The calm that comes after the storm in human life as in nature--how true the analogy. To give vent to things, how significant. To give vent to angry feelings in words, how like giving vent to smothered fire; or to any suppressed and confined force: the words come faster and hotter, the passion of anger mounts and there is a “blow out” indeed. Deny yourself the first word, and the conflagration is avoided. A passion can be smothered as literally as a fire. The use of metaphor, comparison, analogy is twofold--to enliven and to convince; to illustrate and enforce an accepted truth, and to press home and clinch one in dispute. An apt figure will put a new face upon an old and much worn truism, and a vital analogy may reach and move the reason. Thus when Renan, referring to the decay of the old religious beliefs, says that people are no poorer for being robbed of false bank notes and bogus shares, his comparison has a logical validity,--as has also Herbert Spencer’s figure when he says, “The illusion that great men and great events came oftener in early times than now is partly due to historical perspective. As in a range of equidistant columns the farthest off look the closest, so the conspicuous objects of the past seem more thickly clustered the more remote they are.” We seem to see the identity of law in both these cases. We are treated to a pictorial argument. We are using analogy in a legitimate and forceful way when we speak of our fund or capital of bodily health and strength, and of squandering or impairing it, or of investing it poorly. The accidental analogies or likenesses are limitless and are the great stock in trade of most writers and speakers. They tickle the fancy and enliven the page or the discourse. But essential analogies, or those that spring from unity of law, are more rare. These have the force of logic; they shed a steady light. St. Paul’s famous comparison of the body dead and buried with the seed in the soil, which, he says, dies before it can grow, is used with logical intent. But will it bear examination? Is the germinating seed dead in any sense that the body is dead? It is no more dead than the egg buried beneath the mother hen is dead. When the egg really dies we know the result, as we know the result when the corn rots in the ground. It is not dissolution that the seed experiences, but evolution. The illustration of the eloquent apostle may captivate the fancy, but as argument designed to convince the understanding it has no force.