IB52.41& ■ B64-T 'V»- ‘ THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD, « l&ecottfeti fog Unfa. V t f / 2T{je Pfousefjolti iUbratg oi JExpostttorr. “A handy series of admirably printed and very useful volumes.”— Scottish Review.'- “ A,delightful series, both cheap and good.”— C. H. Spurgeon. The Life of David a&„,Reflected in his Psalms. By Alex¬ ander MaclaRen, D.D. 35. 6d. Adam, Noah, and Abraham: Readings in the Book of -Genesis. By Joseph Parker, D.D. 3s. Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. By Marcus Dods, D.D. 3$. 6d. The Last Supper of Our Lord, and His Words of Conso¬ lation to the Disciples. By J. Marshall Lang, D.D. 3 s. 6d. The Speeches of the Holy Apostles. By the Rev. Donald Fraser, D.D. 3s. 6d. The Galilean Gospel. By the Rev. Professor A. B. Bruce, D.D. 35. 6d. The Lamb of God : Expositions in the Writings of St. John. By W. R. Nicoll, M.A. 2 s. 6d. The Lord’s Prayer. By Charles Stanford, D.D. 3$. 6d. The Temptation of Christ. By G. S. Barrett, B.A. 3 s.6d. The Parables of Our Lord. By Marcus Dods, D.D. 3J. 6d. The Law of the Ten Words. By J. Oswald Dykes. 3 s.6d. London: HODDER AND STOUGHTON. THE PARABLES OF JUL 13 1897 * OUR LORD, m f§meg. / MARCUS DODS, D.D., Author of “Israel's Iron Age," “The Prayer that Teaches to Pray," “Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph," etc. (THE PARABLES RECORDED BY ST. LUKE.) Jonbon: HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. MDCCCLXXXVI. Butler & Tanner, The Selwood printing works Frome, and London CONTENTS. I. the two debtors. II. THE GOOD SAMARITAN. III. THE RICH FOOL .. IV. THE BARREN FIG-TREE • V. THE GREAT SUPPER. VI. THE LOST SHEEP AND THE LOST COIN VII. THE PRODIGAL SON AND HIS ELDER BROTHER . . PAGE I 19 41 — 6l 83 - 105 125 VIII. THE UNJUST STEWARD. 145 ~ IX. DIVES AND LAZARUS X. THE UNJUST JUDGE . . 1 XI. THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN 167 189 209 V PARABLE OF THE TWO DEBTORS. 15 PARABLE OF THE TWO DEBTORS. Luke vii. 36-50. The reader of the Gospels cannot fail to remark that the narratives of physical cures are greatly in excess of the narratives of spiritual restora¬ tions. Even in cases where spiritual good was received, this comes in sometimes as a mere appendage to the physical healing. Neither can it be thought that the faith required for the cure of the bodily disease itself guarantees the permanent health of the spirit; for there is convincing evidence that not every one who was physically restored was also emancipated from spiritual disorder. In fact, the reader longs for fuller information regarding our Lord’s method of dealing with those whose soundness of body enabled them to dispense with appeal to His miraculous power, but who were yet broken in fortune, defeated in life, enthralled by evil habit. This little story presents us with such a case; and it gives us a glimpse of the background of the life of Christ. It was only by accident this woman’s case came to the front. There may 3 4 THE TWO DEBTORS. have been many who, like her, received light and healing of soul from a few minutes 5 quiet talk with Christ, and who returned to their occupa¬ tions unnoticed but renewed. Before she came to Simon’s house, this woman had heard Jesus, and had found in Him salvation ; but nothing is told us of that part of her history. In asking Jesus to dine with him, the Pharisee probably acted, as most men on all occasions act, from mixed motives. Others were invited, and gladly, no doubt, availed themselves of the opportunity of meeting Jesus and for themselves determining whether His claim to be a prophet was or was not valid. That the Pharisee felt himself in the position of a superior person who might sit in judgment on this man from Naza¬ reth, is apparent from the circumstance that though he asked Him to his house, he gave Him a barely civil reception, pointing Him to His place without even the formal courtesies which, though small in themselves, , greatly facilitate freedom and friendliness of intercourse. A Pharisee, above all men, might have been ex¬ pected to be punctilious in these matters. But very often those whose manners are formed upon irreproachable models fail grievously in the genial consideration of others which springs from sweetness of nature. The coldness of the reception given to Jesus by the self-satisfied Pharisee was unexpectedly THE TWO DEBTORS. 5 set in a very strong light by the strikingly oppo¬ site conduct of the woman who came into the room where the company was dining. The common Eastern fashion is to sit cross-legged on the floor at meals. But the Jews of our Lord’s time had adopted the more luxurious Greek style of reclining on couches round a raised table. Jesus was thus reclining on His left side, with His head towards the table and His feet extended on the couch towards the wall of the room. The intrusion of an uninvited guest during meals would of itself excite no remark. In fact, provision was often made for such intruders by setting cushions round the wall of the room for the accommodation of persons who might wish to talk with the guests either on business or other matters. But that a woman of notoriously bad character, and who could not fail to be known in the little tow i to all but strangers, should thus enter the dining¬ room of a Pharisee, was probably an unheard-of presumption. But her whole nature was for the time absorbed in devotion to Jesus, and she could not wait for a quieter time or more con¬ venient place, but passed unheeding through the abuse and repulses of the servants of the house. For her there was but one presence there. She saw no one else; she thought of no one else. Her impulsive temperament, which had possibly led her astray at first, now stands her in good 6 THE TWO'DEBTORS. stead, and rebukes our cold and tardy expres¬ sions of gratitude, our cautious and timorous professions of love to Christ. She enters the room with the intention of anointing the feet of Jesus. But ere she can offer Him this adoration, the fulness of her heart, stirred by His presence, overflows, and in a tumult of penitence, joy, and love she sinks at His feet and bursts into tears. In her confusion, seeking for something to wipe the feet her tears have wet, she uses the hair that is hanging dishevelled about her, and her face being thus drawn down and hidden, she covers His feet with kisses. Then remembering her errand, she pours the ointment over them. That our Lord did not interrupt her is more remarkable than that none of the onlookers did. To any ordinary teacher or benefactor there would have been extreme awkwardness in re¬ ceiving so extravagant a demonstration of affection and in such circumstances. She kissed His feet. Homage can find no lowlier tribute to pay. Adoration can no farther go. And we cannot but rejoice that for the credit of our com¬ mon humanity such a tribute was paid to our Lord. There were at least some on earth who recognised that He deserved all they could give. This woman’s worship is an exhilarating spec¬ tacle. She creates an atmosphere it does one good to breathe, an atmosphere of high and true THE TWO DEBTORS. 7 sentiment, in which things.are rightly estimated, and in which conventionality disappears. Would only that her kissing of the feet of incarnate goodness and love were the representative ex¬ pression of the feeling of all men towards Christ! But to the Pharisee the admission of this woman to such liberties was proof that Jesus was no prophet. He himself would have allowed no such unseemly familiarities at the hands of a degraded person ; and indeed he might be veiy easy on that score, for it is not the sanctimoni¬ ousness of the Pharisee that elicits such tributes of devotion. Judging Jesus by himself and his class, he did not doubt that He too would have spurned this woman’s attentions had He known her character. It was obvious to the Pharisee that Jesus could not know her character, and he therefore concluded He had none of the spiritual insight supposed to characterize the prophet. Jesus penetrates his thought, and makes him sensible that whether or not Pie had understood the woman s state, He at any rate accurately gauged him. In a conversational, easy way He shows, by the Parable of the Two Debtors, that love is proportioned to indebted¬ ness ; and then, applying the Parable, He defends the woman’s conduct, and leaves Simon to draw edifying conclusions from his own. The Parable is so put that it is obvious to the entire company that great love means great forgiveness, while 8 THE TWO DEBTORS. meagre love means small or doubtful forgive¬ ness. Our Lord then contrasts Simon’s conduct with the woman’s; his supercilious violation of the commonest courtesies with her gratuitous attentions ; his haughty suspicion with her un¬ doubting and devoted reverence; his self-serving and contemptuous hospitality, his languid and cool civility, which was unequal to the task of filling even the common forms of politeness, with the woman’s uncontrollable love that broke through all rules and proprieties of life, and forced new channels for its own vast volume. The facts are obvious to the whole company • the woman’s love is unmistakable, Simon’s cold¬ ness is equally apparent. What deduction, then, is to be drawn from these facts regarding the spiritual condition of either party ? Simon himself has enounced the rule for making such a deduction. Great love, he has just said, is the result of great forgive¬ ness. The larger debtor loved his creditor because he forgave him much. This woman, then, has been greatly forgiven ; her love is the evidence, the proof of it, according to Simon’s own showing. Love, you have told us, varies with indebtedness; this woman’s great love means that she is greatly indebted, has been greatly forgiven; The vehemence, or as no doubt you would say, the indecency of this woman s affection, is proof that her many sins THE TWO DEBTORS. 9 are forgiven ; that is to say, that she is pure. But—our Lord adds with a significant warning —to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little ; a hint which might raise in the mind of Simon the question, Am I forgiven at all ? If love be the index by which we can read the amount of forgiveness, and if I have barely love enough to show decent respect, what am I to conclude regarding my own debt ? Our Lord’s immediate object in this Parable was to defend the woman and justify His own allowance of her presence and expressions of affection. This defence and justification are accomplished when it is shown that the very familiarities which the Pharisee thought Jesus should have rebuked are the proof that the woman is forgiven, cleansed, and pure. Simon had inwardly condemned both the woman and Jesus ; the woman for being a sinner, Jesus for admitting her familiarities. By the Parable, Jesus gives him to understand that her love is its own justification. In this reasoning there is involved—first, that love to Christ is love to God, and is therefore the measure of purity ; and secondly, that love to Christ is the result of forgiveness. i. First, Christ points to the woman’s demon¬ strations of love to Him as proof that her sins are forgiven. He is the creditor who has forgiven much, and is therefore loved much. In other 10 THE TWO DEBTORS. words, He puts Himself, and allows the woman to put Him, in the place of God; accepting her love for Himself as if it were love to God, and therefore proof that she is forgiven and pure. He does not appeal to the fact that her heart was filled with love, irrespective of the object of the love ; He does not argue that because she was now possessed by a pure and unselfish affec¬ tion, she was in a radically sound state of spirit. His argument is, that she has been forgiven a debt, and therefore loves her creditor. It is Christ Himself she loves, and He therefore is the creditor who has forgiven her; but her debt was sin, transgression against God, and it is therefore God who is her true creditor. Christ thus identifies Himself with God, and in the simplest manner accepts love to Himself as if it were love to God, and as decisive evidence re¬ garding the woman’s relation to the Highest. On another occasion the Pharisees observed what was implied in Christ’s forgiving sin, and took exception to His doing so on the valid ground that none can forgive sins but God only. And it may be supposed that on reflection this woman saw what was implied in her connection with Christ. It may be that as yet she had no definite ideas regarding the relation in which Christ stood to God. We do not know how He had got round her heart and quickened within her a craving for purity, and encouraged her to THE TWO DEBTORS. II strive after it. But plainly He had enabled her to believe herself forgiven, and had filled her heart with new desires, and to her He was the embodiment of the Divine. All she sought was in Him. And Christ does not warn her, as if this passionate devotion to Him might arrest a love which should go beyond His person. He allows her to worship Him, to rivet her affections and her hopes upon Him; He encourages her to think of Him as the forgiver of her sin, as the one to whom it was right to give undivided and unstinted love, as her Lord and her God. Christ is, in human personality, “the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” He is God manifest in the flesh. In Him we have all that lifts us to what is best and highest in human nature. In Him we find God ; all that is sufficient to give us confidence, guidance, peace ; to fill our affections and quicken them, to educate conscience and cleanse it, to lift us out of ourselves and give us eternal satisfaction. And Christ links us to Himself by love, and through our love imparts all the blessing He gives. To create an enthusiasm for Himself, a true attachment to His own person, is His chief object. This woman may have had many foolish ideas about God and man, she may have re¬ tained much that was faulty, but in that passion of devotion to Himself our Lord saw the begin¬ ning of all good in her. Affection for Him 12 THE TWO DEBTORS. deadens every evil passion ; it maintains the soul in an atmosphere of purity; it assimilates the whole nature to the Divine, and fills the heart with love to men. Love to Christ is, therefore, the measure and the pledge of purity. 