weed their fields, do not attempt to separate the one from the
other ... The taste is bitter, and, when eaten separately, or even when
diffused in ordinary bread, it causes dizziness, and often acts as a
violent emetic.'" The secondary quotation is from Thompson's _The Land
and the Book_, ii, 111, 112. It has been asserted that the darnel is a
degenerated kind of wheat; and attempts have been made to give
additional significance to our Lord's instructive parable by injecting
this thought; there is no scientific warrant for the strained
conception, however, and earnest students will not be misled thereby.

4. The Wickedness of the Sower of Tares.--Attempts have been made to
disparage the Parable of the Tares on the ground that it rests on an
unusual if not unknown practise. Trench thus meets the criticism (_Notes
on the Parables_, pp. 72, 73): "Our Lord did not imagine here a form of
malice without example, but adduced one which may have been familiar
enough to His hearers, one so easy of execution, involving so little
risk, and yet effecting so great and lasting a mischief, that it is not
strange, where cowardice and malice meet, that this should have been
often the shape in which they displayed themselves. We meet traces of it
in many quarters. In Roman law the possibility of this form of injury is
contemplated; and a modern writer, illustrating Scripture from the
manners and habits of the East, with which he had become familiar
through a sojourn there, affirms the same to be now practised in India."
In a subjoined note the author adds: "We are not without this form of
malice nearer home. Thus in Ireland I have known an outgoing tenant, in
spite at his eviction, to sow wild oats in the fields which he was
leaving. These, like the tares in the parable, ripening and seeding
themselves before the crops in which they were mingled, it became next
to impossible to extirpate.";

5. The Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly.--This parable has given
rise to much discussion among expositors, the question being as to who
is meant by the man who cast seed into the ground. If, as in the
parables of the Sower and the Tares, the Lord Jesus be the planter,
then, some ask, how can it be said "that the seed should spring and grow
up, he knoweth not how," when all things are known unto Him? If on the
other hand the planter represents the authorized teacher or preacher of
the gospel, how can it be said that at the harvest time "he putteth