When we consider how Jesus handles Nature and her wilder children in his parables, another point attracts attention.  Men vary a great deal in this.  To take two of the Old Testament prophets, we find a marked difference here between Ezekiel and Jeremiah.  Ezekiel “puts forth a riddle and speaks a parable” about an eagle—­a frankly heraldic eagle, that plants a tree-top in a city of merchants (Ezek. 17:2-5).  Jeremiah is obviously country-bred.  He might have been surprised, if he had been told how often he illustrates his thought from bird and beast and country life—­and always with a certain life-like precision and a perfectly clear sympathy.

In the Gospels we find again the same faithfulness to living nature, another country-bred boy with the same love for bird and beast and the wild, open countryside.

                       The Earth
    And common face of Nature spake to me
    Rememberable things.[9]

Nature is enough for Jesus as for Jeremiah; she needs no remodelling, no heraldic paints—­“long pinions of divers colours”—­she will do as she is; she is just splendid and lovable and true as God made her; and she slides into his mind whenever he is deeply moved.  Think of all the parables he draws from Nature—­the similes, metaphors, and illustrations; every one of them will bear examination, and means more the nearer we look into it, and the better we know the living thing behind.  The eagle, in Jesus’ sentence, plants no trees, but it has the living bird’s instinct for carrion; the ancient Greek historian and Lord Roberts at Delhi in 1858 remarked that “wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together” (Luke 17:37).  In India that year, it was said, they gathered from all over to Delhi.  What brought them?  Instinct, we say; and we find Jesus, in that rather dark sentence, suggesting somehow that there is an instinct which knows “where.”  And sheep and cows and asses, and hens and sparrows, and red sunsets, fill men’s reminiscences of his talk; and we may safely conclude that, when allusions are so many in fragments of conversation preserved as these are, the man’s speech and mind were attuned to the love of bird and beast.

Is there another teacher of those times who is at all so sure that God loves bird and flower?  The Greek poet Meleager of Gadara—­not so very far removed from Jesus in space of time—­has a good deal to say about flowers, but not at all in the same sense as Jesus, not with any feeling such as his for the immortal hand and eye that planned their symmetry, and their colours and sweetness.  St. Paul is conspicuously a man of the town—­“a citizen of no mean city” (Acts 21:39), and he dismisses the animals abruptly (1 Cor. 9:9); he has hardly an allusion to the familiar and homely aspects of Nature, so frequent and so pleasant in the speech of Jesus.  He finds Nature, if not quite “red in tooth and claw”, yet groaning together, subject to vanity, in bondage to corruption, travailing in