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We shall not enlarge further on the parable as sketching Christ's religion in its dominion over the individual. We can only remark, in passing, that none of the maxims of human philosophy have shown themselves capable of yielding such produce as we thus trace to the seed of a solitary text. There is much truth and beauty in many of those sayings with which writers on ethics have adorned their pages; but the most weighty proverbs that ever issued from the porch of the academy, and the most sententious maxims which lecturers on morals ever delivered to their people, have always failed to work anything approaching to that renovation of nature which can distinctly be traced to some gospel truth quoted with authority from God. Take the result of a hiding in the heart a sentence which asserts the excellence of virtue, and one which sets forth God's love in the gift of His Son. Now sentences may be likened unto seeds, not only because both are small, but because, if rightly planted and watered, and developed, they are capable of producing fruit in the life and conversation. But who, unless ignorant of facts, or determined to be deceived, would assert the holiness of the best heathenism to be comparable to the holiness of Christianity, or who that has ever tried theory, by the touchstone of experience, would declare, that a man who was a cultivator of virtue, because excellent in its nature, will ever reach as high a standard of morality as one who, having hope in Christ, seeks to "purify himself even as Christ is pure?" We give it as a truth, which the history of the world presses forward to substantiate, that no maxims, except Scriptural maxims, have been long efficacious in withholding man from vice, or have ever nerved him to the striving after a high-toned and elevated morality. And if, then, we must admit that the sayings of a sound moral philosophy may be figured by seeds, because they contain elements which, under due culture, may be expanded into something like righteousness of deportment, we still contend that when the amount even of possible produce is contrasted with the original grain, the tree which, under the most favourable circumstances, can spring from the seed, and that seed itself — there are no sayings, but those of Christianity, just as there are no particles, but those of Divine grace, which deserve to be compared with the grain of mustard seed; for in no case but that, we must believe, would there be such disproportion between what was cast into the soil of the heart, and that spreading over of the whole district of the life, as to warrant the employment of the imagery whose design it has been our effort to delineate.

(H. Melvill.)

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KJV: And he said, Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? or with what comparison shall we compare it?

WEB: He said, "How will we liken the Kingdom of God? Or with what parable will we illustrate it?