and plainly perceived, between the natural and spiritual worlds, so that analogies from the first are felt to be something more than illustrations, happily but yet arbitrarily chosen. They are arguments, and may be alleged as witnesses; the world of nature being throughout a witness for the world of spirit, proceeding from the same hand, growing out of the same root, and being constituted for that very end. All lovers of truth readily acknowledge these mysterious harmonies, and the force of arguments derived from them. To them the things on earth are copies of the things in heaven. They know that the earthly tabernacle is made after the pattern of things seen in the mount (Exod. xxv. 40; 1 Chron. xxviii. 11, 12); and the question suggested by the Angel in Milton is often forced upon their meditations,

"What if earth

Be but the shadow of heaven and things therein

Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?"+

For it is a great misunderstanding of the matter to think of these as happily, but yet arbitrarily, chosen illustrations, taken with a skilful selection from the great stock and storehouse of unappropriated images; from whence it would have been possible that the same skill might have selected others as good or nearly as good. Rather they belong to one another, the type and the thing typified, by an inward necessity; they were linked together long before by the law of a secret affinity. It is not a happy accident which has yielded so wondrous an analogy as that of husband and wife, to set forth the mystery of Christ's relation to

*See IRENEUS, Con. Hær., 1. 4, c. 14, ◊ 3.

† Many are the sayings of a like kind among the Jewish Cabbalists. Thus in the book Sohar, Quodcunque in terrâ est, id etiam in cælo est, et nulla res tam exigua est in mundo, quæ non alii similii, quæ in cælo est, correspondeat. In GFRÖRER'S Urchristenthum, v. 2, p. 26-30, and BÄHR's Symb. d. Mos. Cult., v. 1, p. 109, many like passages are quoted. No one was fuller of this than Tertullian: see his magnificent words on the resurrection (De Res. Carn., c. 12). All things here, he says, are witnesses of a resurrection, all things in nature are prophetic outlines of divine operations, God not merely speaking parables, but doing them, (talia divinarum virium lineamenta, non minus parabolis operato Deo quàm locuto.) And again, De Animâ, c. 43, the activity of the soul in sleep is for him at once an argument and an illustration which God has provided us, of its not being tied to the body to perish with it: Deus. ... manum porrigens fidei, facilius adjuvandæ per imagines et paraboles, sicut sermonum, ita et rerum.

Out of a true sense of this has grown our use of the word likely. There is a confident expectation in the minds of men of the reappearance in higher spheres, of the same laws and relations which they have recognized in lower; and thus that which is like is also likely or probable. Butler's Analogy is just the unfolding, as he himself declares at the beginning, in one particular line of this thought, that the like is also the likely.

his elect Church. There is far more in it than this: the earthly relation is indeed but a lower form of the heavenly, on which it rests, and of which it is the utterance. When Christ spoke to Nicodemus of a new birth, it was not merely because birth into this natural world was the most suitable figure that could be found for the expression of that spiritual act which, without any power of our own, is accomplished upon us when we are brought into God's kingdom; but all the circumstances of this natural birth had been pre-ordained to bear the burden of so great a mystery. The Lord is king, not borrowing this title from the kings of the earth, but having lent his own title to them-and not the name only, but so ordering, that all true rule and government upon earth, with its righteous laws, its stable ordinances, its punishment and its grace, its majesty and its terror, should tell of Him and of his kingdom which ruleth over all-so that "kingdom of God" is not in fact a figurative expression, but most literal: it is rather the earthly kingdoms. and the earthly kings that are figures and shadows of the true. And as in the world of man and human relations, so also is it in the world of nature. The untended soil which yields thorns and briers as its natural harvest is a permanent type and enduring parable of man's heart, which has been submitted to the same curse, and without a watchful spiritual husbandry will as surely put forth its briers and its thorns. The weeds that will mingle during the time of growth with the corn, and yet are separated from it at the last, tell ever one and the same tale of the present admixture, and future sundering of the righteous and the wicked. The decaying of the insignificant unsightly seed in the earth, and the rising up out of that decay and death, of the graceful stalk and the fruitful ear, contain evermore the prophecy of the final resurrection, even as this is itself in its kind a resurrection, the same process at a lower stage, the same power putting itself forth upon meaner things.

Of course it will be always possible for those who shrink from contemplating a higher world-order than that imperfect one around them,— and this, because the thought of such would rebuke their own imperfection and littleness-who shrink too from a witness for God so near them as even that imperfect order would render-it will be possible for them to say it is not thus, but that our talk of heavenly things is only a transferring of earthly images and relations to them;-that earth is not a shadow of heaven, but heaven, such at least as we conceive it, a dream of earth; that the names Father and Son for instance (and this is Arianism) are only improperly used and in a secondary sense when applied to Divine Persons, and then are terms so encumbered with difficulties and contradictions that they had better not be used at all; that we do not

find and recognize heavenly things in their earthly counterparts, but only dexterously adapt them. This denial will be always possible, and has a deeper root than that it can be met with argument; yet the lover of a truth which shall be loftier than himself will not be moved from his faith that however man may be the measure of all things here, yet God is the measure of man,-that the same Lord who sits upon his throne in heaven, does with the skirts of his train fill his temple úpon earth—that these characters of nature which every where meet his eye are not a common but a sacred writing-that they are hieroglyphics of God: and he counts this his blessedness, that he finds himself in the midst of such, and because in the midst of them, therefore never without admonishment and teaching.

