e the God of nature is also the God of revelation. _The world of
secular activity_ abounds in like analogies, on which another class of
our Lord's parables is based; like that of the vineyard let out to
husbandmen, the servants intrusted with different talents, the ten
virgins, the importunate friend, the unjust judge, the unfaithful
steward, the prodigal son, and others that need not be enumerated.
Analogies like these, however, do not properly constitute _types_. Types
rest on a foundation of analogy, but do not consist in analogy alone.

2. In the history of God's people, moreover, as well as of the world
which he governs with reference to them, the _present_ is continually
foreshadowing _something higher in the future_. This must be so, because
the train of events in their history constitutes, in the plan of God,
neither a loose and disconnected series nor a confused jumble of
incidents, like a heap of stones thrown together without order or
design, but a well-ordered whole. It is a building, in which the parts
now in progress indicate what is to follow. It is the development of a
plant, in which "the blade" foreshadows "the ear," and the ear, "the
full corn in the ear." The primal murder, when "Cain rose up against
Abel his brother, and slew him," "because his own works were evil and
his brother's righteous," was the inauguration of the great conflict
between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent--the
forerunner of the higher struggle in Egypt between Pharaoh on the side
of the devil, and the covenant people on the side of the seed of the
woman. This struggle in Egypt, again, foreshadowed the still higher
contest between truth and error in the land of Canaan--a contest which
endured through so many centuries, and enlisted on both sides so many
kings and mighty men; and which, in its turn, ushered in the grand
conflict between the kingdom of Christ and that of Satan, a conflict
that began on the day of Pentecost, and is yet in progress. This
continual foreshadowing of the future by the present is essentially of a
typical nature, yet it does not constitute, in and of itself, what we
understand by a type in the ordinary usage of the term.

3. _A type_ is _a symbol appointed by God to adumbrate something higher
in the future_, which is called the _antitype_. This definition includes
three particulars: (1.) The type must be a _true adumbration_ of the
thing typified, though, from the very nature of the case,