But when this great harmony comes to be devoutly recognised, a hundred minor and incidental points of contact are invested with a sacred interest.
No doctrinal injury would have resulted, if the Child Jesus had never left the Holy Land. No infidel could have served his cause by quoting the words of Hosea. Nor can we now cite them against infidels as a prophecy fulfilled. But when He does return from Egypt our devotions, not our polemics, hail and rejoice in the coincidence. It reminds us, although it does not demonstrate, that He who is thus called out of Egypt is indeed the Son.
The sober historian cannot prove anything, logically and to demonstration, by the reiterated interventions in history of atmospheric phenomena. And yet no devout thinker can fail to recognise that God has reserved the hail against the time of trouble and war.
In short, it is absurd and hopeless to bid us limit our contemplation, in a divine narrative, to what can be demonstrated like the propositions of Euclid. We laugh at the French for trying to make colonies and constitutions according to abstract principles, and proposing, as they once did, to reform Europe “after the Chinese manner.” Well, religion also is not a theory: it is the true history of the past of humanity, and it is the formative principle in the history of the present and the future.
And hence it follows that we may dwell with interest and edification upon analogies, as every great thinker confesses the existence of truths, “which never can be proved.”
In the meantime it is easy to recognise the much simpler fact, that these things happened unto them by way of example, and they were written for our admonition.
FOOTNOTES:
[32] Take as an example the assertion of Bunyan that the sea in the Revelation is a sea of glass, because the laver in the tabernacle was made of the brazen looking-glasses of the women. (Solomon’s Temple, xxxvi. 1.)