Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/78

 them, shows them to have been utterly unprepared for it. It required repeated positive demonstration, on his part, to assure them that he was truly alive among them, in his own form and character. The question then is—what meaning had they all along given to the numerous declarations uttered by him to them, apparently foretelling this, in the distinct terms, of which the above passage is a specimen? Had they understood it as we do, and yet so absolutely disbelieved it, that they put no faith in the event itself, when it had so palpably occurred? And had they, for months and years, followed over Palestine, through labors, and troubles, and dangers, a man, who, as they supposed, was boldly endeavoring to saddle their credulity with a burden too monstrous for even them to bear? They must, from the nature of their connection with him, have put the most unlimited confidence in him, and could not thus devotedly have given themselves up to a man whom they believed or suspected to be constantly uttering to them a falsehood so extravagant and improbable. They must, then, have put some meaning on it, different from that which our clearer light enables us to see in it; and that meaning, no doubt, they honestly and firmly believed, until the progress of events showed them the power of the prophecy in its wonderful and literal fulfilment. They may have misunderstood it in his life time, in this way: the universal character of the language of the children of Shem, seems to be a remarkable proneness to figurative expressions, and the more abstract the ideas which the speaker wishes to convey, the more strikingly material are the figures he uses, and the more poetical the language in which he conveys them. Teachers of morals and religion, most especially, have, among those nations of the east, been always distinguished for their highly figurative expressions, and none abound more richly in them than the writers of the Old and New Testament. So peculiarly effective, for his great purposes, did Jesus Christ, in particular, find this variety of eloquence, that it is distinctly said of him, that he seldom or never spoke to the people without a parable, which he was often obliged to expound more in detail, to his chosen followers, when apart with them. This style of esoteric and exoteric instruction, had early taught his disciples to look into his most ordinary expressions for a hidden meaning; and what can be more likely than that often, when left to their own conjectures, they, for a time, at least, overleaped the simple literal truth, into a fog of figurative interpretations, as too many of their very modern suc