Parable of the Hen and her Nest full of Eggs

It is a very interesting sight to see a hen and watch all her movements during the first part of her incubation, until she finally finishes it. From the time she lays her first egg, until she completes her nest, she watches, examines, and turns them over every day, and you can plainly see from all her movements and airs, that she is much pleased with her new charge, and she appears to be not only contented, but satisfied with her long confinement, which continues all day and all night, from three to four weeks.

She considers the least interruption a great molestation, if you attempt to approach her with only a finger; but if, at the close of the usual period allotted the hen for hatching her expected brood of chickens, she finds all her hopes and expectations blasted, and that every one of her eggs prove rotten, her actions are very remarkable and curious, and particularly worthy to be written down for our instruction. She first begins by moving off to one side of her nest, leaving only a part of her eggs uncovered, and then continues to move every day further and further off from them, until after some days she sits entirely upon one side of her nest, leaving her eggs bare on the other side, and finally leaves them altogether uncovered, and then all at once she rumples up her feathers, throws up her crest upon the top of her head, then starts up and runs off her nest, and all around, crying and shrieking in the most piteous manner, as an evident expression of her lost labors and great disappointment, and none can help her.

The writer of this Parable, or Comparison, has for a number of years been examining most carefully the Chronology of the Christian Church, and her repeated and continual failures, whenever she has fixed the fulfillment of any of the prophecies to any limited period; so that she has been glad to abandon them as unsound, just like the poor Hen and her eggs, but not until, like her, time has proved them both bad and rotten; and now she is beginning to leave her eggs, not only partly uncovered, but is really sitting on one side of her nest, and nearly the whole of her eggs are from under her, (as I shall show directly,) exposed to public view; and the church will soon, like the poor Hen, all at once start up, run off and leave her nest, rumple her feathers, not only on the top of her head, but upon her whole body, and will utter such piteous crying and shrieking, as has never been heard by mortals, and that before the "Seven last Plagues" (see Rev. 15th chapter) of "the Wrath of God" are poured out upon her; because of her "violence against thy brother Jacob (Israel) shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever." Obad. verse 10.

APPLICATION

A minister of the Church of England states in a recent work, that the Rev. Joseph Tyso, at Wallingford, has written several useful works on Prophecy. "Of prophetic times," he gives about sixty examples; and as more than three-fourths of them must necessarily be understood literally, for the author concludes that we are not warranted in interpreting the rest in a different manner. More than forty authors are quoted, in tabular forms, to show that there is no agreement among those who adopt the plan of taking a day in prophecy to signify a year. Time has shown that more than thirty of them were mistaken in their calculations; and the author expresses his apprehensions that "The same interpreter (Time) will prove that the rest are mistaken also," so that we will find that the "false mother" has overlaid the "Living Child" 240* years at least as to Time, and that the poor Hen has now left her eggs exposed to public view, as this extract shows.

* The difference between the Jewish and Christian Chronology.