Page:The Bible- Its True Character and Spiritual Meaning.djvu/24

14 transcending the faculties of sense, communicate itself in the language of men without first investing itself with angelic ideas, and then with corresponding natural images? The object of such a communication being to make known things which "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man to conceive," the human mind would be incapable of apprehending them, except through the medium of sensuous representatives and corresponding signs. The language of a Divine Revelation must, therefore, from the nature of its message, be parabolic. Even its natural images of moral righteousness can be only images of spiritual graces and Divine perfections. But much of the letter of Scripture treats of specific events, and is limited in its application to the occasion past. It does not treat of such subjects as man needs to have revealed. How then can it be the Word of God, as it claims, unless it is also, as it claims, "settled forever in the heavens?"—unless it contains an internal meaning which is apprehensible to angelic intelligence, or spiritual thought? Possessing at least two distinct series of ideas, as it must thus do to be the Word of God, it is parabolic in reality, and spiritual in its object, and eternal in its