2. Secondly, love to Christ is the result of forgiveness, and varies with the amount of debt forgiven. But this statement requires certain modifications. We must not force out of the parable any numerically exact ratio between pardon and love. Jesus does not mean that the one debtor of the Parable was precisely ten times as grateful as the other, although his cancelled debt was ten times as great. Manifestly the character of the debtors must be taken into account, and their way of looking at the debt. If they were men of a precisely similar sensitive¬ ness of conscience and quickness of feeling, then their gratitude would be in proportion to their debt. But where do we find two such men ? Is it not notorious that while one man is broken¬ hearted under the shame of bankruptcy, another, less nicely educated to mercantile honour, jauntily sets about repairing his shattered fortunes, and gaily trims his sails to catch the changing wind ? And between these extremes are there not all possible gradations of feeling and of conduct ? So is it with our debt to God. He who has inherited a sensitive conscience, and has been trained to shrink from the smallest stain, will on % THE TWO DEBTORS. 13 that very account be deeply humbled even by sins which others make light of, and will highly value the mercy that forgives them. A coarser nature, habituated to vice, and saturated with depraved ideas, may accept forgiveness with surprisingly little sense of the goodness of God. It is not, in short, the amount of sin, but the sense of it, which is the measure of gratitude to Him who forgives it. To suppose that by sin¬ ning deeply you secure that one day you will love much, is a fallacy. You may have more sin to be conscious of; but your consciousness of it, instead of being greater, will be less. You will seek in vain for the old shame, for the early remonstrances of conscience, for the same humili¬ ation on account of many sins that you once had on account of few. Your many sins will stand as facts in your history ; but your heart, long used to their company, will refuse to loathe' them as once it did. To be very wicked is no safe receipt for becoming very good. But the fact to which our Lord points in the parable is the commonly recognised one, that abstinence from crime, and from vices which society condemns, and which stain the outward life, frequently produces a self-satisfied and superficial character. The Pharisee is essen¬ tially shallow. He accustoms himself to judge by what appears; and when he is conscious that he satisfies the requirements of men like himself, 14 THE TWO DEBTORS. who see no deeper than the conduct, he thinks little of his essential character, and spends no pains on ascertaining in what his virtue is rooted. The obvious difference between himself and the flagrant transgressor of the law betrays him into self-complacency, pride, and ignorance of the spiritual life and of God. Such a person re¬ mains unhumbled, and has no thirst for forgive¬ ness, not being sensible of defilement. He criti¬ cises Christ, observes and considers but does not fully understand Him. He investigates His relation to other men; but no instinct of his own prompts him to cast himself upon His friendship as the very Person he needs. In contrast to this cold and self-satisfied character, our Lord sets the humbled penitent, the person who is broken-hearted on account of the defilement and accumulating misery and hopelessness of his sin. His transgression may have been of a kind that makes a dark blot on the life. Originally of a warm and passionate nature, he may have burst the ordinary trammels which society lays upon men, and may have brought into his life a great deal of wretched¬ ness. He may be so entangled that deliverance seems hopeless; character and strength of will alike gone, he may go from day to day not knowing where to look for any help, and some¬ times disposed to abandon all thought of re¬ storation, and give himself frankly and finally THE TWO DEBTORS. 15 to ruin. Such a person, when he is lifted out of his solitary despair by the loving recognition of Christ, when he feels the forgiving hand laid upon him and sees the gate of a new life stand¬ ing open at his very feet, when he becomes con¬ scious that through all his vileness and selfishness a Divine compassion has followed him, is wholly overcome with mingled shame and joy, and hails the Saviour as One who seems to have been provided precisely for his necessities. This is the advantage that the conscious sinner has over the self-righteous Pharisee. The sins of the one being branded by public sentiment, and bring¬ ing the sinner into collision with physical and social laws, are recognised by the sinner himself as deadly and humiliating evils. He cannot blind himself to the fact that forgiveness and cleansing, inward help and purity, are needed by himself. Sin, if it has not deepened his nature, has, at all events, convinced him of its own reality, and of the terrible influence it can exert in a human life. The Person who sets him free from this pervasive, intractable, and overmastering evil becomes all in all to him. But how was Simon, and how are we, to profit by the knowledge that love to Christ is the result of forgiveness ? We are conscious that for the settlement and perfecting of the spirit there is nothing like love to Christ. We know that the existence in us of this affection would secure i6 THE TWO DEBTORS. that our relations to everything else should be right. We have a sense of degradation so long as we are attracted by other persons and things, and yet feel only a slight attraction and an in¬ secure attachment to Christ. We would fain love Him with the whole strength of our nature. But how are we to achieve this highest state of feeling ? It is useless to demand love, as if such a demand could be directly enforced. This is the old dead law over again : “ Thou shalt love.” This, we find, we cannot fulfil. We cannot love just because we are commanded to love; no, nor because it would be to our advantage to love, nor even because we wish to do so. Love must be spontaneous: it is created in presence of what fits our nature, so that often we cannot tell why we love such and such a person, not understanding our own nature sufficiently to see the suitableness. Love to Christ is the spon- \ taneous product of our sense of His suitableness to our nature and condition, and of our indebted¬ ness to Him. A sense of indebtedness does in some cases produce hatred rather than love. But we cannot seek or accept forgiveness until we are humbled and see something of the tran¬ scendent attractiveness of the Lord. The soil is thus prepared for the springing of love in re¬ sponse to the sunshine of His favour. Besides, forgiveness is not a solitary gift. It is the beginning of a new life, a centre from THE TWO DEBTORS. 1 7 which life and light radiate, a germ which exists not so much for itself as for what it produces. It brings assurance of a friendship that is of infinite value; it imparts a reliance upon God as our God, teaching us to count upon Him, exhibiting to us His hitherto unthought-of good¬ ness. It pervades the soul with new and ex¬ hilarating sensations, and fills it with new desires and purposes. Therefore the Gospel does not directly say “Love,” but “Believe.” Trust in Christ as willing to forgive. Bring to Him your empty, ruined, ungodly, unloving spirit, and have it healed, filled, renewed. Act upon what you at present know, that He makes provision in His own person and work for sinful men. Humbly appeal to Him with such penitence and with such earnestness as you have; and as you open your spirit more and more to His influence, and find increasingly how complete you are in Him, your love will grow. It may not be of the passionate type elicited in this woman by the visible presence of the Lord, but it will be sound enough to urge you to serve and to please Him. The character of the love we bear Him must be in some respects different from that which those felt who saw His loving expression of face, and heard their forgiveness pronounced by His own lips; but it cannot be impossible or unlikely that we should learn truly and deeply to love Him who alone brings into our life the fruitful c i8 THE TWO DEBTORS. and happy expectation of endless purity and love, who alone gives us assurance that this life is anything better than a short and uneasy dream. Can we fail to love Him whose love for us is, after all, almost the only fixed and sure thing we can count upon ? Can we fail to love Him to whom we must be indebted for as great a forgiveness as was this woman ? She sat and wept beside His feet; the weight Of sin oppressed her heart ; for all the blame, And the poor malice of the worldly shame, To her was past, extinct, and out of date ; ^ Only the sin remained,—the leprous state ; She would be melted by the heat of love, By fires far fiercer than are blown to prove And purge the silver ore adulterate. She sat and wept, and with her untressed hair Still wiped the feet she was so blest to touch ; And He wiped off the soiling of despair From her sweet soul, because she loved so much. I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears ; Make me a humble thing of love and tears. THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 4 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. Luke x. 25-37. The lawyer who unwittingly gave occasion to our Lord to utter the Parable of the Good Samaritan, was not one of those who sought to betray Him into some indiscreet or unorthodox expression with which they might accuse Him before the authorities. He was rather of the less offensive type of person very largely repre¬ sented in our own day, who takes an interest in religious subjects and religious teachers, who goes to hear all the varieties of preaching, and is ready with an opinion on every novel theory, and who for the most part measures all he hears by a standard as obsolete and inapplicable as it would be to measure the sufficiency of a town’s defences by their ability to resist sling-stones or battering rams. This lawyer tested our Lord by putting to Him a question on which a great many others hinged, and which gave promise of a lively discussion in which a number of our Lord’s opinions would be expressed and a full view of His teaching laid open. He wished to 21 22 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. arrive at that kind of knowledge of our Lord’s religious position and whereabouts which in our own day is sometimes sought to be reached by putting the question, Do you believe in miracles ? or, Do you believe that Jesus is truly and pro¬ perly God ? The question, however, proved an unfortunate one for the scribe’s purpose, though one of the luckiest ever put, in so far as it called out one of those Parables which the child eagerly listens to and which never throughout his whole life cease to have some influence upon him. What answer the lawyer expected it is im¬ possible to say. Certainly he did not expect to be referred directly and solely to the moral law, but probably thought he should hear of fasts and prayers and sacrifices. And in re¬ sponding as he did and quoting a perfect sum¬ mary of the law, he no doubt anticipated that Jesus would speak of purely religious duties in which the scribe was probably exemplary, or would at all events take off the edge of the bare commandment by muffling it round with a number of observances, explanations, and so forth. But in place of this he is staggered by having the naked law thrust home upon himself as the sole and sufficient reply to his own ques¬ tion : That is God’s law ; He asks no more; you already know all His requirement; do it> and you live. There is, of course, not the smallest shade of THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 23 quibble in this answer of our Lord’s. - It is the simple eternal truth. All we have to do to in¬ herit eternal life is to love. God is love, and in creating us He made us such that all we have to do is to love. Let us only do this, heartily love God and our neighbour, and we fulfil the whole law. God has given us this feeling to be both the spring and regulator of all else, so that if it be in life and healthy exercise all else goes well with us. To ask why we may not hate or neglect, is to ask why we are as we are, why God has made us thus ? For us eternal life is eternal love. Christ did not come to abolish this law, but to fulfil it; to make it possible to us to keep this eternal law of our being. What we in this generation have to do and to be in order to be eternally alive, is, of course, precisely the same as what men of any generation have had to do and to be ; the difference is, that we have better means of fulfilling the law. The lawyer, however, cannot allow his ques¬ tion to be so easily disposed of. He seeks to pursue the subject, and accordingly puts the further question, “ Who is my neighbour ? ” The simplicity of the answer of Jesus to his first question must have excited in the minds of the bystanders some suspicion of the scribe’s sincerity. They must have felt that any one professing to know the law might have an¬ swered such a question for himself. The scribe 24 THE GOOD SAMARITAN, I therefore “ desiring to justify himself,” to show that he had a real interest in the subject, and that it was not so easily disposed of as Christ’s answer implied, asks for a definition of the term “neighbour.” To one-trained as