to speak,) the tribe of Levi who take tithes, _paid_ tithes to Melchizedek in the person of their great progenitor; because Levi was as yet in the loins of his father Abraham when Melchizedek met him[475].... I do not ask your pardon for thus leading you in detail over one unusually minute specimen of Divine Interpretation. I know well that there are many persons to whom the Divine method is highly distasteful; and who think their own method of Interpretation infinitely better. But, unfortunately for those persons, the question in hand is not a question of taste, but a dry _matter of fact_. We have to discover what is _the Divine method_ of Interpretation, and no other thing. Its improbability and its inconvenience,--its difficulty, and its strangeness,--its seeming inconclusiveness, (apart from the authority on which it rests,) and its certain uniqueness, (notwithstanding the many injunctions we have met with that we must interpret the Bible like any other book[476],)--all these considerations are all together irrelevant, and beside the question. St. Paul himself admits that the Discourse now before us is πολὺς καὶ δυσερμήνευτος,--long and of difficult interpretation[477].--Some will perhaps be found to inquire how it happens that while so many remote points of analogy are adduced, so obviously typical a circumstance as Melchizedek's _bringing forth_ "_bread and wine_[478]" obtains no notice from the Apostle? I answer,--For the same reason that Isaac is nowhere spoken of, nowhere so much as hinted at, in the Bible, as being a type of CHRIST. A blind man may see it. It requires no Revelation from Heaven to teach such things as _that!_ But the typical foreshadowing of the superiority of our SAVIOUR'S Priesthood over that of Aaron, in the story of Melchizedek, would infallibly have escaped mankind altogether, unless it had been thus specially revealed.