Three Questions by a Christian and their Answers — Page 48
48 from books of astronomy? If you do, you will be acting foolishly, for the speaker never intended his statement as a literal fact, all he was doing was expressing himself in a metaphor, just as all people do. O, you who eat the flesh of Christ and drink his blood during the Holy Communion, are you unaware of the use of metaphors and symbolic ex- pressions? Who does not know that in the language of every country there is a wide room for the use of symbols and metaphors. Divine revelation also makes use of the same metaphors and symbols which common people have innocently adopted in their everyday speech. It is not the way of Divine revelation to abide by abstruse philosophical terms at every place and occasion. Since the revelation is addressed to the masses, it is important that it should speak in their own idiom and according to their own understanding. There is, no doubt, a time and place for speaking in terms of fact and scientific detail, but it is im- possible for a man to simply abandon the use of metaphors and figurative speech when his first and foremost duty is to speak to the common man at his own level, so that they may understand and their hearts may be moved by his words. Admittedly, there is no revealed book which has distanced itself from the use of metaphors and symbols, or has considered this practice to be wrong. Has there ever been such a revealed book? If we reflect, we will find that in our own speech we make use of hundreds of metaphors and idioms everyday, and no one finds fault with them. For instance, when one says, "The first moon is fine as a hair",