he was, it was a natural inquiry, and yet it betrays the shallowness of his thoughts on the subject. No one whose heart was filled with love could have asked such a question. Love never seeks limits, but always outlets wider and freer. In His reply, therefore, our Lord does not direct attention to the objects of love, but to those who exercise it. He does not directly answer the question, “ Who is my neighbour ? ”—a ques¬ tion that bore in it the hope that these neigh¬ bours might prove to be few and such as might be easily loved—friends, relatives, connections ; but He shows, by an instance of the actual working of love, that it makes neighbours. It is not the defining of neighbours that gives us the definition of love, but the experience of love that defines for us who are our neighbours. He makes the lawyer at once see who his neighbour is, by showing him what love is. He lets him see that his question cannot be asked by a loving heart. Love is here, as elsewhere, a much prompter and truer teacher than theo¬ logical definition. It is this, then, that our Lord teaches by means of the Parable—that love, or a merciful! THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 2 S' spirit, finds a neighbour in every one that is in need and can be helped ; that no tie of kindred or obligation imposed by office is so keen- sighted in detecting a neighbour as love is. This He illustrates with the same wonderful readiness and finished perfection and fertility of thought as are displayed in all the Parables. The instance of misery or misfortune which our Lord chose was one constantly occurring. It was as common for a man to fall among thieves on the Jericho road and be left half dead as it is now for miners to be killed by an explosion of fire-damp or for men to be maimed for life by a machinery accident. So notorious had that road become for robbery and violence that it was called “ the red or bloody way.” It only needs to be observed about this poor man, that he lay in the most urgent need of a friend, of one who would give him help, of one who would take a little trouble and spend a little time over him. It remained to be seen whether such a person would turn up. The first to come to the spot was a priest, that is, the man of all others bound to do him a friendly turn. The priest was not only a Jew, he was the representative of the Jews, the Jew by pre-eminence; as especially Jewish as the British sailor is especially British, and to be counted on wherever a fellow-countryman is in trouble. He was by his birth and by his office 26 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. the brother of all his race, not suffered to re¬ cognise one tribe more than another, not suffered to allow even his own family ties to draw him from close attachment to all the people. The medical officer of a parish would surely not pass a man lying on the road with his head cut open, or why does he hold his appointment? A soldier who has fallen wounded in a retired part of the field of battle will hail it as an un¬ usually fortunate circumstance if the first man that comes up is the surgeon of his own regi¬ ment. So, if this wounded Jew had strength enough to see the priest as he came in sight, he must have considered it a remarkably happy coincidence which brought just the person who might most naturally be expected to show him kindness—one who lived for the people’s good, and one who had just been engaged at Jeru¬ salem in services well fitted to bring him into sympathy with the various distresses of men. If any man might be included in the term “ neighbour,” surely the priest might. But the priest thought otherwise. Like many another man, he was content to do what he was obliged to do, and what his ritual prescribed, but had none of the spirit of his office. And so it had happened to him as it happens to all who so use their official position—it had hardened on him as a shell, and separated him from his fellows. He was not more a man because a ‘THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 2; priest, but less a man. It was not the fulness of his humanity that made him a fit priest; but his priestliness actually blighted his humanity all round. The other order of men who might chiefly have been expected, from the nature of their order and office, to be forward to assist and put themselves as public property at the disposal of all, was the Levitical. The insufficiency of a merely official """tie is therefore further illustrated by our Lord’s introduction of a Levite on the scene. He also sees, but turns his head away and almost per¬ suades himself he does not know his help is needed. It is as if the English consul in some Italian port, in passing along the street, saw an Englishman being assaulted and in danger of his life, but instead of interfering turned into a side street, trying to persuade himself that the man was not an Englishman, or that the quarrel was not serious, though he saw blood ; or that the robbers were Government officials securing a culprit. It is unfortunately too easy for us all to imagine, with the aid of our self-knowledge, what excuses these men would make for them^ selves. Possibly the priest knew the Levite / was behind him, and thought the work fitter for him ; if so, it is one instance more of the folly of leaving to others work which is fairly our own. Possibly both men were tired with 28 THE GOOD SAMAkiTAN, their service in Jerusalem, and eager to get tS home. Possibly both were a little afraid of delaying in a spot in which there was such y; speaking evidence of its insecurity. Probably neither of them cared to get mixed up with a business which might involve them in legal proceedings, necessitating them to appear as witnesses, or which might even bring suspicion on themselves. So they passed by on the other side—they tried not to see it. From our trans¬ lation you might suppose the Levite made a more minute examination of the man than the priest—“ came and looked on him,” it says'—but the words are the same in both cases. There is no reason to suppose the Levite was either so much harder-hearted that he went out of curiosity close up to the man to see how he was hurt, nor that he was so much softer-hearted as to intend at first to help him, but found, or persuaded him¬ self he found, his wounds too deep for skill of his. The significant fact in both cases is, that they saw the man, but passed by on the other side, as if trying to persuade themselves there was no man there and no reason why they should pause. This conduct, I say, we can too well under¬ stand. Which of us has not been guilty of passing by on the other side, of leaving misery unrelieved because it was not clamorous ? This unfortunate, lying half dead by the roadside, THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 29 could make no importunate supplications for relief, could not sit up and prove to the priest that it was his duty to help him, could not even ask help, so as to lay on the priest the responsi¬ bility of positive refusal; and so he got past with less discomfort, but not with less guilt. The need is often greatest where least is asked.' And how many forms of misery are there lying within our knowledge as we journey along the blood-stained road of life, but which we pass by because they do not bar our progress till we give our help, or because it is possible for us to put them out of our mind and live as though these things were not. It is true we could not live, or certainly could only live in depression and wretchedness, if we kept constantly before our minds all known suffering,—if we had a vivid image of the pain and sorrow at this pre¬ sent moment afflicting thousands of gentle and innocent persons,—if we set before the mind’s eye the hopeless, wearing anguish that is hidden in every hospital in this and other lands, the blank despair that numbs the spirit of whole tribes swept into slavery under the cruellest oppression, the various miseries and difficulties which desolate life and cause many and many a victim to curse the day of his birth. To go about our ordinary duties with all this present to our mind would be as impossible as to live in peace, or to live at all, if our senses were acute 30 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. enough to make audible to us all the noise within a radius of two or three miles, or to make visible to us all that exists unseen. But the passing by on the other side which leaves guilt upon the conscience is the putting aside of distress that comes naturally before us, and the refusing to assist where circumstances give us the opportunity of assisting. A lost child is crying on the street, but it is awkward to be seen leading a dirty, crying child home, so we refuse to notice that the child is lost; a man is lying as if he were ill, but he may only be in¬ toxicated, and it looks foolish to meddle, and may be troublesome, so we leave him to others, though another minute in that position may, for all we know, make the difference between life and death. You read a paragraph of a paper giving a thrilling account of a famine in China, or some other great calamity; but when you come to a clause intimating that sub¬ scriptions will be received at such and such a place, you pass to another column, and refuse to allow that to make the impression on your mind which you feel it is beginning to make. In short, you will, in these and many like circum¬ stances, wait till you are asked to help; you know you could not in decency refuse if you were asked, if the matter were fully laid before you and all the circumstances detailed, but you will put yourself out of reach before this can be THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 31 done ; you will not expose yourself to the risk of having^your charitable feelings stirred, or at any rate of having your help drawn upon; you will, if possible, wipe the thing from your mind, you will carefully avoid following up any clue, or considering steadily any hint or suggestion of suffering. But, as we have said, it was not just another mariy nor just another Jew , that came and saw this man lying in his blood, it was, both in the case of the priest and Levite, one who had a special tie or obligation to be compassionate. These men were supposed to be a kind of em¬ bodied and living law of God, an incarnate compassion, a reflex on earth of the mercy of the Most High. They of all men should have recognised this Jew as their brother. Their peculiar guilt is ours when we repudiate any special responsibility, and make as though there were no tie between us and the object needing help. And happy are they who can say that at least of this special guilt they are free,—who have really filled up with active love- all the relationships of life by which God has brought them into connection with others, and. who can¬ not reproach themselves with failing to see what any friend, servant, relative required, or, having seen it, to do it for them,—who know no instance in which they failed to bring assistance because it was of a troublesome kind, or of a kind that 32 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. would have brought them into connection with disreputable people, or would have made them look foolish or meddling or romantic. Surely if not in your own case, then in the case of others, you see that it is not always the re¬ lationship that gives the love, but the love that makes the relationship,—that there is often a friend that sticketh closer than a brother an outlaw from the faith that is more sub¬ stantially helpful, wiser and readier in advice and prompter in lending a hand, than one be¬ longing to the same “household of faith.” Had you met this Levite after seeing his conduct, would you not have been tempted to say to him, What are you a Levite for, if not to give such help ? If you encountered a police official who carefully avoided all dangerous and trouble¬ some interference, would you not be apt to challenge his right to retain his post? But might we not turn our challenge on ourselves, and say to ourselves, Why are you a Christian ? what do you unite yourself to Christ for ? Is it not that you may be able to do good, to be helpful, to become salt to the earth, and of exceptional value among men ? If, then, you shrink from all exceptional duty, from all that calls for trouble and real sacrifice, from all that puts you seriously about, what is the good of your Christianity ? where does it go ? But while there are men whose lack of THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 33 humanity empties their relationships and every office they hold of all service to others, save only what they are rigidly bound to by the letter of their engagement, and compelled to by the insistance or observance of others, there are also men whose love throws out sympathies on all sides, invents obligations where no claim could be enforced, and breaks through restric¬ tions naturally hindering them from interference. So far from seeking excuse for not helping, they invent excuses for helping, or are unconscious f that excuses are needed. Of this class of men the Good Samaritan is the immortal type—the once-drawn picture of the master-hand that needs no added touch. In him you see that it is love that makes the difference ; that in the time of need a compassionate heart is to more purpose than any tie, engagement, office, or bond. All the excuses the others had might have been his, and many more. He was not bound to the man by any tie of country, he was not even a mere foreigner, but was of the Samaritans, who had no dealings with the Jews. What the Christian is to the Mohammedan, the Jew was to the Samaritan. Born among a people whose most active energy was spent in demonstrations of enmity against the Jews, part of his edu¬ cation must have been to annoy and persecute. Neither was this man an official like the