While the "Notes" of Dr. Trench on the parables are generally judicious and valuable, his exposition of this and one or two others that are cognate is injured by a secret bias towards the forms in which he has been educated,--a bias that is natural and human, but not on that account less hurtful. The body of the vast and venerable institution of which he is at once a chief and an ornament, stands so near, and bulks so largely, that where it is concerned his usual acuteness fails him. The general announcement at the commencement of the parable, that it concerns the kingdom of heaven, he seems to think is sufficient proof that the "field" must mean the kingdom of heaven or the Church. It does, indeed, concern the kingdom of heaven, for it shows that when that kingdom has, by the Son of man, been introduced into the world, many things spring up and mingle with it there to mar its fruitfulness; but it betrays an unaccountable confusion to argue formally that because the parable concerns the kingdom of heaven, therefore, of all the features which the parable contains, "the field" must specifically represent that kingdom, in the face of the express testimony of Scripture that the field represents a totally different thing. The parable of the mustard-seed concerns the kingdom too, but does the "field" in that parable therefore mean the Church? No. The mustard-seed that grew in the field means the Church, and the field means the world in which the Church is planted. So in this parable the only thing that represents the Church, or aggregate of individual believers, is the mass of the wheat stalks that sprang from the good seed: the good seed are the children of the kingdom, and the field is the world in which these children live and labour. Looking minutely to the phraseology employed, we find that the kingdom of heaven is not said to be likened unto a field, but unto a man that sowed seed; pointing to the Lord himself as the head, and the good seed as his members, and the wide world as their place of sojourn, till he take them to himself.