had heard all, "let us go up to where Antonia's cottage stood. No one go down to her mother till I can bear her the tidings myself. First let us see if we can learn more than we now know."

Every one followed. The priest went on hurriedly, and led the way straight up the road. When they were near the spot, the women began to draw back, as if expecting some dreadful sight.

"You will see nothing," said old Pedro, who contrived

to keep up with them; ". no one will ever see a fragment of her till the Resurrection day."

The wreck down the mountain side was dreadful. Here and there rocks and turf had been ploughed up, and tons of mould and of crushed granite driven out on this side and on that. The spot where the cottage had stood, had changed its very form; old men that had known it all their lives, would have been unable to recognize it now.

"And of course," I said, as the guide paused, "no one ever discovered any trace of poor Maria ?"

Maria, Senhor," he answered, "many years after that was the best wife and the best mother in Paradella, over the hill, yonder," and he nodded in that direction.

"But how was it possible that she should have escaped ?"

"Only GoD and our Lady know," he replied, as he crossed himself, "but so it was. In some way or other the rock had passed over her at the moment it swept away the garden. They found her and the child both lying in a kind of hollow place that had not been touched, and both, seemingly, dead. But the women got round them, and brought water, and so forth, and both one and the other recovered. And, as old Jeronimo the soldier used to say, the most wonderful part of all was, that the wind of the rock did not kill Maria and the child; for every one that has served in the army knows that the wind of a cannon ball will kill a man almost as well as the cannon ball itself. However, that is the plain story, as near as I can tell it you; and there are plenty of people alive to bear me out in it. And now, Senhor, here we are at Nossa Senhora da Atalaya.” J. M. N.

53

THE WHEAT AND THE TARES.

A POSTIL.

THIS parable of the wheat and tares explains the third stage in the growth of CHRIST's kingdom. The first parable of the series shows the reason why the seed, though it came from Heaven did not grow up in all the places in which it was sown. The second prophesies and accounts from natural causes for the apparent want of success which will and must attend the most energetic efforts. In the first then the seed is sown; in the second it is buried; here we find it having passed through these stages; it has sprung up; it is evidently growing. But in this stage there is a greater discouragement than anything that has yet befallen the sower. It is something to grieve over that which should have produced fruit, but has not; it is something to curb the natural impatience which requires some evidence of success; but it is a far greater trial of faith that the harvest should spring; that the soil should prove itself to be fertile; but that there should be tares among the wheat-that besides the indifferent, the cold-hearted, the persecutors, the maligners, a man's foes should be among his own household, that the very brethren of the faith should be false. Well may the faithful, yet despairing servants-they into whose hands the divine seed has been committed-they who are conscious that they have themselves done their duty honestly and faithfully-well may such as these draw back from their labours in utter despondency, exclaiming, "Sir, didst thou not sow good seed in thy field; whence then hath it tares ?"

We lose much of the force of this parable by the faulty translation in our English version of the Bible. The parable means much more than that two different crops will grow on the same soil at the same time. It means that the sowers themselves are unable to distinguish the good from the bad; that they have no means of knowing whether, when they see the crop before their eyes,

that crop is anything more than a pretence and a show. The word which we render tares describes a grass which, though absolutely barren and useless, it is impossible to distinguish from the blade of real wheat; it is that spoken of in the Psalms as "the grass which withereth before it be grown up, wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, neither he that bindeth up the sheaves his bosom."

This discovery is by far the greatest discouragement which can possibly fall upon GOD's faithful servants, because its tendency is to shake their confidence in every thing. They cannot but be conscious of the faithfulness of their own labours; they have sown the seed committed to them; they have waited patiently through the time of deadness, till it has sprung up: it has sprung up, but a great portion of the crop is bad, and they cannot tell the bad from the good. Can it be? is it possible? could the seed from which such a crop has sprung have been bad from the beginning? Didst thou not sow good seed in thy field? Whence then hath it tares? We see the first faint traces of unfaithfulness in this question; there is the shadow of a doubt implied in the seed and in the greater Sower Himself. And this is not an imaginary case. On the contrary, it is the most common form of unfaithfulness that we have-the most common because the most reasonable. It is a fact; it is a thing that all can see, that the baptized do fall away from grace given; that the field sown with God's seed, and sown by GOD's servants does produce tares; it is patent, it cannot be denied, though no one can see the extent of the mischief; and the half faithful, yet doubting servants stand aloof, and think in their own hearts either that the seed is not good, or that it could not have been sown at all in a soil which produces such a crop; either that there is no such thing as regeneration in baptism, or that for some reason or other, the baptized cannot have been regenerated. The question implies a doubt somewhere, and there can be no doubt as to the existence of the tares.