priest, who might have been greeted with a respectful D 34 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. salutation had the man been in a condition to have given it, and who would probably have resented the omission of such a token of respect; but he was an alien who would more likely have read the expression of a mocking hatred on the face of the passer-by, or have even been greeted with cursing, or “ Thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil.” But over all these influences love triumphs, and he with whom this wounded Jew would at any other time have con¬ temptuously refused to deal has now dealings with him of a very touching nature. That is / to say, it is love that makes man neighbour to man. The true neighbour is the man who has a compassionate heart and a friendly spirit. Where this is wanting, it avails not that a man lives next door, or belongs to the same con¬ gregation, or is a member of the same club or union or profession; it ought to be so, that 3 these external associations quicken our friend- * liness, and so they often do, and where love exists they find expression for it in many suit¬ able ways ; but these external bonds can never supply the place of love. No doubt the people who saw how careful the Samaritan was of his protege would say, He must be his brother, or his neighbour, or an old friend ; for the truth is, that genuine compassion and affection make a mkn brother, neighbour, and friend of all. It is not, then, by any marks in others that you THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 35 can test who is your neighbour; it is not by the marks of race, neighbourhood, religion, common pursuits, old friendships, not by anything in them at all you can determine; but only by what is in yourself, namely, humanity of disposition, friendliness, compassion, or whatever name you choose to give it. Love alone can determine] who is your neighbour. Another point is incidentally brought out by \ our Lord. Love does not ask, What claim has this man and that man on me ? but, What does this or that man need that I can do for him ? It must have been, and it still is, an edifying sight to see the completeness of the Samaritan’s attentions—to see him kneeling with the in¬ terested, anxious eye of a friend by the side of the Jew, gently raising his head, cleansing his wounds, mollifying them with oil, binding them with strips torn from the first thing that came to hand, restoring in him the grateful desire oi life, and greeting his return to consciousness with the strength-giving congratulations of genuine affection. We might suppose he had now done enough. How is his own business to go forward if he thus delays ? But love is not so soon satisfied. He sits by him till he is strong enough to be set on his beast, and does not resign his charge to any other. He does not feel that the robbed man is off his hands when he has got him to an inn. He has himself to go 36 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. on his journey, but he will not on that account, nor on any account, disconnect himself from the man ; he will disconnect himself from him only when he needs no more assistance. This is love’s way. To be asking, How far am I to go in helping others ? shows we have not love. To be asking, To what extent must I love ? Where can I stop? Whom can I exclude? and From what sacrifices may I reasonably turn away? is simply to prove that we have not as yet the essential thing, a loving spirit; for love asks no such questions, but ever seeks for wider and wider openings. This, then, is our Lord’s answer to the ques¬ tion, How shall I inherit eternal life? The answer is, Love as this Samaritan did. You will not receive eternal life as the reward of doing so, in the sense that, having now helped men and sacrificed for them, you shall enter into an eternity in which you may cease doing so, and live in some other relation to them. Not so. But by loving men thus you hereby enter into that state of spirit and that relation to your fellow-men which is eternal life, the only eternal relation possible. What more can you be asked to do than to love those you have to do with ? It is that which will alone enable you to fulfil all duty to them. You need not ask, What is due to this man or that, how much service, how much assistance, how much substantial help? THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 37 These are very useful questions where there is no love, but they are never sufficient, and they are therefore all summarily dismissed by Paul in his brief rule, “ Owe no man anything, but . to love one another,”—that is the one debt always due, never paid off, always renewed, and that covers all others. You are meant to live happily and strongly and sweetly ; the relations of society part to part are meant to move as sweetly as the finest machinery, and love alone can accomplish this. It is a mere groping after harmony and order and social well-being that we are occupied with while we try to adjust class to class, nation to nation, man to man, by out¬ ward laws or defined positions. One of our most popular teachers, Emerson, is indeed bold enough to say, in direct contra¬ diction to this Parable, “ Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor ? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me, and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom, by all spiritual affinity, I am bought and sold ; for them I will go to prison if need be.” Him we may well leave to be an¬ swered by that deeper-seeing heathen, who said, “ Nature bids me assist men; and whether they be bond or free, gentlefolk or freedmen, what 33 THE GOOD SAMARITAN. matter ? Wherever a man is, there is room for doing good.” To obey Emerson’s law would be to introduce into a world already sufficiently broken up into sects, classes, and parties, a division more alienating and inextinguishable than creed distinctions, more bitter and personal than race hatred, more irreconcilable and truly hardening than class separation. We may therefore measure ourselves thus, and thus we may see what our religion has done for us. Our Lord came to set us right with one another; to put us on a footing with those with whom we are to spend eternity such as shall make it possible to us to do so. He said, again I and again, “ This is the command I give unto /; you, that ye love one another.” This is one half of our salvation, one half which involves the other, and you may measure the help you have received from Christ and ascertain in how far you are a saved person by the ability you have to keep this command. Thi s is the test Lo lnx H gives : “We know that we have passed fr om I 'de ath To^riTeT'’ H om^?__„TBe ca u se we love the J brethren . 77 How is it, then, with ourselves ? While Christ tells us we should not hesitate even to lay down our lives for the brethren, that is to say, should not be behind even natural generosity, which week by week prompts men to sacrifice life for others, even for persons they could not name,—while Christ leaves us this THE GOOD SAMARITAN. 39 command, and illustrates it by His whole life, do we grudge to live uncomfortably for our brethren ? This comfort and that we raise to the rank of necessities, and limit our givings and our sympathies. But love sweeps away such necessities, and shows itself the highest law of all. If still you say, What are we to do for others ? is it not enough to give what law and decency require us to give ? is it not enough to forbear doing harm, speaking evil, inflicting injury? your Lord has but the one answer: Love them first of all, and see what will come of that. THE RICH FOOL THE RICH FOOL. Luke xii. 13-21. This is yet another Parable in which our Lord illustrates the attitude He expects us to assume towards the world and its goods. It was oc¬ casioned by an unusually blunt exhibition of worldliness. Our Lord had been assuring His disciples that if they were brought into court, the Holy Ghost would teach them what to say. There is a man in the crowd to whom, at last, the words of Jesus begin to seem practical ; courts, lawsuits, inheritances, were the staple of his thoughts, and the familiar words make him prick his ears. This ability to speak in courts is the very thing he has been seeking. If Jesus has it, He will possibly be good enough to use it for him, and so he will get his law gratis, as well as recover his share in the inheritance. This is a delightful prospect, too good an op¬ portunity to let slip. And so, utterly blind to the kind of interests our Lord had at heart, utterly regardless of the crowd, possessed with the one thought that for months and yeais had 44 THE RICH FOOL. consumed him, and seeing only that Jesus had great wisdom and justice, a remarkable faculty of putting things in their right light, and an authoritative manner, which surely not even his brother could resist, he blurts out-—“ Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheri¬ tance with me.” To one whose interests are religious, or politi¬ cal, or literary, or scientific, it is always amusing to see the unbounded importance which many men whose business is in money attach to their department of affairs, and the unaffected earnest¬ ness with which they discuss them. There is a solemnity in their manner when they speak of large sums ; they seem to grow and swell with the amounts they name, a mystery and awe in their tone as they tell of big transactions, a pompous and grand dignity as they give the history of some bit of property, which is abun¬ dantly instructive. They turn from religious talk to this monetary style with the air of one who should say, Religion is all very well as a pleasing speculation or emotional tonic, but this other is the reality ; let us now put aside all mere play of the imagination and turn to the substantial affairs of life. They constantly be¬ tray the understanding on which they live, the understanding that everything must give way to business, that it is the real thread on which life is strung. V THE RICH FOOL. 45 The egotism ot worldliness was never ex¬ hibited in a more barefaced, naked, shameless form. Here had this man, through all our Lord’s conversation, been thinking his own worldly thoughts ; what he gathers from all our Lord has been saying is, that He would make a good lawyer; and the best thing he can imagine that Christy with His felt authority and goodness, can do for him, is to help him to a better income. He is sensible of Christ’s power ; if he was informed that He had come down from heaven, he would not be disposed to question it. What is it then, as he stands in presence of this highest beneficence, that he will claim ; what is it, now that he finds his opportunity, that he will have ? That half-acre his brother has kept him out of. So are men judged by their wishes and cravings. In many small towns you find harmless lunatics, who are glad to find a stranger on their streets whom they can lay hold of, and pour out their wrongs to, and repeat the old story of their claims to this estate or that title or handsome fortune. One would be glad to think this man was such an irresponsible crea¬ ture, who, merely recognising in our Lord a strange face, gave utterance to his one constant demand, u Speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance.” But covetousness and lunacy are always so nearly allied that this man can 46 THE RICH FOOL. scarcely be considered as showing any special signs of lunacy. We can all detect in ourselves the germs of his character. We know how possible it is to retain a grasping disposition and avaricious purposes through very solemn converse with things spiritual. We know what it is to let some one important affair take such possession of our thoughts that, for the time, God and all spiritual things are as though they were not Nay, do we not know what it is to calculate on the influence of Christ moving some one to do us a worldly advantage, which other¬ wise we could not hope for ? What a contrast did these two central figures of the crowd present! This man in whom no response whatever is found to anything spiritual, who can stand and listen to God Incarnate and be conscious of no new desires, no new world opening to his hope,—this poor shrunken crea¬ ture on the one hand, and on the other Jesus, in whose eye no answering sparkle met the glitter of gold, who could listen to talk about disputed successions and undivided properties without the smallest interest, who could not be tempted to assume authority in affairs where the arbiter would not be forgotten. What our Lord continued throughout His life to do, He did here—refused to interfere in civil matters, repelling indignantly the idea that He was to be used as a petty magistrate. Not that the king- THE RICH FOOL. 47 dom He had come to establish was to have no influence on the world, for it was destined to influence its minutest affair, but this was all to come about in a regular way ; the hearts of men were to be Christianized, and they being so, all other things would feel the influence. Our Lord would not spend a word in composing that frater¬ nal difference, but He would spend all the force of His teaching on extirpating the cause of the difference. “ Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you ? ” He said, but also, “ Take heed, and beware of covetousness.” If our Lord, who saw in every case what was right to be done, refused to intermeddle, how much more should'we limit ourselves to what is our own sphere, who neither clearly and wholly under¬ stand, nor are wise to act. A great part of the mischief that is done in the world comes of men overstepping the region with which they are familiar, and in which they are authoritative. It is amazing to hear with what boldness and unsuspecting confidence men pronounce upon matters with which they have had the most meagre acquaintance. It was the shock produced