Page:The Parable of Creation.djvu/72

68 facts, into the sandy plains of the memory. Every schoolboy knows that. It is only as he understands or usefully applies what he learns that it becomes interesting to him. Now the man, we assume, has been all his life, consciously or unconsciously gathering the dead knowledges of religious instruction into his memory. If he is a student of religious things he may fancy that this constitutes him a religious man. But it does not. If he is a worldly man he may fancy that the ideas of morality he has, and a vague belief in God and a future state, make him all right. He also is mistaken. The land of his memory, albeit it is of moral and spiritual truths, is as dry as his spiritual nature is lifeless. But now that he has leached the proper state for further advance, the Lord desires he should know how dry and lifeless these knowledges he has gained are. So he says in the parable, "Let the dry land appear!" "Let it appear to you how dry and lifeless the land of the memory in itself considered is" "And God called the dry land earth." The names of things in Scripture are always indicative of their quality. This expression is, in the peculiar form of ancient sacred symbolism, simply a statement that the earth or land of the mind is at this period of regeneration still spiritually dry and