This is a most natural doubt-so natural, so, we may almost say, excusable that our LORD condescends to

reason with it, and to explain how such a state of things, trying as it may be, is only what might reasonably have been expected.

An enemy hath done this.

The consequence of our having been placed in a state of salvation, is, not that our great Enemy is bound so as to be unable to assail us, but that we have arms given us, sufficient, if we use them rightly, to overcome him. You may observe that we are very apt to mistake a state of salvation for a state of safety, or in other words, a state in which we may be saved for a state in which we have been saved. We are very apt to look at our Christian armour as an ornament rather than as an implement of warfare, and to imagine the battle over, and ourselves at rest, whereas the object of CHRIST is to arm us with heavenly weapons, which, if used aright, must necessarily prevail, and ultimately gain for us that place of safety which we have not reached as yet.

The springing of the tares is the consequence of sowing the wheat. So far from showing that there was no good seed, they prove that there was good seed to be imitated. As S. Augustine observes," False Prophets came after THE PROPHETS, false Apostles after APOSTLES, Antichrist after CHRIST." They could not have gone before them; they could not have been at all, had not a truth existed somewhere. A shadow implies a substance, a counterfeit something real to be counterfeited. It was "because he saw that this man bore fruit a hundred fold, and this sixty and this thirty," continues Augustine, "and that he was not able to carry off, or to choke that which had taken root, that the Devil turns to other insidious practices, mixing up his own seed which is counterfeit of the true, and thereby imposing upon those who are prone to be deceived. So the parable speaks not of another seed but of 'tares' (lolium) which bear a great likeness to wheat corn."1

This is one of the few parables to which the LORD has

1 Jerome also notices this. His words are,- "Between the wheat and tares, (which in Latin we call lolium,) so long as it is in the blade, and before the stalk has put forth an ear, there is a very great resemblance, and none or little difference to distinguish them by.".

affixed His own explanation. Chrysostom says that "He had spoken to them in parables in order that He might induce them to ask the meaning, yet though He had spoken so many things in parables, no man yet had asked Him aught, therefore He sent them away." Jerome implies, as is not unlikely, "that having put forth the parable openly, He then entered into the house for the express purpose that His disciples, to whom He had already explained much, might have the opportunity of asking Him about those things, which the people neither deserved to hear, nor were able to hear. In the former parable, the disciples hesitated to ask Him. They now ask freely and confidently, because they had heard, To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven.' They pass over the parables of the leaven and mustard seed, and ask concerning that of the tares, which evidently had some connection, whatever it was, with the parables of the sower and the buried seed, and discloses something more than had been revealed as yet."

"This the LORD spake," says Chrysostom, (and considering the age in which he lived, and his own fiery and uncompromising temper, his words are very remarkable,) "to forbid any putting to death; for we ought not to kill a heretic, seeing that so a never ending war would be introduced in the world. He does not forbid restraint upon heretics that their freedom of speech should be cut off, that their synods and confessions (creeds) should be broken up (refuted ;) but He does forbid that they should be put to death."

Why should GOD permit wickedness to exist in the world at all, seeing that He hates wickedness, and seeing that He is Almighty? This has been a stumbling block before now, and many "inventions" has man found out to account for it. Why can we not be satisfied with our LORD's own explanation, it is simple enough,—“Lest while ye gather up the wheat, ye root out the tares with them. This does not mean only or principally, that He spares bad men for the sake of good men connected with them, though the Bible would give us many instances of that; but that He spares vice for the sake of virtue. In a world constituted as ours is, virtue itself could not