In the sermon on the mount, the Saviour says:  “Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5:39); but the preceding context gives the scope of this and the other particular precepts that follow, which is that Christ’s followers should “resist not evil,” that is, by rendering evil for evil.  It is the spirit of meekness and forbearance that he inculcates, not a slavish regard to this and that particular form of manifesting it.  So when he says:  “Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away” (ver. 42), he cannot mean, consistently with the scope of the passage and his teachings elsewhere, that we should stultify ourselves by literally giving to every asker and borrower, without regard to his necessities, real or alleged.  He means rather to inculcate that liberal spirit which never withholds such help as it is able to give from those who need it.

When the Saviour says again:  “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee,” etc., both the preceding context and the general tenor of the Scriptures teach us that he means what is expressed by the apostle in another form:  “Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth.”  Col. 3:5.  To mortify is to deprive of life, make dead.  We mortify our members which would seduce us into sin, not by destroying them, but by keeping them in subjection to “the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus.”

(3.) If the interpreter is liable to err by taking figurative language in a literal sense, so is he also by regarding as figurative what should be understood literally.  A favorite expedient with those who deny the supernatural character of revelation is to explain the miraculous transactions recorded in the Bible as figurative or mythical.  When David says that in answer to his prayer “the earth shook and trembled, the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth;” that God “bowed the heavens also and came down, and darkness was under his feet;” that “the Lord thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his voice, hailstones and coals of fire;” that “he sent out his arrows and scattered them, and he shot out lightnings and discomfited them,” all acknowledge that the language is to be figuratively taken.  Why then, an objector might ask, not understand the account of the giving of the law on Sinai amid thunderings and lightnings as figurative also?  The answer of every plain reader would be—­and it is the answer of unsophisticated common sense—­that the former passage occurs in a lyric poem, where such figurative descriptions are entirely in place; the latter in a plain narrative, which professes to give throughout historic facts with names and dates; that no reader, who had not a preconceived opinion to maintain, ever did or could think of interpreting the passage in Exodus in any other than a literal way, while every