For such is in truth the condition of man: around him is a sensuous world, yet not one which need bring him into bondage to his senses, but so framed as, if he will use it aright, continually to lift him above itself -a visible world to make known the invisible things of God, a ladder leading him up to the contemplation of heavenly truth. And this truth. he shall encounter and make his own, not in fleeing from his fellows and their works and ways, but in the mart, on the wayside, in the fieldnot by stripping himself bare of all relations, but rather recognizing these as instruments through which he is to be educated into the knowledge of higher mysteries; and so dealing with them in reverence, seeking by faithfulness to them in their lower forms to enter into their yet deeper significance-entertaining them, though they seem but common guests, and finding that he has unawares entertained Angels. And thus, besides his revelation in words, God has another and an elder, and one indeed without which it is inconceivable how that other could be made, for from this it appropriates all its signs of communication. This entire moral and visible world from first to last, with its kings and its subjects, its parents and its children, its sun and its moon, its sowing and its harvest, its light and its darkness, its sleeping and its waking, its birth and its death, is from beginning to end a mighty parable, a great teaching of supersensuous truth, a help at once to our faith and to our understanding.

It is true that men are ever in danger of losing "the key of knowledge" which should open to them the portals of this palace: and then instead of a prince in a world of wonder that is serving him, man moves in the midst of this world, alternately its taskmaster and its drudge. Such we see him to become at the two poles of savage and falsely-cultivated life-his inner eye darkened, so that he sees nothing, his inner ear heavy, so that there come no voices from nature unto him and indeed in all, save only in the one Man, there is more or less of the

dulled ear, and the filmed eye. There is none to whom nature tells out all that she has to tell, and as constantly as she would be willing to tell it. Now the whole of Scripture, with its ever-recurring use of figurative language, is a re-awakening of man to the mystery of nature, a giving back to him the key of knowledge, the true signatura rerum: and this comes out, as we might expect, in its highest form, but by no means exclusively, in those which by pre-eminence we call the parables. They have this point of likeness with the miracles, that those too were a calling heed to powers which were daily going forward in the midst of men, but which, by their frequency and their orderly repetition, that ought to have kindled the more admiration, had become wonder-works no more, had lost the power of exciting attention, until men had need to be startled anew to the contemplation of the energies which were ever working among them. In like manner the parables were a calling of attention to the spiritual facts which underlie all processes of nature, all institutions of human society, and which, though unseen, are the true ground and support of these. Christ moved in the midst of what seemed to the eye of sense an old and worn-out world, and it evidently became new at his touch; for it told to man now the inmost secrets of his being he found that it answered with strange and marvellous correspondencies to another world within him, that oftentimes it helped to the birth great thoughts of his heart, which before were helplessly struggling to be born, that of these two worlds, without him and within, each threw a light and a glory on the other.

For on this rests the possibility of a real teaching by parables, such a teaching as, resting upon a substantial ground, shall not be a mere building on the air, or painting on a cloud,-that the world around us is a divine world, that it is God's world, the world of the same God who is teaching and leading us into spiritual truth; that the horrible dream of Gnostic and Manichæan, who would set a great gulf between the worlds of nature and of grace, seeing this from a good, but that from an imperfect or an evil power, is a lie; that being originally God's, it is a sharer in his great redemption. And yet this redeemed world, like man, is in part redeemed only in hope: it is not, that is, in the present possession, but only in the assured certainty, of a complete deliverance. For this too we must not leave out of sight, that nature, in its present state, like man himself, contains but a prophecy of its coming glory ;it "groaneth and travaileth;" it cannot tell out all its secrets; it has a presentiment of something, which it is not yet, but which hereafter it shall be. It too is suffering under our curse: yet even thus, in its very imperfection wonderfully serving us, since thus it has apter signs and more fitting symbols to declare to us our disease and our misery, and

the processes of their healing and removing;-symbols not merely of God's grace and power, but also of man's sins and wretchedness: it has its sores and its wounds, its storms and its wildernesses, its lion and its adder, by these interpreting to us death all that leads to death, no less than by its more beneficent workings life and all that tends to the restoring and maintaining of life.

But while thus it has this merciful adaptation to our needs, not the less does it, in this its fallen estate, come short of its full purpose and meaning it fails in part to witness for a divine order, as the philosophic poet, whose eye was mainly directed to this, its disorder and deficiency, exclaimed,

tanta stat prædita culpâ :

it does not give always a clear witness, nor speak out in distinct accents, of God's truth and love. Of these it is oftentimes the inadequate expression yea, sometimes seems not to declare them at all, but rather in volcano and in earthquake, in ravenous beasts, and in poisonous herbs, to tell of strife and discord and disharmony, and all the woful consequences of the fall. But one day it will be otherwise: one day it will be translucent with the divine Idea which it embodies, and which even now, despite these dark spots, shines through it so wondrously. For no doubt the end and consummation will be, not the abolition of this nature, but the glorifying of it,—that which is now nature (natura), always, as the word expresses it, striving and struggling to the birth, will then be indeed born. The new creation will be as the glorious child born out of the world-long throes and anguish of the old. It will be as the snake casting its wrinkled and winter skin; the old world not abolished, but putting off its soiled work-day garments, and putting on its holiday apparel for the great Sabbath which shall have arrived at last. Then, when it too shall have put off its bondage of corruption, shall be delivered from whatever is now overlaying it, all that it has at present of dim and contradictory and perplexing shall disappear. This nature, too, shall be a mirror in which God will perfectly glass himself, for it shall tell of nothing but the marvels of his wisdom and power and love.

But at present, while this natural world, through its share in man's fall, has won in fitness for the expression of the sadder side of man's condition, the imperfection and evil that cling to him and beset him, it has in some measure lost in fitness for the expressing of the higher. It possesses the best, yet oftentimes inadequate, helps for this. These human relationships, and this whole constitution of things earthly, share in the shortcoming that cleaves to all which is of the earth. Obnoxious to change, tainted with sin, shut in within brief limits by decay and