our direct intuitions on which the infinite understanding of God is alone competent to pass an infallible judgment.  Such are the following:  If it be God’s will to create a race of intelligent beings, what shall be the compass of their faculties, moral, intellectual, and physical?  In what circumstances and relations shall he place them, to what probation shall he subject them, and what scope shall he allow to their finite freedom?  If they sin, what plan shall he devise for their redemption, and by what processes shall he reveal and execute this plan?  These, and many other questions involving man’s highest interests, lie above the sphere of simple intuition.  God alone, who looks through eternity at a glance, can fully comprehend them, for they are all constituent parts of his eternal plan.  That human reason, which cannot see the whole of truth, should affect to sit in judgment upon them, and to pronounce authoritatively what God may, and what he may not do, is the height of presumption and folly.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE OF SCRIPTURE.

1.  When the psalmist says:  “The Lord God is a sun and shield” (Psa. 84:11), he means that God is to all his creatures the source of life and blessedness, and their almighty protector; but this meaning he conveys under the figure of a sun and a shield.  When, again, the apostle James says that Moses is read in the synagogues every Sabbath-day (Acts 15:21), he signifies the writings of Moses under the figure of his name.  In these examples the figure lies in particular words.  But it may be embodied in a sentence, thus:  “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (Acts 26:14), where Saul’s conduct in persecuting Christ’s disciples is represented under the form of an ox kicking against the ploughman’s goad only to make the wounds it inflicts deeper.  Figurative language, then, is that in which one thing is said under the form or figure of another thing.  In the case of allegories and parables, it may take the form, as we shall hereafter see, of continuous discourse.

A large proportion of the words in all languages, in truth all that express intellectual and moral ideas, were originally figurative, the universal law being to represent immaterial by material objects.  Examples are the words exist, existence, emotion, affliction, anguish, etc.  But in these, and innumerable other words, the primitive physical meaning has become obsolete, and thus the secondary spiritual meaning is to us literal.  Or, what often happens, while the original physical signification is retained, a secondary figurative meaning of the word has become so common that its use hardly recalls the physical meaning, and it may therefore be regarded as literal; as in the words hard, harsh, rough, when applied to character.  In the first of the above examples:  “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks,” the transfer of the word hard from what is physically hard to what is painful or difficult, is so common that it can hardly be regarded as figurative.  But the expression that follows is figurative in the fullest sense of the word.