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

yet, when we call a man a hare, every one at once supposes us to mean
that he is timid. An elephant is sagacious as well as ponderous, but when
we say that a man is an elephant, we are not thought to compliment his
sagacity, but to allude to his hugeness of body. The torch was once an
image of illumination, now it is an image of destruction. We speak of the
lamp of knowledge, but of the torch of discord. The spider has many points
of metaphor, but in popular language his image is narrowed to the mode in
which he ensnares his prey. The ass has had a varied fortune in metaphor.
Homer compares his hero to an ass; yet, from being the image of enduring
bravery, of strength, of contentment, of frugality, of meekness under wrong,
the ass has come to be almost exclusively the image of stupidity. The dog
once went into metaphor on the strength of his worst points; he now
generally goes in on his best. Once the question was put: Is thy servant a
dog, that he should do this thing? Now institutions of trust paint upon their
sign the dog, who, as he watches the chest, is an image of the institution in
the incorruptible fidelity it claims for itself. If there be a didactic metaphor
in the Lord's Supper--and such it would be most likely to be if there were
any--it would select the body of Christ as the predicate, because of one
familiar quality which enabled it, more than any other, to make clear and
vivify the meaning of the bread. Will any one pretend that such is the case?
13. In a metaphor the adjectives and verbs appropriate to the
predicate are applied to the subject. The adjectives and verbs appropriate
to the subject in a metaphor cannot be applied to the predicate. "The child
is a flower; it opens its petals to the dawning sun; it strikes its root into the
green earth; it is tender, sweet, fragile." We cannot correctly apply in this
same metaphor any of the qualities of the child to the flower, or mingle the
attributes of the subject with those of the predicate. We can simply and
solely consider the subject under the metaphorical conditions of the
predicate. We cannot say: "The child is a flower; it strikes out its roots in
the nursery; that flower once had a father and mother, but, alas! the chill
wind came, and now the flower is an orphan." If, therefore,