Excerpt from The Parables of the Old Testament

Some years ago I commenced a study of the Parables of the Old Testament with the purpose of making use of the Parables as material for sermons. I was not disappointed as to the suggestions afforded by such a study, indeed, it opened up for me a rich vein of moral and spiritual truth. But I was surprised to find how little there was in print that would be of help to me in conducting such a study. Book stalls and libraries abound in volumes on the Parables of the New Testament, but nowhere, either in America or Great Britain, could I come on a single book which dealt with the Parables of the Old Testament. Whatever, then, the offenses of this volume, it cannot be laid against it that it traverses a field whose fruits already have been harvested and garnered. As for these Parables, I think I can feel almost like those mariners of the sixteenth century who sailed upon seas that never before had been cleft by the keel of a ship.

I have no desire to draw out fine spun distinctions between the different forms of illustrative speech. We used to define them and refine them in our college days, but as a matter of fact, the partitions which divide metaphor from simile, and allegory from parable, and parable from fable, are exceedingly thin.

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