and what is changed by the transference? The object and purpose of its insertion in the historic Word, were it found there, would still be the same as of its insertion in the Lord's discourse. Its exquisite portraiture of the tenderness of Divine love toward human waywardness would be the same, and the same, too, the progressive development of its lessons to man's expanding consciousness.
Has it never occurred to you that since the parables, with their spiritual contents, are so often historic in form, that therefore those narrations of the Holy Scriptures which are historic in form may be parables in reality, with an equally important spiritual significance? The proud King Saul, head and shoulders above all the men of Israel, standing in fear with his armies before the giant of Gath, and finally delivered by the youthful David, the ruddy shepherd-boy from the fields of Bethlehem—is it any less a parable than the story of the lost sheep, or the marriage of the king's son, in the Gospels? The touching story of Absalom, caught by his hair in the branches of the oak, may be the veriest history, but it is no less a parable than the story of the Prodigal. They contain the same elements, and serve the same ends; they appeal to the hu-
