the genuineness of the Speeches themselves by the formal removal of objections. Sometimes, again, a subtle question of exegesis is brought very near to a solution by the mere process of rightly indenting the lines. For instance: Does the eighteenth verse of the second chapter of Galatians present a conclusion to which the Apostle Paul had for himself arrived?—or is he still addressing his erring brother Peter, and delicately suggesting that Peter was now, at Antioch, "building up" an invidious distinction which, at Cæsarea, he had "destroyed"? The cited-speech indentation appears to be correctly continued there; and the aptness of the words to describe Peter's inconsistency, coupled with the independent fact that there is nothing to show that his faithful brother had yet done addressing him, goes far to settle the true explanation.
b. The indentations indicate the existence of Speech within Speech. Thus: Moses in the land of Moab, in relating the desert experiences through which the Sons of Israel, with himself, had newly come, cites previous speeches made at the respective times to which he refers—what the people had said to him and how he had answered the people. And it is an undoubted gain to be vividly confronted with the inquiry. Would any historical romancist have dared not only to put invented speeches into the mouth of Moses, but similar speeches into the mouth of God"? "Speech within speech" is to be found in many places, and is sometimes discovered to be invested with great interest: as when Solomon, in his Dedicatory Prayer,[1] cites Divine promises previously made to his father David; or as when the Apostle Paul, in addressing King Agrippa, quotes the very words in which the Risen Jesus had addressed him.[2]
c. The indentations call attention to the existence of Poetic Parallelism. This special kind of parallelism is, of course, not to be confounded with parallel texts or parallel narraitives, important though these both are in their own way. Poetic Parallelism is that beautiful, measured reduplication of thought, whereby the same sentiment or fact or promise is doubly expressed, the second time with a difference, still within the general scope of the first; the variation serving not only to cluster together beauties of speech, such as synonyms, contrasts, subservient natural images, and so forth, but to fix the general scope and outlook of the couplet or stanza, the one line hinting the limit to which the other may be assumed to submit, or defining the subject to which it also relates. From this point of view Parallelism steps in as a most graceful and useful handmaid to Exposition. But the charm of it, is what first is felt. "So God created man in his image ": that sounds like prose, however weighty. But when Parallelism breaks in with its balanced couplet—
In the image of God created he him,
Male and female created he them,—[3]
then we know we are in the presence of Poesy—a most fitting place, surely, for her first appearance!
There the lawless cease from raging,
And there the toilworn are at rest,"[4]
is so plaintive as to be like a mother's lullaby over her sick child.
