tended similitude, however, has not one corresponding feature in the two parts; for, in the first place, our Lord was in the grave only one day and two nights; and, in the next, Jonas, according to this incredible story, was alive the whole time, praying to and praising God, whereas Jesus was amongst the dead, and buried, of whom the Psalmist says,* *the dead praise not thee, O Lord, "neither they that go down into silence."

III. IN the thirteenth chapter we find that, according to this writer, our Lord had greatly changed his mode of preaching to the people since the time of his delivering to them his sermon on the mount: for though in that ample collection of unconnected moral aphorisms, there is scarcely any thing like a parable to be met with, now, the author tell us, " he spake not unto them without a parable.” Accordingly, the whole of his discourses given us in this chapter, both from the ship and even after he was come into the house, except where they are interrupted by explanations to his disciples alone, consists of a collection of seven parables, three of which are evidently borrowed from Luke; two of them ver

#Psalm cxv. 17.

batim, and the other four are the author's own composition. To this circumstance the reader's particular attention is requested; for, I persuade myself, there is no person of taste or feeling, who has attentively read the writings of Luke, and has not admired the parables of his first, and the speeches of his se cond history, as pieces of masterly composi tion, whether he considers the elegant simplicity of the diction, the justness and force of the sentiment and doctrine intended to be conveyed by them, or the strict propriety, and consistency of character, of the several agents or speakers introduced, either allegorical or real: but whoever impartially considers the various parables, related by the writer called Matthew, will find that every one of them, which is not taken from Luke, is grossly defective in some or all of those particulars; and that, of those which he has evidently copied from Luke, there is not one which is not injured, exactly in the proportion in which he has thought fit to deviate from the very words of Luke. Of all this, the parables that compose this chapter afford us most striking examples. The first is the well known parable of the sower; from several circumstances of which, it is as clear as

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light,* as Dr. Mills expresses it, that the author must have borrowed it, and transcribed several sentences from Luke; but he has chosen to vary some parts of the phraseology, and, instead of telling us, in the words of the latter, that some fell upon a rock, and, "as soon as it sprung up, it withered away "because it lacked moisture," he 68 says, some "fell on stoney places, where they (the seeds) had not much earth, and forthwith they

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sprung up, because they had no depth of "earth, and when the sun was up they were

scorched, and because they had not root "they withered away." Here the concise simplicity and strict propriety of Luke's expression, and the aukwardly laboured periphrasis of this author, together with the false idea it suggests, that seed vegetates the sooner for want of depth of soil, form so glaring a contrast, as must surely strike every attentive reader: and where Luke tells us, "other fell on good ground, and

sprang up, and bare fruit an hundred fold," this writer says, no doubt, with intent to improve upon his model, that "other fell "into good ground, and brought forth fruit, ત્રટ some an hundred fold, some sixty fold, and

Luce Clarius.

"some thirty fold." Now, if the criterion of good ground be, its producing an hundred fold, that which produces only thirty or even sixty fold, is certainly not good ground; and the author, instead of apprehending our Saviour's meaning, in the parable recorded by Luke, seems to have been misled into these three different degrees of produce, of what he calls good ground, by the very dissimilar parable of the talents, and an attention to the different capacities of men; but that difference is by no means the object of this parable, as stated by Luke; and, therefore, he is far from attributing the product of the fruit of the Gospel, in any degree, like this writer, to the mental capacity of the hearer, but represents his Master as teaching us, that by the seed on the good ground, is meant all those, who, in an honest and

good heart, having heard the word, keep it, " and bring forth fruit with patience." The intellectual abilities of men, indeed, vary as greatly as the degrees of their bodily strength, but in capacity for moral virtue they are all equal; the weakest and most illiterate may possess as honest and as good a heart, as the wisest and most exalted genius that ever lived: the moral virtue of the latter may have

a more extensive influence than that of the former, but that difference is merely accidental; his heart cannot be justly represented as a better and more fruitful soil in its proportion, though it might, with propriety, be compared to a more extensive field of equally productive soil, whose produce must of consequence be more extensively beneficial.

The second parable of this collection is entirely the author's own; and the reader will in vain search in it for that propriety of expression, and consistency of doctrine, which are so eminently conspicuous in Luke's compositions of the same kind. It begins with resembling the kingdom of heaven to "a

man who sowed good seed in his field;' but what idea must this writer have formed to himself, of the meaning of the kingdom of heaven, that he could think of likening it to a husbandman? The kingdom of heaven (or, as it is always called by other writers, of God, or of Christ, as that phrase is used by Jesus in the prayer he taught his disciples, by Luke, Paul, and John in the apocalypse) uniformly signifies, as I have before observed, the dutiful state of submission and obedience of mankind, to the terms of the New Covenant