The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

eal kine, nor real ears, but the ideals of a dream. It is not three branches,
but the three branches of the dream that are three days. The seven dreambranches,
dream-kine, and dream-ears are, to speak literally--to drop the
idea of a dream-seven years. 3. If "is," in interpreting a dream, and
because it so interprets, meant "signifies," it would have no bearing on the
Lord's Supper, which is not the interpretation of a dream. 4. "The seven
empty ears shall be seven years of famine." Does that mean "shall
signify," as if they did not equally signify then? or does it mean that the
empty ears, if we express what they really are and are to be, shall be
"seven years of famine"? 5. Would the inference be justifiable from this
dream, that: Take, eat; these are seven ears prepared for your food--means
that there were no ears, but only symbols of ears? Pluck and strip; these
are branches covered with delicious fruit--that there were no branches, no
fruit, but symbols of them? If it would not, there is no parallel.
Zwingli’s Revelation. Ex. xii. 11.
When Zwingli supposed that he saw that "is" means "signifies, is a
symbol of," a formidable difficulty still stood in the way. He could not find
a passage in the Old or New Testament in which it had that sense, when,
as he expresses it, "it was not conjoined with a parable." "We began,
therefore, to think over the whole, revolve the whole; still the examples
which occurred were the same I had used in the Commentary (on True
and False Religion), or of the same kind. I am about to narrate a fact--a fact
of such a kind that I would wish to conceal it, but conscience compels me
to pour forth what the Lord has imparted, though I know to what
reproach and ridicule I am about to expose myself. On the thirteenth of
April I seemed to myself, in a dream, to contend with an adversary, a
writer, and to have lost my power of speech, so that what I knew to be true
my tongue failed me in the effort to speak...Though, as concerns ourselves,
it be no more than a dream we are telling, yet it is no light thing that we
were taught by a dream, thanks be to God, to whose glory also we are
telling these things. We seemed to be greatly disturbed. At this point,
from a machine," (the theatrical apparatus