Note 80 — XXIII. THE LOST COIN.

Recognising in the lost coin mainly a repetition of the same lesson which the lost sheep contained, but justly anticipating from the mere fact of a repetition, that the second will present some features which were not contained in the first, Dr. Trench finds the expected difference in this,—that “if the shepherd in the last parable was Christ, the woman in this may, perhaps, be the Church.” After suggesting as an alternative that the woman may represent the Holy Spirit, he remarks that these two are in effect substantially identical, and finally rests in the conclusion that it is “the Church because and in so far as it is dwelt in by the Spirit, which appears as the woman seeking her lost.” This able expositor speaks with evident hesitation when he represents the Church as the seeker here; and accordingly we find him with a happy inconsistency affirming in a subsequent paragraph that “as the woman, having lost her drachm, will light a candle and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it, even so the Lord, through the ministrations of his Church, gives diligence to recover the lost sinner,” &c. I am willing to accept the phraseology of this sentence, but it is obviously at variance with the view which he had previously presented, and to which he recurs in the close, that in this parable it is the Church which seeks the lost, while in the preceding parable it is the Saviour. Further, if he maintain that the woman seeking the lost coin represents the Lord seeking sinners through the ministrations of the Church, he must also maintain that the shepherd seeking the lost sheep represents the Lord seeking sinners through the ministrations of the Church. If the Lord himself is in both cases equally the seeker, there is no reason in the text of Scripture, and Dr. Trench suggests none from any other quarter, why he should be represented as seeking through the ministrations of the Church in one case and not in the other. The letter of the word and the nature of the case peremptorily demand that the qualification regarding the instrumentality of the Church should be attached to both or to neither. In either case it remains that, in respect to the person who seeks the lost, these two parables teach precisely the same lesson.