ite
in origin and in nature, are commingled and interwoven in all the
ordinary relations of life. The children of the wicked one and the
children of the kingdom live together in the world, eat of the same
bread, and breathe the same air, and look upon the same light.

In the Galilean field, which the Lord employed as a type with which to
print his lesson, portions might be seen where, owing perhaps to
peculiar wetness and sourness in the soil, the wheat had wholly
disappeared, and the darnel grew alone; in other parts, probably where
the soil was warm and dry, the good seed had gained the mastery, and the
false scarcely showed its head; and in a third quarter the good and bad
might appear in equal numbers and equal strength. Such precisely is the
aspect of the world. Large portions of it have been heathen from a
higher date than that to which history ascends; large portions, which
were Christian long after the apostolic age, have been overrun and laid
waste by the blind but strong system of Mahomet; while in other parts a
vigorous Christian life appears, although even there the good seed must
maintain a struggle against bitter roots below and poisonous fruit
rearing its head on high.

I accept, therefore, in all simplicity, the Master's own definition: I
see in the field of the injured husbandman a picture, not of the Church
in the world, but of the world in which the Church must for the present
live and labour. The ingenious effort made by a recent Swiss
expositor[13] to find a middle path only serves to show how heavily the
difficulties of the common interpretation press on those who maintain
it. Having confessed, according to the terms of the text, that the field
or ground is not the Church, but the world, he proceeds, with a very
strong animus against what he calls puritanism or separatism,[14] to
argue in the usual way against every attempt to purify the visible
Church except by the exclusion of persons who are notoriously heretical
or vicious. The grounds on which he pleads against separation from the
impure, in as far as this parable is concerned, are--(1.) That there
was no need of a revelation to make known the universally acknowledged
maxim that bad people should be tolerated in the world; (2.) That,
according to the terms of the parable, the farmer sowed wheat in his
ground, but did not sow the whole of his ground--so that the ground may
be the world, and the portion sown, or the wheat field, may still
repr