The Scriptures abound in parallels. Not always are these readily seen even after their existence is intimated, and in most cases they are long unsuspected. A beautiful thought is expressed by a friend, some speaker at a Wednesday evening meeting emphasizes a familiar verse, one's own study of some lesson leads thought in a new direction, and our hitherto holden eyes are gladdened to see two well-loved portions of Holy Writ glow in new beauty and become so closely welded one with the other as to furnish further indisputable proof of "the scientific unity which exists between God and man" (Science and Health, p. 202) including every work and word to which Truth has accorded expression. Such a revelation was recently given to the writer, and it connected the beatitudes in the fifth chapter of Matthew with the parable of the prodigal son as related in the fifteenth chapter of Luke. Many helpful lessons had come through previous study of these pearls from the lips of our Master, but this recent unfoldment leads her to wonder if they had ever really been studied by her before.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." At first glance this may seem to furnish a contrast rather than a parallel to the early history of the prodigal. We find him eager to possess himself of goods claimed, receiving the demanded division, hoarding his belongings and carrying them away into a far country beyond the constraint of parental advice. We can fancy his extravagant display of wealth, his boastful expenditure, his thoughtless excesses, his inevitable beggary. Our thoughts follow him as he struggles vainly against the results of his own blind wastefulness; we behold him in the throes of want and woe, of shame and sin, until in a last desperate attempt to extricate himself from his pitiable state, to regain some of his vanished possessions, he yields allegiance to a citizen of that famine-ridden land. The immediate consequence was a plunge into the deepest possible degradation; he became a servant of the unclean, a feeder of swine, a hopeless and despised outcast, shorn even of self-respect, conscious only of a mighty unappeased hunger. Then was he not "poor in spirit"?
We read that the prodigal "would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him." No man could give unto him; only the "kingdom of heaven" could overrule his poverty and degradation; therefore he was "blessed" even in the midst of his woe. He had become a mourner, lamenting his own ignorance, his carelessness, his prodigality, and the blessed dawn of comfort pierced his gloom. "He came to himself." Not with full comprehension at once, perhaps, but his first words betoken humility. He compared his case with that of the hired servants in his old home, and acknowledged himself more lowly than they.
