Lectures to My Students, Volume 2 — The Art of Illustration · Lecture 6 — Charles H. Spurgeon
MY purpose this afternoon, brethren, is to give you a little guidance as to books in which you can find fables, emblems, and parables. We desire to preach in the best possible manner, and to maintain our people’s attention from the first word we utter to the close of the discourse. We shall, therefore, find it very helpful, not only to make use of illustrations and anecdotes, of which I have spoken to you before, but also to have a good choice of language, a variety of tone, and as much as possible of excellent matter that will tend to light up and explain the subject on which we are speaking. To that end, we shall be wise if we introduce into our preaching parables and emblems, as many of them as we can. I may again remind you, as I have done in previous lectures, that the teaching of God himself was always mainly by parables. The whole of the typical ceremonies and sacrifices of the Jewish law are so many acted parables. It is all parabolical, symbolical, emblematic teaching; the lamb killed, the blood sprinkled, the first-born slain, the scape-goat sent away, the brazen serpent uplifted, and so on; you know the interpretation of it all; it was a long series of parables, and symbols, and types, by which God was. speaking to men. Most of the Old Testament teaching seems to have been parabolical. The prophets constantly employed parables and emblems; indeed, they were not only in the habit of throwing truth into the parabolic and emblematic form, but also into the histrionic. Many condemn anything like the histrionic in preaching; I mean by that term, the acting visibly, using signs and tokens which bring the truth to the eye as well as to the ear. The prophets made use of that method very largely. We find Jeremiah commanded by the Lord to make bonds and yokes, and. to put them upon his neck, and afterwards to send them to the kings of Edom, Moab, Ammon, Tyre, and Zidon, as an emblem of their servitude to the king of Babylon. Ezekiel also was bidden to take a the, and portray upon it; the city of Jerusalem, “and lay siege against it, and build a fort against it, and east a mount against it; set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round about.” He was also told to take an iron pan, or plate, and set it up between himself and the city, to show after what style it would be besieged. All this was to be, “:a sign to the house of Israel.” I need not stay to mention the many forms in which the prophets were continually instructing God’s ancient people by signs, and symbols, and emblems, and parables. If you were to take a flower into the pulpit, and especially if you were to exhibit a pair of scales, as Matthew Wilks did, you would be put into the newspapers, and be pilloried for weeks; but the prophets were divinely commanded to act as they did, and they therefore obeyed the Word of the Lord, what, ever men might think or say of their action. Similes were also largely employed by our Lord himself. He put truth into such a form as would be most likely to arrest the attention of men, and touch their hard hearts, and reach their seared consciences; he taught scarcely anything to the great mass of the people except by this method of instruction: “without a parable spake he not unto them.” After the close of his open-air addresses to the multitudes, his disciples came to him, and he opened up to them the inner meaning of his public discourses, and gave them deeper spiritual truth than his ordinary hearers were able or willing to receive. We may conclude, therefore, from our Lord’s use of the parable, that it is a
most important mode of teaching, and we cannot do better than employ it ourselves wherever and whenever we can. If any of you want to find a good article upon emblematic teaching, and especially upon the parables, you should readTRENCH’ S “Introductory Essay” to his Notes on the Parables of our Lord (John W. Parker & Son). There you will see how he draws a distinction between the parable and the fable, the parable and the mythus, the parable and the proverb, and the parable and the allegory; and he draws these distinctions, I think, with very great wisdom and sense. Much more might be said upon the matter; but there is quite sufficient in what he has written for a preface to a book on our Savior’s parables, and there is much that it will be well for all students of the various modes of speech thoroughly to understand. Trench’s conclusion puts the whole matter in such a concise form that I venture to read it to you: — “To sum up all, then, the parable differs from the fable, moving as it does in a spiritual world, and never transgressing the actual order of things natural; — from the mythus, there being in the latter an unconscious blending of the deeper meaning with the outward symbol, the two remaining separate and separable in the parable; — from the proverb, inasmuch as it is longer carried out, and not merely accidentally and occasionally, but necessarily figurative; — from the allegory, comparing as it does one thing with another, but, at the same time, preserving them apart as an inner and an outer, and not transferring, as does the allegory, the properties and qualities and relations of one to the other.” These distinctions are so well drawn that I really need add very little to them by way of introduction to our subject this afternoon. You know that the mythus, or myth, works the parable so into itself that, while the more learned and thoughtful understand the meaning, the common people generally accept the outside form as being matter of fact. For instance, the old heathens believed that Phaeton obtained leave from his father Helios to drive the chariot of the sun, and that he drove it in such an exceedingly reckless manner, that: he lost all control over the horses, and nearly set the world on fire, and he would have done so if Jupiter had not hurled his thunderbolts at him, upset his chariot, and destroyed the furious driver in the fiery river Eridanus! But that is not the lesson intended to be taught by the mythical story; it is meant to show how’ many a young man, without skill, has attempted to govern a nation, and brought it into inextricable difficulties; or it is an illustration of how, sometimes, a mere novice has become the teacher and pastor of a Christian church, and before long he has tried to drive the chariot of the sun, but has been hurled flora it, and, if God has not mercifully prevented such a calamity, to his own destruction, and also to the ruin of the little community of which he tried to be the charioteer. The mythus, you see, makes the outside covering appear as if it were a fact instead of a fiction, and so misleads rather than instructs the people, except it be the initiated, who pierce through the shell, and get at the kernel, the truth that is concealed from the multitude. As for the allegory, which is another form of the same kind of emblematic teaching, that explains itself as it goes on. It personifies this and that, and makes qualities into persons; and as it