HKB
sense are as unquestionable as his learning and orthodoxy. A clergyman in full orders, who has never read the works of Bull and Waterland, has a duty yet to perform.]
Let it not be objected, that, forgetful of my own professed aversion to allegorical interpretations, I have, in this note, fallen into "the fond humour of the mystic divines, and allegorizers of Holy Writ."[131] There is, believe me, a wide difference between symbolical and allegorical. If I say that the flesh and blood (corpus noumenon) of the Incarnate Word are power and life, I say likewise that this mysterious power and life are verily and actually the flesh and blood of Christ. They are the allegorizers, who turn the 6th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John,--the hard saying,--who can hear it?--after which time many of Christ's disciples, who had been eye-witnesses of his mighty miracles, who had heard the sublime morality of his Sermon on the Mount, had glorified God for the wisdom which they had heard, and had been prepared to acknowledge, This is indeed the Christ,--went back and walked no more with him!--the hard sayings, which even THE TWELVE were not yet competent to understand farther than that they were to be spiritually understood; and which the chief of the Apostles was content to receive with an implicit and anticipative faith!--they, I repeat, are the allegorizers who moralize these hard sayings, these high words of mystery, into a hyperbolical metaphor per catachresin, which only means a belief of the doctrine which Paul believed, an obedience to the law, respecting which Paul was blameless, before the voice called him on the road to Damascus! What every parent, every humane preceptor, would do when a child had misunderstood a metaphor or apologue in a literal sense, we all know. But the meek and merciful Jesus suffered many of HIS disciples to fall off from eternal life, when, to retain them, he had only to say,--O ye simple-ones! why are ye offended? My words, indeed, sound strange; but I mean no more than what you have often and often heard from me before, with delight and entire acquiescence!--Credat Judæus! Non ego. It is sufficient for me to know that I have used the language of Paul and John, as it was understood and interpreted by Justin Martyr. Tertullian, Irenæus, and (if he does not err) by the whole Christian Church then existing.
[131] See Introductory Aphorisms, xxix., p. 19.--ED.
APHORISM XIX.
FIELD.