by this man’s naive display of his absorbing worldliness which made our Lord at once turn to the crowd with the words, “Take heed, and beware of covetous¬ ness : for a man’s life consisteth not in the 48 THE RICH FOOL. abundance of the things he possesseth.” This, then, is pointed out as the great snare of covet¬ ousness, that it tends to make a man identify himself with his possessions and rate himself by them. This is what our Lord here lays His finger on, as being especially disastrous in this vice ; it blinds a man to the fact that he remains for ever distinct from his possessions; that he is one thing, his possessions another; that he and they cannot be amalgamated, but must remain separate in essence and in destiny. That covetousness has this tendency every one knows. The man who values himself for what he has, and not for what he is, the man who fancies himself great because his possessions are great, is one of the most familiar objects of ridicule. But take heed, for there is a current setting that way which all of us feel the force of. Money-making is one of the most obvious and convenient goals which a man can choose for himself in life. Many men, when young, are sadly at a loss what to make of life, and are burdened with their capabilities. They know they can do something, but cannot determine what. They have not tested themselves, and cannot say what might be the prudent course. They have no strong natural bent towards any particular calling. Now to realize a competence supplies an aim, easily thought of and easily held in view. To make a fortune is an appre- THE RICH FOOL. 49 ciable result, that a man may spend his effort on and measure his progress by. If it be made, there it is to show, it is actual visible achieve¬ ment, a monument of labour spent. And in the course towards the goal there is a great deal of satisfaction, there is evident progress. A man is fallen very low indeed, if he is not at all concerned to know that he is making any advance one way or another. Now, men can very soon learn the art of measuring their pro¬ gress, not by themselves, or their own personal growth, not by any ripeness of character and real internal acquisition, but by mere outward, material gain. They are content with some little glows of satisfaction that they are rising in the world, that they are able this year to command some luxuries that were last year beyond their reach, and especially that this actual thing, money, has increased in their hands. This is the way we practically come to measure ourselves by what we have, and to think that our life consists in the abundance of the things we possess. And what our Lord insists upon here, and. seeks to impress us with, is the folly and disaster of so doing. He shows us that a man and his possessions are distinct; that a- man’s life is not longer nor happier in proportion to what he has; that the man, the living soul, is one thing, the goods another; that he goes one way, they E So THE RICH FOOL. another; and that by no ingenuity can a man get himself and his property so united that he shall be beautiful, strong, lasting as it is. He may fill his shelves with the wisest and most elevating books, and yet remain illiterate ; he may gather round him precious works of art, and be a clown and a boor; he may buy up a county, and be the smallest souled man in it; he may erect a mansion which will last for ten generations, and may not have ten years of life or ten minutes of health to enjoy it. A man’s possessions obstinately stand off from himself. Naturally we all feel that we are expanding and enlarging ourselves in extending our pos¬ sessions, that we are more firmly rooting our¬ selves on earth; in each of them we seem to have a mirror reflecting ourselves, and each of them adds to our importance. Our Lord, there¬ fore, presents to our view a man who has abun¬ dant, superabundant possessions, but has no life left. He had laid up goods in abundance, and reckoned on life in abundance, a long, full, lively life. He forgot the distinction, but it was made nevertheless. He is shown to us separate from his possessions, and transferred to a sphere where, like old-world coins, their value is un¬ known, and they can neither be accounted, used, nor enjoyed. The rich man of the Parable is represented as one of the exceptionally favoured children of THE RICH FOOL. 51 fortune. He had already become wealthy at an age at which he might naturally count upon having several years of enjoyment. His wealth too, had been acquired, not by hard fatiguing labour, but in that line of life in which, more than in any other, a man’s time is his own, and he can work or play as he feels disposed. And especially it is to be remarked that no sin at¬ tached to his money-making; he had not made his money by gambling, he had not profited by another man’s disaster, no one was the loser for his winnings, it was the honest, unsullied gift of Heaven to him ; his fields yielded enormously. But as a sudden and great alteration of circum-/ stances is the best revealer of what a map really is, this sudden wealth disclosed a selfish¬ ness in this land-holder of which before he had perhaps not been suspected. The manner in which his wealth had come to him sets his ingratitude to God in a stronger"' light. Though his wealth had come to him through that medium which is most evidently at God’s discretion, so evidently that even men who are ungodly in other matters make some show of acknowledging that years of famine and years of plenty depend on God’s will,— though the gifts of God had come to him by the shortest route, as if from and out of God’s very hand, unhidden by any complicated trans¬ actions with men,—though his wealth had been 52 THE RICH FOOL. built up by the elements, whose influence he could neither command nor restrain,—yet he seizes and claims as his own the fruits of his fields, as if he had been the maker of them, as if no one else had spent anything on them, and as if he had to consult no one but himself as to their disposal. What most men would have decency if not devotion enough to call a God¬ send, he calls a windfall, and gathers up as his very own. A great success solemnizes some men; they hurry home and fall on .their knees ; they are ashamed of so much goodness coming to men so unworthy, and they hasten to make acknowledgment. Serious-minded men who engage in business not for the mere excitement and gain of it, walk in God’s presence, and bear in mind that the silver and the gold are His, that promotion cometh not from the north or south by the wind that happens to be blowing, and are therefore ever ready to say, What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits toward me ? Can anything be more pitiable than the man who stands at his counting-house door and forbids God’s entrance while his balance is being struck, who does not care that God should know how much he made last year, but goes and prays that this God would give him success this year ? Is it not astonishing how religious men who profess to live for God, should so carefully keep Him from interfering in their money THE RICH FOOL. 53 matters, that is, in those matters round which their life really revolves ? If we cannot go before God and frankly say, This is what I have made this year, and I could not have made it but for Thee and Thy help,—this is because we fear God will claim too much, and prompt us to use it as we are not prepared to do. Must there not be something wrong if we are not letting God’s eye and judgment fully and freely into every transaction we engage in, and every gain we make ? In the case of this rich man, certainly his blindness to the source of his wealth and the bad use he made of it did hang together. He missed the opportunity of being God’s almoner*^ of dispensing God’s bounty to the needy. He did not recognise that it was the Lord who gave, and therefore it was not the Lord’s poor who got. The goods are his goods—he can’t get past that; he may do what he likes with them, he cannot see that there is any other vote or voice in the matter. In what sense the fulness of the world is God’s he has no mind to consider. His barns are bursting, he has more wealth than he knows what to do with j but one thing is certain, it must all be spent on himself. You would suppose he had never seen a hungry child in his life ; you would suppose he had never met a beggar, or seen a blind man or a cripple in his market town. “Where shall I bestow my 54 THE RICH FOOL. goods ? ” This was his difficulty, and yet he had the world before him, a world filled with want, abundant in misery, rich in cases of need. How many hundreds- there were who could have given him very pointed and definite direc¬ tions! how many who would quickly have re¬ lieved him from his perplexity ! how many at that very hour, when he was wondering what he could do with his superfluity, were tortured by the opposite perplexity, wondering where they could get bread for these pale, appealing chil¬ dren, where they could find temporary aid to help them through a year of disaster ! Among all the investments he had heard and thought of, there was one prospectus he had apparently not seen, that to which God has put His name, \ “He that giveth to the poor, lendeth to the Lord.” He did not apprehend that their bare and empty homes would be better houses of in¬ vestment than his own locked and useless barns, i It is no more than what thousands of rich men, and of men who are not rich, every day do ; he would not be in the Parable if he were exceptional. He is here because he is typical —typical of the men who, in considering how they shall invest their gains, look only to their own interests,—who, in considering their next step, have chiefly in view, what advantage can I win for myself? and who do not consider what good they can do. Life is constructed almost THE RICH FOOL. 55 entirely on selfish principles : business is carried on upon the understanding that every man must look out for himself. One of the many benefits of war is, that it counteracts this selfish¬ ness ; men learn to think of the common cause, of the public good, of the prosperity of the country, of the honour of their regiment. But in most departments of life men are prone to consider merely or chiefly, How can I get the utmost of good for myself ? Often and often no other thought whatever is at the root of an investment, a transaction, an enterprise. The future is sketched in the mind, and I am the centre, and all else is arranged so as most effectually to contribute to my joy. They are the few whose first thought it is, Is there any one I can benefit ? and who so frequently think how they can promote the welfare and hap¬ piness of others, that at last this becomes a habit with them. When we consider the sleek and complacent selfishness of the man that could quietly pro¬ pose to spend many years of comfort without a thought of others, we are almost glad to hear of his sudden disappointment. Doubtless the man might have died as suddenly if he had been better prepared. Had he invited all the poor of the district, to make a distribution to them of his surplus, he might all the same have died without seeing his benevolence enjoyed. 56 THE RI€H-FOOL. /But while there are few things more delightful to contemplate than the sudden painless de¬ parture of the man who has walked with God, there are few things so shocking as the sudden death of the sinner, who dies in passion with an oath on his lips, or never wakens from the insensibility of drunkenness. And what this Parable draws attention to is the vanity, the insecurity of worldly and selfish expectations. The man had one view of the future: God another. The man was saying, “ Thou hast much goods laid up for many years ” : God was saying, “ Not another night shall you possess a single bushel.” What a satire is here upon man ! Truly every man walketh in a vain show; he heapeth up riches and knoweth not who shall gather them. Pie builds his house and purposes to live and see good days, but a voice falls from heaven, Thou misreckoning man, the house may be built, but there will be no man to inhabit it. In his own thoughts the man was living through long years of ease and plenty, but the cold reality touched his warm expectations, and they withered death-stricken. The wind passeth over him and he is gone, and the place he counted his knows him no more. He was reck¬ oning that no life could be worthy of compari¬ son with his; that his shrewd plans had been fully accomplished, his utmost hopes exceeded; THE RICH FOOL. 57 he was in the full triumph of self-gratulation, counting himself the most successful of men, the man to be envied ; but this is God’s judgment: “ Thou fool.” But might he not set even God’s judgment of his conduct at defiance ? Was he not surrounded by tokens of his success, by proofs of his wisdom ? Alas ! in that very article and particular in which he had judged himself most wise, he was exhibited as conspicuous in folly. He had spent all his poor wisdom in providing for this soul of his an easy, merry, plentiful life, and he finds that so far from providing an abundant life for him¬ self, he is unable to secure life of any kind, and would gladly exchange his position for the life of the meanest of his slaves. Stripped, naked, a bare, desolate soul, he passes from our sight, lost in the darkness of eternal remorse, his own voice still dolefully echoing the condemning voice of God, his own soul turning on itself with the everlasting reproach, “ T hou fool! thou fool! ” “ This night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall these things be, that thou hast provided ? ” The answer comes from many a dissipated fortune, from many an auction room, in which are exposed the accumulations of a lifetime. There is one of the places a man proud of his possessions may moralize. The most precious and frequently handled