-any detail of every-day life, was elevated, as occasion demanded, to be the vehicle of the sublimest lessons. Others have uttered parables; but Jesus so far transcends them, that He may justly be called the creator of this mode of instruction.1

The first of the wondrous series was, fitly, that of the Sower, for the planting of the New Kingdom must needs be the first stage towards further truths respecting it. In a country like Galilee no illustration could be more easily intelligible, and it is no wonder that Jesus often uses it. As He sat in the boat, with the multitude standing on the shore, each feature of the parable would be before Him-the sower going out from the neighbouring town or village to sow his patch on the unenclosed hill-side, with its varied soil, here warm and deep, there a mere skin over the limestone rock, invaded at some spots by thorns, then, as now, so plentiful in Palestine, and crossed by the bridle path, along which men and beasts were passing constantly. The seed was good, and the sower faithfully did his work, but it depended on the soil itself what would be the result, for the rain, and the light, and the heat came equally on all. Part fell on the trodden

1 Renan's Vie de Jésus, p. 167. Keim, vol. ii. p. 438. Matt. xiii. 1–23. Mark iv. 1-25. Luke viii, 4-18.

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path-which, itself, though now beaten hard, was once as soft and yielding as any part of the field-and was crushed under foot, or picked up by the birds hovering near. Some fell on spots in which the springing thistles had already taken root, and were about to shoot up in rank vigour; some on the shallow skin of earth over the rock, where the hot sun hastened the growth, while the hard rock hindered the root from striking down; and only a part fell on good soil, and yielded a return for the sower's toil."

This parable, apparently so self-illustrative, troubled, alike, the minds of the Twelve, and of the wider circle of hearers who had any interest in Christ's words. The mode of teaching was new to them from Him, and the conceptions embodied in what they had heard were directly opposite to all they had been accustomed, as Jews, to associate with the Messianic kingdom. The careless multitude, drawn together only by curiosity, had scattered when Jesus, having finished His address, had returned to Peter's house. Thither, however, a number of graver spirits followed, with the Twelve, to seek the explanation they felt assured would be vouchsafed. It was, indeed, precisely what Jesus desired, for it afforded an opportunity for the fuller instruction of all whose state of heart fitted them to receive it, and it drew them into closer personal intercourse with Himself. He received them with frank delight. "Unto you, who thus show your interest in the mysteries of the kingdom of God," said He, "it is given. to know them, but to the indifferent outside multitude, they are designedly left veiled in parable." To understand spiritual truth, the heart must be in sympathy with it; otherwise, to try to explain it, would be as idle as to speak of colours to the blind, or of music to the deaf. Where the religious faculty was dead or dormant, religious truth was necessarily incomprehensible and undesired. "He came to be a Light to men, and to reveal the truth, not to hide it; but men must have willing ears,5 and take heed to what they hear, pondering over it in their hearts. To listen only with the outward ear, like the careless multitude, is to draw down the punishment of God. In natures thus wilfully indifferent, stolid insensibility only increases, the more they hear. To such, the very word of life becomes a word of death.

1 Mark iv. 12.

3 Mark iv. 11.

5 Mark iv. 23.

2 Mark iv. 33, 34. Matt. xiii. 34; x. 13.

4 Mark iv. 21.

6 Mark iv. 24.

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Rejecting me, the Light, they are given up by God to the darkness they have chosen, and lose, erelong, even the superficial interest in higher things they may have had.

"Ye, on the other hand," He continued, "who really have received the truth into a willing heart, have thereby proved your fitness for higher disclosures, and shall have them. The honest interest you show determines the measure of knowledge you are able to receive, and it will be given you. He who has opened his soul to me will receive continually richer insight into the truth. Alas for those who shut their eyes and stop their ears! But blessed are your eyes, into which you have let the truth enter, and blessed are your ears, into which you have let it sink. Amen! I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see those things which ye see, and did not see them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and did not hear them." 2

He

Such, in brief explanatory paraphrase, was the welcome to those really anxious to understand the parable, which Jesus forthwith expounded to them; disclosing, as He did so, conceptions and principles which required a complete revolution in their minds to understand and appropriate. announced that the ancient kingdom of God was, henceforth, spiritualized, so that the only relation of man to it, from this time, was a moral one; not, as heretofore, in part a political. So entirely, indeed, was this the case, that He did not even speak of the external agencies or organization by which men should be outwardly received as its citizens, but assumed that acceptance depended on the man himself; on his will and his sympathy with what the New Kingdom offered. "The Word is the living Seed of the Gospel. As the embodiment of all truth, it is by following it that the Will of God is realized by men, and the one grand law of the kingdom thus obeyed. It is given to men, as the seed to the ground, and they can hear and understand it if they choose, but all depends on their doing so. As the strewn seed neither springs nor bears fruit on much of the ground, and fails except where it sinks into good soil, so the relations of men to the Word of God are very various. Few, it may be, receive it aright, but it is always the fault of men themselves if it be not living seed in their hearts. Wordly indifference may have made the soil impenetrable as the trodden path, or have left only a skin of sentiment over hidden callousness; or worldly cares