Human nature, when fresh from the hand of God, was full of poetry. Its
sociality could not be pent within the bounds of the actual. To the lower
inhabitants of air, earth, and water,--and even to those elements
themselves, in all their parts and forms,--it gave speech and reason. The
skies it peopled with beings, on the noblest model of which it could have
any conception--to wit, its own. The intercourse of these beings, thus
created and endowed,--from the deity kindled into immortality by the
imagination, to the clod personified for the moment,--gratified one of
its strongest propensities; for man may well enough be defined as the
historical animal. The faculty which, in after ages, was to chronicle the
realities developed by time, had at first no employment but to place on
record the productions of the imagination. Hence, fable blossomed and
ripened in the remotest antiquity. We see it mingling itself with the
primeval history of all nations. It is not improbable that many of the
narratives which have been preserved for us, by the bark or parchment of
the first rude histories, as serious matters of fact, were originally
apologues, or parables, invented to give power and wings to moral
lessons, and afterwards modified, in their passage from mouth to mouth,
by the well-known magic of credulity. The most ancient poets graced their
productions with apologues. Hesiod's fable of the Hawk and the
Nightingale is an instance. The fable or parable was anciently, as it is
even now, a favourite weapon of the most successful orators. When Jotham
would show the Shechemites the folly of their ingratitude, he uttered the
fable of the Fig-Tree, the Olive, the Vine, and the Bramble. When the
prophet Nathan would oblige David to pass a sentence of condemnation upon
himself in the matter of Uriah, he brought before him the apologue of the
rich man who, having many sheep, took away that of the poor man who had
but one. When Joash, the king of Israel, would rebuke the vanity of
Amaziah, the king of Judah, he referred him to the fable of the Thistle
and the Cedar. Our blessed Saviour, the best of all teachers, was