gems of the departed owner are handed over to men 58 THE RICH FOOL. who never saw him, or who made a jest of his avarice, or to men who rivalled him, and are now proud of living a year or two longer and getting as their own what they had long grudged to him. The books he read are now pencilled by others ; his plate is defaced and marked with other names ; the very bed he lay on he needs no more ; the clothes he wore he shall never again use ; his mirrors, it is well they cannot now reflect him. “ So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God.” So, that is, equally senseless, and in an equally precarious position. But how many does this judgment hit ? Yet not all; for some, on finding unexpected means coming into their hands, would have said within themselves, This is delightful, this will enable me to provide for this needy relative, this will at last put me in a position to make up for loss I unwittingly occasioned. This will precisely fit the wants of this or that benevolent institution that I know makes admirable use of its funds. God identifies Himself with all that is needy on earth, and spending treasure for the needy is spending treasure for God. And in so spending we become rich towards /'"''God, are provided for so far as our outlook God wards is concerned. How is it then with us ? Suppose all earthly possessions were sud¬ denly to drop from about you, as they one day THE RICH FOOL. 59 will, what would you have left ? Would you then be rich or poor ? Would the wants you would then begin to feel be amply provided for ? Here we are now without our possessions, are we rich at this moment ? Suppose we never got back to our homes, suppose we were by some great natural catastrophe at this hour separated from all that we have provided for this life, should we still be rich ? Is there something so belonging to you that you can say, This is mine for evermore—mine through every change, through health and sickness, in life and death —mine though I be stripped of all that can be separated from my person, though I stand a bare spirit without connection with material things ? Will you honestly give yourselves an answer to this question ? What have I towards God ? What that is certain to increase the nearer I go to Him ? Am I so joined to Him that I can say, “ I am persuaded, that neither life nor death, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord ” ? THE BARREN FIG-TREE. THE BARREN FIG-TREE. Luke xiiL 6-9. This Parable formed part of the conversation which our Lord held with those who reported to Him the fate of some Galileans whom Pilate had slaughtered in the temple. The Galileans were notoriously turbulent, and on more than one occasion Pilate quelled their disposition to riot with the decisive and unrelenting ferocity that characterized him. On this occasion he seems to have stepped beyond his jurisdiction, and to have sent soldiers into the temple to slay the sacrifices among the beasts they were sacrificing—an act which would have desecrated a pagan temple, and which was peculiarly horrible in a temple so sacred and exclusive as that of the Jews. Indeed, one is tempted to suppose the atrocity had been magnified by rumour, and that what had at first been related in strong figures was at last taken literally ; that Pilate had slaughtered some Galileans who had come to the city to sacrifice, but were not yet inside the temple ; and that some one re- 63 6 4 THE BARREN FIG-TREE. turning to Galilee, and finding himself an object of interest as a participator in the disturbance, and desiring to make a terse and picturesque report of what had happened, said with an allowable figure of speech that Pilate had mingled their blood with that of their sacrifices. This report a hearer taking literally might suppose to mean that Pilate had sent soldiers into the temple and had slain the worshippers among the altars and sacrificial animals. Whatever the act of Pilate had been, those who now spoke of it seemed impressed, not so much with any perfidy or profane ferocity on his part, as with the exceptional guilt which they suppose these Galileans must have in¬ curred to justify their consignment to such a doom. They argue that God would not have delivered up any of His worshippers to so shocking a death, had they not been guilty of some exceptional iniquity. And with the plea¬ sure men find in speaking of the disasters of others while themselves secure, and of com¬ menting upon wickedness which they believe to exceed their own, these persons come with their story to Jesus, hoping to hear some edifying discourse on the wickedness of the world at large, and some suggestions which may warrant them in congratulating themselves with still more satisfied complacency. They are, however, disappointed. In this THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 65 slaughter of the .Galileans, as well as in other calamities to which public attention had been drawn, our Lord sees no evidence of exceptional guilt, but rather samples of calamity threaten¬ ing the whole nation. These disasters were the first mutterings of the storm which was shortly to break over the whole community. The Jews were not to look at the Galileans, or at those of their own number on whom the tower of Siloam fell, as separate from themselves by any peculiar wickedness; they were to consider them as integral parts of the nation, and to accept and gather warning from the strokes which thus fell upon the people at large. These strokes, our Lord says, were meant to awaken the whole nation to its precarious condition. They were meant to make the people at large . consider whether they did not as a people together deserve a like doom. They are, in short, the first efforts of the husbandman to stimulate the tree to greater activity. The branches which have been cut off are cut off not for any special fault of theirs, but to quicken the whole tree. If the Jewish ear were opened, it would hear in these thickening accidents and disasters, not any private calamity, but the voice of the husbandman wondering how the whole tree can be made to produce any proper and valuable fruit. Hence the Parable of the Fig-tree. F 66 THE BARREN FIG-TREE. The direct meaning of the Parable is unmis¬ takable. What had happened to these Galileans would shortly happen to the whole nation unless they so repented as to accomplish God’s purpose with them. This Jewish people was like a fig-tree enjoying every advantage, but bearing no fruit. As three years make up the full time which it is.reasonable to spend upon the culti¬ vation of an apparently barren tree, so there is a fulness of time in the history of a nation during which it receives its opportunities. This time had now expired with the Jews, and the forty years that were yet given them, in answer to the “ Father, forgive them,” which our Lord breathed from the cross, were the tree’s ultimate year of probation which was to decide its fate. To every nation God has given a special task, and special gifts and opportunities to accom¬ plish it As the body requires many members, and all the members have not the same office,— as the orchard has many kinds of trees, and one kind cannot bear all fruits,—so each nation has had some special impulse to give to the progress of the race. A modern nation, however civilized, cannot do the work which was committed to an ancient tribe, of choosing out the habitable parts of the earth and sowing the seed which all subsequent times have been reaping. The Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians and Per¬ sians, Cyrus, whom God owned as His servant, THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 6/ and many besides, had their peculiar functions in the education of the race and in preparing the world for Christ. But the Jews were called . to a distinctive place. A different species of fruit was expected from them. Their special function was to acknowledge Christ when He, came, and to form His kingdom. This fruit they had not borne. As a nation they had failed, and seemed likely yet to fail, whatever individuals among them had done and were yet to do. Having failed and continuing to fail, they would become mere cumberers of the ground. There would be no reason why their national existence should be continued. The Parable, however, has important personal bearings. Every man’s conscience gives the Parable a personal application. You would hardly find any one who would deny that God expects som e fruit of his .life. If you asked yourself or any one else, Is it a matter of abso¬ lute indifference to God what results from your life ? you would be answered, That it is im¬ possible to conceive of God at all without sup¬ posing that He desires every human life to serve some good purpose. This, at all events, is Christ’s view. This it is which made His life what it was, influential to all time, and the unfailing source of the highest energy to all other lives. That is to say, He has given us the most cogent of all demonstrations that in 68 THE BARREN FIG-TREE. proportion as we accept His view of the con¬ nection of our life with God, shall we resemble Him in the utility and permanent result of all we do. It has become obvious that in the world of nature nothing is isolated and independent, but that everything is connected more or less remotely with everything else ; that all nature is one whole, governed by one idea and fulfilling one purpose. Human lives are under the same law. No life is outside of the plan which com¬ prehends the whole; every life contributes something to the fulfilment of the great purpose all are to serve. Our Lord tells us that this purpose is in the mind of God, and that He judges us by our fulfilment or non-fulfilment of His will. And that we should be reluctant to bring forth fruit to God, or hesitate to live for Him, has its root in the foolish and objection- ' able idea that God and we have opposing interests, so that to help out God's idea of the world and to work with Him and towards His end is really not our best. Nothing seems to teach us that God is all on our side. It has taken men six thousand years to find out some part of the provision for our good which He has laid up in the material world, and it seems it will take us even longer to discover the provision He has made for feeling and thought and for spiritual strength and joy. But not only has each .human life a purpose ; THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 69 most men have the more or less distinct per¬ ception that they are as fig-trees among vines ; that they have peculiar opportunities not given to"other men, and that in one way or other they enjoy special advantages. The fig-tree of the Parable was not lost among a forest of precisely similar, equally cared-for and equally uncared-for trees ; it was one , standing by itself among plants of different kind, and receiving different attention. You have little feeling of responsibility to God so long as you think you have dropped into your place casually as the seed blown by the wind, or that what you receive you receive not because it is suitable for you, and therefore given by God, but only because you and all around you are included in some general order of things, and dealt with in the mass and regardless of individual character¬ istics. But if you deal with God about your life at all, you find it to be necessarily implied that you ascribe to Him a constant watchful¬ ness over it and a power to introduce what is needful for you, and to give you all that is needed for fruit-bearing, for accomplishing His purpose. The position, then, that you occupy and the advantages you enjoy are the indication that God means your life to serve a good purpose. If you look at life with the secret or expressed conviction that it is a pitiful and contemptible 76 The barren fig-tree. thing from which nothing good can result, it will in your case become a contemptible and barren affair. But begin with the belief that God’s purposes are worth accomplishing, and that they can be and are being accomplished by men, and that you may accomplish them, and this , will give to your life a steady and hopeful energy, and put your life on the only track that i is really eternal. A man may indeed' find the thought rising in him, that as some nations have served God’s purpose by war, by godless culture, by living out their own nature irrespective of God, so may I accomplish His purpose although I pursue the bent of my own nature and build up my life solely in accordance with my own views and plans. But why has God given you light about His will if He meant you to make no use of it ? You can only judge of the kind of fruit God wishes you to bear by considering tho positio n He has set you in ; and you can bear that fruit only by using all the advantages He Jias given you. The gardener leaves some plants out and unsheltered, but others he brings into the walled garden, and some he puts under glass ; and if the vine were treated like a goose¬ berry bush, it would bear neither grapes nor yet gooseberries. So if we exclude or neglect influences which God has seen fit to furnish us with, we must be failing to produce the fruit He wishes. If He has brought you light in THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 7 1 Christ which you are not making any use of, if you decline to live in that communion with the heart of all spiritual life which exists in the Father of spirits, then it must be that you aie failing to produce the fruit for the sake of pro¬ ducing which He has given you these advan¬ tages. Are you sure there is nothing to be gained by fellowship with Christ ? are you sure that you can be as complete a man without this person who felt it in Him to draw t all men to Him ? are you sure that you can serve every good and worthy purpose just as well without any direct help from Him as with it ? Because, if you are not sure, then