e weak among them
far outnumber the strong. In history, however, the minority is always
victorious. Popular legend has certainly at times grievously obscured the
gospel of Christ, but not so much as to prevent those who are familiar
with its nature and effect from discovering the grains of gold in the
sand, the rays of truth behind the clouds. At all events, popular legend
refuses to be ruled out. A knowledge of it and its influence on historical
events in other nations, and especially a familiarity with the modes of
expression in Oriental languages, are of the greatest use in all these
investigations. Only let no one confound legend and metaphor with
mythology. When Jesus says that he is the water, and that whoever drinks
of this water shall never thirst again, every one readily perceives that
he speaks metaphorically. And likewise when he says that he is the vine or
the good shepherd. But here the transition from parable to reality very
soon begins. Among so many pictures of the good shepherd it need occasion
no surprise that it is commonly imagined that Jesus actually was a
shepherd and carried a lamb on his shoulders. What occurs now was of
course equally possible in the earliest times. When the common people saw
daily, in old mosaic pictures, a sword coming forth from the mouth of God,
they formed a representation of God corresponding to these pictures (Rev.
i. 20). And thus many readers of the Gospel suppose that Jesus was really
carried up into the air by the devil and placed on the summit of the
temple or of a high mountain, that he might show him all the kingdoms of
the earth, and tempt him to establish an earthly realm. Is it reverent to
imagine Christ borne through the air by the devil, instead of simply
learning that Christ himself, as we read, was not a stranger to inward
trials, and that he freely confessed them to his disciples? Many parables
are represented in the Gospels, as though they had really occurred at the
time. Thus, in the parables of the kingdom of heaven, the phrase always
runs that it is like seed which a man sowed, and while he slept an enemy
came and sowed tares. Or the kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a
woman took and hid in three measures of meal, or like a treasure found by
a man in a field, or like a merchant seeking goodly pearls, etc. In
listening to these parables or looking at pictorial representations of
them, there develops almost unconsciously, especially among the young, a