Lectures On the Symbolic Character of the Sacred Scriptures

s of Israel, that ye may eat flesh, and drink blood. Ye shall cat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth, of rams, of lambs, and of goats, of bullocks, all of them fatlings of Bashan. And ye shall eat fat till ye be full, and drink blood till ye be drunken, of my sacrifice which I have sacrificed for you. Thus ye shall be filled at my table with horses and chariots, with mighty men, and with all men of war, saith the Lord God." (Ezek. xxxix. 17-20.) Our present subject is the correspondence of animals and birds to things of the mind, and the use made of them in the Holy Word. And now, let any intelligent person, who has never thought upon the subject, be told that the visible universe corresponds to the human mind, that there is nothing in nature which does not, from its quality and use, denote some principle and quality of the soul of man, let him admit this, and thsn go rationally and carefully into the examination of nature, for the purpose of finding out what thingsthere, most expressively symbolize human thoughts ; and after closely investigating the nature of the vast variety of mundane things, in comparison with human qualities, he will come, most deliberately and decidedly, to the conviction that the birds much more fully and emphatically express man's thoughts, than any other species of things. And for a symbol of human affections, he will select, with the most definite decision, the beast. And the more closely he stud...