ever be reached whether in scientific or religious thought-earnestness. Earnestness implies some amount of love, and without love there is no appreciation, save of hard, distorted outlines, and bald external forms, absolutely silent upon the treasures they enshrine.

The following parable is a simple and beautiful one:

"A certain House-master planted a vineyard; and set a fence thereabout; and dug out a winepress therein [for the winefat]; and built a tower; and let it out to husbandmen; and went abroad to a far country [for a long time].

"And when the season of the fruit drew nigh, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, to receive his fruits.

"And the husbandmen took his servants, and one they flayed with stripes, and another they murdered, and another they stoned [or: beat one, shamefully handled another, and sent them away empty].

Again he sent other servants of more account than the first, and they did unto them in like manner.

"Now, at last, he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence

my son.

"But when the husbandmen beheld the son, they said within themselves, This is the heir; come let us slay him, and possess his inheritance. And they took him and cast him forth without the vineyard and slew him.

"Whensoever, therefore, the lord of the vineyard shall come, what will he do unto those husbandmen ?

"[They say unto him] He will put them, being evil, to an evil destruction, and will let out the vineyard unto other husbandmen, such as will render him the due fruits in their seasons.

"And when they heard it, they said, God forbid."

Before proceeding to the analysis

of this parable, it may be well briefly to touch upon the system of ancient society. Whether persons or possessions, the House-Father, or head of the family, had all its constituents equally "in his hand"; he had under his paternal authority and jurisdiction, his immediate kin and family, including his heir; his servants and dependents of various degree, slaves, emancipated slaves, and inferiors in a state of semifreedom, who cultivated his lands, of which they had the administration not the ownership. But his was no private or personal ownership; by undisputed right of status and without need of proclamation or possibility of question, he was the representative of the clan. It was indeed embodied in him; he was the person beneath whose control all smaller individualities merged, and before whom they were but units in a corporate whole, whereof all the external functions vested in its representative. Over every member of the clan and its dependents the House Father in archaic society held the power of life and death-an authority held with equal absoluteness over the son as over the slave, though naturally exercised in a widely different spirit. Cultivators of lands acquired by the lord— lands oftentimes at some distance from the head-quarters of the clan -were of two kinds. There were husbandmen who were held to have acquired, in the third generation of occupancy, a native right in the soil; that is to say who were irremovable from the land so long as they performed their customary obligations. There were migratory cultivators, strangers induced by the lord to take up a temporary tenure of land, with a position determined by contract.

From historic sources we can thus give some amount of clearness and definition to the charac

The House Father is, as before, the Deity. The vineyard, girt about with its fence, suggests a parallelism with the island of the other

parable, surrounded by its isolating sea. The hedged vineyard is the individual man, the field of the action of Divinity. As the sea which encircled the island represented that state of truth, or absence of the fictitious and the factitious, through which a soul. must come in its naked journey to birth in the material world; so the "hedge" here is the sign of that external world itself-the body as the limiting inclosure of the soul, the outward mark of man's individuality or personal separateness. The "winepress" in the vineyard is the deeper and more internal part of man, the shrine of the soul, the spiritual possibilities. The "winefat" is that good which the soul accumulates for itself, its fruit being, nevertheless, the only return which is made to God. In the "tower," the lofty outlooking faculty, or intellect, finds its fit correspondence.

The "husbandmen" are the developing influences of the world; the natural passions and attributes. It is these material senses (as opposed to the immortal spiritual qualities, or germs) which are to develope man, and enable him to learn good or evil.

The House-master "goes abroad." We know not the closeness of the bond that unites the not yet incarnate spirit with the divine centre from whence it proceeded; we are more conscious

in our

present state of the fact of the

"far country." A lifetime may be presumed to be represented by the expression "for a long time." The man, when born, God, as it were, leaves wrapped in matter and sensual life, hoping he will grope his way out to him again, bringing his fruit. If he did not leave the spirit in this strange land of matter we may suppose that there would be no possibility of any freedom of choice or will, but that the spirit would always be as powerless to act individually as a sunflower to turn away from the

sun.

The " season for the fruit" who can tell? For how few even try to earn the wondrous gift of life made to them, much less to repay it by flower and fruit of love given forth and duties done? The fruit is the growth of the human being; and we may believe that that growth is the only reward expected by our divine nurse.

The" servants" are the influences from without himself that act upon man. Truth in many a form is sent out unto him. God's messengers come to look for the good fruit of the world of man. This is not the history of a special individual. Exhortations of one man to another, suggestions of a friend, probings of an enemy, teachings of fact, experiences drawn from life, all these in the veiled plan of the universe, may be messengers of God. And the great truth-bearers, the servants of more account, that come into the world now and again, and seem to transcend ordinary mortality, being so big with the gospel of God!-truly that House Father is never weary of sending his servants; his poets and priests are for ever waiting on us like servants to entreat us to Him.

