It was apparently for the sake of the Apostles that this form of teaching is introduced. One of the services it rendered is obvious, it set the hearers thinking. A new form of intellectual exercise was laid before the listeners, something was proposed which they had to solve for themselves; they are given the solution in two cases, and they are provided with other examples on which they are to try their own skill. Beside the stimulus thus given to intellectual activity by the new kind of teaching, it kept before the eyes of the students those lofty conceptions of Divine agency in the world which preachers of the Kingdom of Heaven would require. Personal trust in our Lord’s words, cooperating with some intuition of their own, had made them feel sure that God’s Kingdom had come. Now they were told that they might know something of its ways; they are set to ponder on them, but the direction their thoughts are to follow is marked out; they are not left to rove hither and thither in their own imaginations, they are not suffered to pass disjointedly from notion to notion as in a dream; the puzzle of the parable arrests their attention, and the thread which the circumstance of it supplies serves as a clue confining their thoughts to move along a certain path. Here again, as we have observed so often, a selective action comes in, for it is the more active intellects that are most drawn towards a puzzle. They find in it something that their minds may work upon and this is what they seek; while the sluggish desire nothing of the kind, but turn aside from anything they cannot at once understand. Again, if the Apostles solved a parable for themselves and thereby arrived at a new aspect of some Divine truth, this fresh knowledge would be much more their own, and have a far greater effect in forming their minds, than if the solution had come from their Master. A problem solved by the pupil himself does him more good than a dozen of which he reads the solutions in a book. The parable suggested certain parallels between things outward and things spiritual in the world, and, without conceiving anything so abstract as an analogy between these two orders of things, the Twelve may have caught a glimpse of the truth, that a workmanship betokening the same hand runs through all provinces of the universe. When the disciples had thus been filled with new thoughts and new ideas, our Lord withdrew them from turmoil that the ideas might germinate undisturbed, we read “And on that day, when even was come, he saith unto them, Let us go over unto the other side.”(193) An incident in this little voyage served as a test of the condition of that Faith, the growth of which in the Apostles’ hearts was being, I believe, watched anxiously by our Lord.