it is obvious that, for all you know, you are shutting out an influence which would simply make all the difference between bearing fruit and not doing so ; be¬ tween your life serving the best purpose possible and serving a purpose disappointing and dis¬ astrous ; between fruit borne on the south side of a high brick wall and fruit borne or attempted on the north side. And what can be more utt erly h u miliatin g than to have our life examined by absolute insight and the most loving justice, and to be pronounced barren ? To fail in any one de¬ partment of life is humiliating enough, but to fail over the whole, and to find that the whole thing is gone for nothing, must be impossible to bear. To have consciously failed in helpfulness 72 THE BARREN FIG-TREE. to a friend, or to have failed as a son or as a parent, to have quite disappointed one who was us, makes a mark on our conscience we do not easily cover over; to be engaged with others in a work all of which is retarded -..or spoiled by a piece of stupidity or neglect on our part, affects us with a very sensible shame. But think of failing in what our whole life was given us to accomplish ! How vain to defend ourselves by affirming that if we have not pleased God and borne the fruit He desired, we have yet not lived in vain! A young surgeon is appointed to an hospital, but the mortality greatly increases; inquiry is made, and it is found that he has neglected his duties. He is charged with neglect, and acknowledges it. “ But,” he says, " come with me, and I will show you I have not been idle.” He takes the authorities to his room, and shows them a freshly finished painting or a half-written book which he expects will make his fortune. No one questions whether such a person will be retained or dismissed. For the charge of bringing foHhua & fruit J s \ not the only one which the owner of the fig-tree —Brings against it - It-alaaxuinbered the gyound*_, took up a place in his vineyard which might be more profitably used. It not only bore no fruit itself, but “sucked the soil’s fertility” from whole¬ some and productive plants. It used up room THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 73 and nourishment which another tree might have used for fruit-bearing. This tree had given promise, and because of its promising appear¬ ance had been set where it was—but it failed. And it reminds us of the guilt we incur when we engage to perform duties which nevertheless we neglect. Had we not professed a willingness to perform them, others would have been found to do them. Had we not thrust ourselves for¬ ward,‘or would we only stand aside and yield the duties to others, they would be performed ; but by taking engagements upon us and not fulfilling them, we both omit our own part and prevent others from performing it: like a crowd idly gazing from the shore at a man drowning, and hindering the one eager to rescue who cannot make his way to the water’s edge through the idle mass. Have you never seen some one spoiling a piece of work which you were sure you could do well, but with which you cannot interfere because the other is the party engaged to do it ? Far better that he were out of the way; but until he is discharged by a competent authority, he must be allowed, not only to spoil the work himself, but to pre¬ vent any one else from doing it well. The reason why no one interferes with your work is not always that it is perfectly satisfactory. You may blunder and weary, you may do your work in a perfunctory and slovenly way, but while 74 THE BARREN FIG-TREE, you occupy the place, the better workman can¬ not interfere to mend matters. It is a saddening but also a stimulating re¬ flection, that many duties might be better performed were we out of the way. To many parents it must occur that their children would have been better provided for in an orphan hospital, sometimes even better clothed and fed, better instructed in religion, with a more worthy example to incite them to well-doing, and receiving a better start in life than they can do while their natural guardians are alive and engaged to perform duties which are almost wholly neglected. And in many directions in which our relations in life branch out, it may well shame us to look upon the dead barren twigs into which we send no sap, and which , might be all beautified and bending under mellow fruit were some other enjoying the place that we occupy with our lifeless bulk. If others had had our advantages, is it not probable that more beneficial results would have appeared ? If others had enjoyed the same parentage, the same thoughtful prayerful love watching over their early years, the same clear light regarding duty, the same encouragement to well-doing,—- if others had received as fully as we of what is thoroughly beneficial in life, of what goes to form character and to make the conduct whole¬ some and helpful,—is it not likely that fruit of THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 75 a rarer quality and of greater abundance would have appeared ? It is impossible that such waste of ground should be suffered for ever in such a vineyard as this of the Parable. If we on whom certain duties are depending are the very persons who prevent these duties from being done, this is not a state of things which a wise God will allow. Indolence, distrust, anything which hinders us from working harmoniously with God, must be removed and is being removed from His dominion. Such things can only be suffered for a time, and do not belong to the eternal condition of things. Therefore God in His mercy warns us that all such obstructive dis¬ positions must be abolished. Here Christ, in His office of Saviour andjnterccssor is repre¬ sented as inter posing between the owner and the barren tree : H Lord,” He says, “ let it alone this year also. Let me give it one chance more, let me do my utmost for it.” This request is acceded to, but on the distinct undeistanding that this is a last chance. It is agreed on both sides that if fruit be not now borne, the end has come. There will be no more pleading. -The spade will be thrown aside and the axe lifted. There is no hurry in the matter, but a distinct agreement—one thing or other must be done either the fruit borne or the tree cut down. As it is said, (i God does not pay on Satuidays, but ?6 THE BARREN FIG-TREE. at last He pays.” His judgments are not weekly, but they are infallibly certain. Every delay He makes, He makes with a distinct understanding of what He means by it, of how long it is to be and of what will take place at the expiry of the term. There comes a time when even the tears of Christ will not save us ; when even He can do no more than weep. The Jews accordingly received their year of grace. Judgment was delayed for forty years \ for a generation. Time was given for passions to die down, for prejudice to pass away, for reflection to be made on all that Christ had been and done. The tree was digged about and well cared for. Means never before used were now used. Preachers as zealous as the old prophets and with more telling words to utter held clearly before them the king they had disowned. The trees planted near them all began to yield fruit. In fact, as every one sees, it was useless trying to do more to bring them to acknowledge Christ; nothing more could be done. And so the heavy hand of Rome which so long had been held back was at last allowed to fall, and the nation went to pieces under the blow. But when the old tree is torn up by the storm, "what chiefly astonishes us is to see that the mass below the ground has been almost as wide¬ spread as the branches above ; that each branch THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 77 and leafy twig that has waved in the air is represented by an unseen root or sucker below which has fed and sustained it; and so if you look below the surface through this period of grace, your eye lights upon the sustaining love of God, your ear discerns the regretful, dirgelike mourning that breathed through the words, “ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” the bitter disappointment and yearning that can only with deepest sorrow and pain give up hoping and that still repeats, “ Oh that My people had hearkened unto Me, and Israel had walked in My ways ! I would soon have subdued their enemies, and turned My hand against their adversaries.” This Parable, then, bears in it a strong encou¬ ragement that may well pervade and strengthen our whole life. For this vinedresser had not^ interceded for the tree unless he had thought it possible that fruit might yet be borne ; and you may be sure the pains he spent on that tree would exceed all that he spent on the rest. You can fancy him leaning on his spade and carefully studying it, thinking of it as he went home at sundown, talking it over with neigh¬ bouring vinedressers, and coming but early to try some fresh method, resolved that it should lose no chance of mending. And were our ear keen enough to hear the deliberations and judg¬ ments pronounced now in the spiritual world, might not some of us become aware that we yS THE BARREN FIG-TREE. ourselves were under discussion and that the time of our final probation had come; that methods were now being tried with us which, if they fail, cannot be renewed ? If hitherto you have done little for God, and if lately the thought of your opportunities of doing good v service has been borne in upon you, if your advantages have been strikingly increased, your position improved, and hindrances taken out of the way, then ought you not in reason to con¬ strue this into a renewed invitation on God’s part that you should make up your mind at length to live for Him ? Suppose you could overhear the remarks passed upon your con¬ dition by these unseen overseers, suppose you could overhear what is thought of your past and - what is resolved regarding your future, have you no reason to believe that you would hear remarks very similar to those, which were called forth by this tree from the persons who stood and considered it ? If it be so, if you are now to be put on a final trial, then He who seeks and longs that you win is at your side to give you every advantage, such arrangement of your worldly circumstances as is most likely to tell upon you for good, such influences brought to bear upon you as you must consciously resist if you are not to bring forth fruit, such prompt¬ ings of conscience and present light about duty as you must shut your eyes to if you are not to I THE BARREN FIG-TREE. 79 see and obey. If this consideration and treat¬ ment of you is going on, and if indeed the main reason of your being in life at all is that it may go on, then are you not to think what may come of It, are you not to bestir yourself to some serious and thorough response to God’s dealing ? If you so bestir yourself, then you are certain of success. Christ does tend you. Much that He does may be offensive to you, much unintelligible ; but believe in Him, frankly heartily co-operate with Him ; welcome His and efforts in your behalf; consider how much fruit His own life bore, how, through neglect and contradiction of sinners, through unsettlement and poverty and at last suffering, He still served God’s purpose. Consider how utterly His life gives the lie to all within you that would either say that life is easy, or that it is fruitless and empty and contemptible. Consider Him and His promise that His Spirit, which made Him what He was, shall pass into yUVT' and take courage to live with Him and like Him. Be¬ lieve that He means you well, believe that He understands human life and means to make yours worthy, and that if you co-operate with Him, nothing can defeat you. There is encouragement also for those who have long been striving to serve God. Do not despond about your own bad state and its many unfavourable symptoms. Do not learn to treat 8o THE BARREN FIG-TREE. life carelessly, as if its duties and trials had no reference beyond the present time ; do not treat this world as if Christ had never been in it and had not shown you how everlasting results may flow from a brief time spent among men and their sins and passions. Do not believe that you are left on earth to grope and stumble blind ^ and forlorn to an uncertain termination, but abide in Christ and keep.your mind occupied with His ways and seek His presence, until you feel sure that every day comes to you with opportunities of living as He did. It may seem very poor fruit such soil as you are planted in can produce, but leave that to Him; He knows the kind of fruit He seeks from your life ; -- and, if it satisfies Him, it may satisfy you. Do not fancy that all is over with you, and that fruit is what once might have been, but now cannot be. Even out of the withered hopes that lie damp upon your heart and the comforts > that have gradually fallen from about you and now lie dead and saddening all your life, your Lord can bring happiness and profit to you, can use these disappointments and griefs as nature uses the dead leaves of the autumn to nourish and feed the spring and the coming harvest. Certainly this remains to us all to say: I may bring forth fruit to God, it is open to me to please and gratify Him, it is open to me to make my life worthy of the approval and com- THE BARREN FIG-TREE. Si mendation of Him compared to whose judgment the praise or blame of men is as the bluster of the wind that, once heard, dies out for ever. Life may in other respects be sad and dreary ; I may be fixed in one cramped and narrow spot all my days, enlivened and stimulated by no / change, the same familiar employments palling upon me more drearily every day ; I may have to stand out exposed to burning heat or chill¬ ing storms, and may long for shelter, for com¬ fort, for ease, for pleasure, but the want of any, or all of these ought not to make me think there is no object in my life, no