But the husbandmen being at that distance from the lord, have some power to rebel and to reject. The earthly qualities, strong on their

claim, they say to themselves in effect, then we are free, our bodies are our own, we can revel in our sensuous life without scruple. Man has his independence if he will, notwithstanding the tenderest or the most terrible attacks of Love. His soul is in effect given over to him for the while to do what he will with, but Love is still the true heir. The fruit may be yet offered to him after the most stubborn winters of refusal to admit him.

One inevitable fate awaits these husbandmen of the soul— the destruction of the activity which is their refuge. God, in His eternal love, will even take the spirit of the man from the place where He has put him, and from the influences by which he is surrounded, and will give him a new lease of life, a new set of husbandmen or fostering influences, another chance of bearing fruit, and of surrendering, at length, to the true heir his inheritance. "Other husbandmen "it is not said whether or not they are to be of a different order, and represent a different life-plasm from that of earth. the parable ends with an exprestion of assured faith that there will be yet a season of fruit, and of that fruit being made a willing offertory to the vineyard's lord.

But

In the study of parabolic art, the following conditions have to be borne in mind as constituting the sine quâ non of an interpretation. Though a reading from one sphere into another can only be approximately effected, it should be seen

that the separate details of the body of the esoteric sense hang together as closely as those of the external form, and constitute on their own plane as apparently consistent and reasonable a whole. There should further be some connecting link of analogy, however slight, between the external symbol and its hidden sense. This must be

invisible to very dull eyes, and may require as fine a faculty, in its own line, as that of a scientific analyst, for its apprehension. Again, a system of interpretation is weak that cannot be carried from one parable to a similar one-fail though it reasonably might at the elucidation of one of a different, more difficult, or higher order. Finally, collateral support should, if possible, be drawn from unparabolic thought of the date of the composition under notice, or of the school or influences likely to affect it or be in sympathy with it.

To estimate how far the first condition is fulfilled in this case, we may briefly and roughly sum up the argument of the parable. The Divine Father seeks to foster into growth Man, the spirit. He makes him individual. He sets an external fence around him, places him in matter; He gives him a brain, also a spiritual shrine for the fruit of his life to be developed in ; and physical senses which work upon him with their varied promptings, temptations, influences, passions, upheavals. To prevent the real inner nature from being utterly lost in an external existence, yielding fruit only to itself-an

existence in which He himself is present in a different degree from that in which he is present to the homeling spirit or the soul enhomed in Himself-he sends into the world of nature messengers to remind, and many an influence to awaken the soul, and appeal to it for its fruit. If truths and examples, facts and everyday experience, eloquence of poet and exhortation of priest, fail to call forth any growth and fruit and good in the man, but are rather thrust aside with violence; He pours his own love into the heart, may be under guise of some deep sorrow, may be felt dimly in the pulsing of some great joy. This love is the true heir and owner of the children of men, but if they will not be the children of love, but rather rebels living in selfish independence and isolation and in sensual license, then love is driven out from them; God cannot enter His vineyard. But His process of creation is patience; a great change comes, and in the passage through physical death the material senses are all left behind, the defaulting husbandmen are dismissed and destroyed; and the spirit is shown an avenue into new surrounding influences, and a new field of life, wherein, may be, its diviner energies will be evoked, and it will be led to bring forth fruit in due season, and an honest recognition of the love that is the real giver of it all.

This may perhaps be regarded in "dry light" as a fairly consistent metaphysical theory, and not quite one of those beginning in nothing and ending nowhere. Mathematical accuracy, it would of course, be unreasonable to look for in the present state of our faculties. "There will be no scientific evidence of God's working in nature," says Agassiz, "until naturalists have shown that the whole creation is the expression

of a thought, and not the product of physical agents." But the solution of the parable of nature can never be stated in mathematical terms.

It may be interesting to compare with the above rendering of the parable of the vineyard, an explication drawn from the text-books of the followers of Swedenborg. The two versions are quite separately evolved, but allowing for minor deviations, are evidently on the same broad general track. If there be a science of the peculiar Flora and Fauna, so to speak, of parabolic imagery, it is natural that mistakes should be made in the process of arriving at it.

"The spiritual sense does not relate to any one particular Church, but is of universal application, having reference neither to time nor place, but to states of spiritual life . . . the vineyard signifies

....

the church as formed in man by the Lord implanting in his mind the principles of goodness and truth. . . . neither religion nor the Church can exist among men except so far as they exist in them. But the Church, while it exists in its principles in the mind, exists in its fruits in the life. Between the implanting of religion in the mind and the producing of its fruits in the life, the great struggle takes place; for conflict and sorrow are experienced in bringing forth into actual life that which has been implanted in the mind. . . . . The wine-press and tower are emblematic of principles of the rational mind. . . . when the Lord, as the Creator, has formed the human being, and endowed him with every faculty that belongs to his nature, and provided him with every means that may be requisite for, the proper and profitable exercise of his faculties, he leaves him to work out his own salvation. His leaving