Notes of a Sermon Preached by the Rev. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday Evening June 10
"Have faith in God. Verily 3 say unto you, Whosoever shall sty unto this mountain, Be thou and shall not doubt in his beast, cometh to puss; he shall have it." taken up and cast into the sea; Lut shall believe that what he saith Mark XI. 23.
It argueg a prosy mind, or seems to argue it, to spend any time discussing the question whether we are to take this striking saying of our Lord literally or not; but there have been people who have insisted on such an interpretation of it, and there may be some yet, for literalism dies very hard. People however, who find an inclination to take it literally, might be asked to take Queen Mary's saying as to Calais being written on her heart" literally; or ask how Lady Macbeth ever could expect anyone to screw his courage to the sticking-place"; how can courage be "screwed" and how could the "ctenes of Rome" "rise and mutiny' at the wounds of Caesar?' Stones do not rise.
So we see, that Jesus Christ had exactly the same right to express Himself in) metaphorical language og the rest of us. For the astonishing thing is, that the great majority of phrases that we use are metaphorical, more or less worn, and what is called slang is often enough merely the attempt to introduce new metaphers into the common speech of the day. And lif we look into this matter again we shall find how large are the numbers of metaphorical phrases in our common speech for which the Bible is responsible. "Talent" is one; "moving mountains" is another. It means removing difficulties, getting rid of hindrances, that handicap us and throw us back hi make advancement impossi-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.