good use I can put it to, no worthily compensating end it will serve. In the assurance of my Lord I mean to abide, that there still and always remains to me the possibility of doing God’s will, and oppor¬ tunity of satisfying His purpose with me. 0 \ J V ■ THE GREAT SUPPER. THE GREAT SUPPER. Luke xiv. 16-24. The occasion of this Parable is carefully ex¬ plained by Luke. One Sabbath-day, a leading Pharisee of the metropolis had invited a large and apparently distinguished company to din¬ ner ; possibly the guests were invited on the express understanding that they would have an opportunity of conversing with Jesus more freely than they could in a public place ; pos¬ sibly Jesus was a casual guest, asked at the mo¬ ment. At all events the innate authority which shone through His bearing and conversation at once disarmed His intended critics, and instead of a spirited debate they found themselves form¬ ing an audience to this dangerous teacher. It was strictly table-talk our Lord here indulged in. His remarks, though not calculated to make either host or guests feel quite at their ease, were seasonable. Perhaps His advice to guests that they should modestly take the low¬ est place is rendered less needful in our own society, in which any obtrusive assumption of 86 THE GREAT SUPPER. precedence would be considered a breach of good manners. And yet there are still extant charac¬ ters which by kindred vices become the bane of all genial and sociable intercourse. There is the man who uses every dinner-table as an occasion for the exhibition of his own wit or knowledge or powers of conversation. There is the man who is uncomfortable and unhappy all the evening if he does not meet with full recog¬ nition of his importance. There is the woman who is offended if you ask her to sit at the same table with those whom she considers much her inferiors in station. There is the person who is always thinking of what is due by others to himself, never or rarely of what is due by him to others. To His host, our Lord, as He looks round on the richly-clad and well-conditioned guests, re¬ marks that his hospitality might be better ex¬ pended on those who had more need of it. Our Lord does not mean to discountenance friendly gatherings, which are, have been, and always will be among the highest pleasures in life, but He means to warn against heartless and hollow civilities,—against asking people to your house whom you really don’t care to see, but to whom 1 you must return the doubtful favour they have | shown you in giving you a similar invitation. Our Lord, that is to say, complains of what society itself is continually complaining of, that THE GREAT SUPPER. 8/ so much time, means, thought, and energy are j spent on the giving and returning of formal j civilities which every one knows to be hollow. Where a real advantage can be conferred by your hospitality, where the comfort of a stranger can be secured, where innocent and exhilarating pleasure can be bestowed, where you can be the means of forming friendships useful and satis¬ factory to yourself and others,—in such cases be given to hospitality; but on every account emancipate yourself from the dreary, wasteful, resultless round of entertainments which are likely to be as distasteful and heartless to those who receive them as those of which they are the recompense were to yourself. But this kind of talk began to touch the com¬ pany somewhat too nearly, and oneof them makes an unsuccessful attempt to put an end to the conversation by a pious remark that no one will be irreverent enough to criticize or throw ovei. The remark is skilful—sufficiently in the line of what had previously been said to warrant him in making it, sufficiently off the line to change the subject, and sufficiently solemn to prevent any from violently returning to the old subject. « Blessed,” he says, “ is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God,”—a most undeniable and edifying assertion, and which, for the mat¬ ter of it, might have fallen from the lips of our Lord Himself, but Pharisaic in this, that, under 88 THE GREAT SUPPER. the guise of piety, it was intended to turn the conversation from what was personal and profit¬ able to a vague generality which touched no¬ body. You can see the sanctimonious old hypo¬ crite solemnly shaking his head, and letting the words fall unctuously from his tongue. But with all our Lord’s benignity and forbearance, there was one thing He could not stand, and that was cant. He therefore does not answer the man as if he had been a simple soul longing for communion with God, but utters a Parable to remind him and the rest that a verbal appre¬ ciation of the blessedness of the kingdom was often joined with an entire refusal to enter it. A person with less delicate edge on his teach¬ ing and less skill to manage a. conversation, might have bluntly replied to the Pharisee, What avails it to extol with so much pious enthusiasm this blessedness, if all the while you yourself are rejecting it ? The Parable illustrates the difficulty of finding any to accept what all acknowledge to be desir¬ able : the lack of all obtrusive eagerness to take I the place next the host, when the host happens to be Divine ; and the wisdom of making a feast not for the well-to-do, who will rather excuse themselves, but for the needy, who will accept the invitation with glad surprise. Our Lord exposes the insincerity of the Messianic expectation which found utterance ip THE GREAT SUPPER. 89 such expressions as that of the sanctimonious guest, by exhibiting the actual treatment which was at the same time being given to God’s invi¬ tation to the Messianic feast. He utters a Para¬ ble which shows how hard God finds it to furnish with guests a table He has spread with the ut¬ most bounty. He shows that, notwithstanding first and second invitations, proclamations of God’s friendship and bounty by the prophets and by the Baptist, the Jews were so immersed in political and commercial schemes that they despised and ignored the happiness God had so carefully prepared for them. They professed to be waiting for the Messiah, but when He actually came and offered them places in His kingdom, they contemptuously declined. Of all those who never broke bread without exclaiming, “ Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the king¬ dom of God,” scarcely one was found to take his place at the table God actually spread before them. To furnish His table with guests God had to pass from the first invited and call in the outcasts among the Jews themselves, and after ransacking the lanes and slums of the city, had to go far afield among the highways and hedges of the outlying Gentiles that His bounty might not be wasted. The application of the Parable to our Lord’s contemporaries is sufficiently obvious. It has \ also obvious applications to ourselves which may 90 THE GREAT SUPPER, be briefly indicated. And as it is to the manner in which men deal with God s invitations that the Parable directs attention, rather than to the fact that the Messianic kingdom is suitably re¬ presented by a feast, it may be enough to say regarding this latter point, that those who actu¬ ally enter God’s kingdom find all their cravings satisfied, all their necessities provided for ; and that in the present person and work of Christ God’s kingdom was opened to men, and remains open now to us. The feast being prepared, whom will God in¬ vite to partake of it ? For admission to a feast is solely by invitation. You may have a strong desire to be at some entertainment which you know is to be given j you may have most urgent reasons for wishing to be there; your happiness for some time to come may, so far as you can judge, depend upon your presence ; and yet you can do nothing but wait for an invitation. The idea of going unasked is not once thought of; your presence or absence depends entirely on the will of another person. If they wish your company, or think it advisable to ask you, that decides the matter. You may see invitations which others have received, but you cannot beg, buy, or borrow these. Unless one comes to yourself, you remain outside, excluded from the company you crave, ignored by the set you long to be in, prevented from pursuing your most THE GREAT SUPPER. 91 warmly cherished plan. The same rule applies to the feast of the Parable. There is a “ not transferable ” impressed on every invitation is¬ sued. It must come to yourself from God, or it is invalid and a forgery. If it were known that only three men in a generation were admitted to intimacy with God, and that all others were omitted, passed by, and left in exclusion, with what envy would these three men be looked upon. Or if it were known that a small, indefi¬ nite number were chosen in each generation, and that for each of them it was settled at the age of thirty by some distinguishing mark ap¬ pearing on their person, we should then feel how completely we were dependent on the will of God in this matter. Yet we are as dependent on His invitation as this would imply. If God has prepared nothing for you, what can you do ? If God does not desire that you be provided for, if no place is set apart for you at this feast, it He has not had you in view in making it, what can you do to mend matters ? Do not think of salvation as a thing ther e , ready for you, when¬ ever you choose to go and take it. It depends on God’s invitation whether any good awaits you. You have first to discover whether God in unmistakable words invites you or not. Those to whom it was first intimated that the supper was ready, had previously been prepared for this announcement, They were the Jews, 92 THE GREAT SUPPER. the well-instructed, Messiah-expectant Jews. They were persons who might seem to be on friendly terms with the host, and had no appear¬ ance of destitution. We must look for their counterpart in men whose need of salvation does not lie on the surface, whose sins are not going before them to judgment, and crying out in the hearing of all, but who rather seem to be on terms of amity with God, and have no difficulty in believing that they are invited to His banquet. That which exhibits the true character of these men is their actual treatment of a present invita* tion; not what they said about it, not the flat¬ tering terms in which they replied to the host, but their conduct when summoned to come now to the feast. It is this which marks off the real friend of God from him whose spurious devotion enables him to ejaculate, as he thinks of a future and heavenly state, “ Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” We are all pre¬ pared to utter such an otiose sentiment; but the pious contemplation of heavenly blessedness is one thing, the entrance upon such friendships and habits as make us capable of it is quite another thing. The man who provoked the Parable was not saying what he did not feel: his feeling was present, but it was merely senti¬ mental, with no result in action. The Parable gives three specimens of the grounds on which men refuse the invitation of THE GREAT StJPPEk. 93 God, and of the terms in which they couch their refusal. I. The first says : “ I have bought a piece of ground, and must needs go and see it. I pray thee have me excused.” No doubt he had seen the ground before he bought it, but it was a much more interesting sight now. A piece of ground, very poor-looking in itself, becomes at¬ tractive to a new purchaser. He can now men¬ tally divide it out and plan its crops or its buildings. This man of the Parable had not been of so much consequence in the world when he first accepted the invitation. He still sees the desirableness of maintaining friendship with the host; but his invitation does not now seem so attractive as it did before he was a land- owner. He endeavours, therefore, with a show of courtesy to set up an opposing necessity. It is not, he says, that he does not desire to accept the invitation, not at all; the host will quite misconceive him if he thinks he is not dying to come ; but necessity compels him to look after his property. He jnust go and take it over, and make arrangements about its use. He is extremely sorry, but so it is. The invitation of God comes inopportunely to the man who is enjoying the first pleasures of proprietorship. He feels himself to be a solid part of this world, and is disposed to resent anything which reminds him that there are claims more pressing than even those of his 94 THE GREAT SUPPER. recent investment. It will now appear which possession the owner thinks most substantial and finds most attractive, the bit of land or the friendship of God. He tries to persuade himself he has a regard for God too, and is compelled for a little to defer the manifestation of that regard. These are ominous necessities indeed which grow up between a man and God, and prevent him from enjoying God’s friendship. And yet do you not constantly find men speak¬ ing of the necessity of postponing God’s will and work to the world’s business ? Do not men on all hands betray that inwardly they put earthly possessions first, God second ? They profess to be compelled to do so, and to be sorry they are compelled ; and do not see that nothing com¬ pels them but their own likings and will. 2. The second refusal was worded : “ I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to prove them. I pray thee have me excused.” This man merely announces his intention, assuming that there can be no doubt of its propriety. However disappointed the host is, he must see that the guest’s conduct is justifiable. This guest does not stay to explain the urgency; he does not even condescend to say that there is a necessity; simply states that he goes, as if every one must at once recognise the reason^ ableness of his conduct. He is so absorbed that The great supper. . 95 he does not even perceive the claims the host has upon him. Of how many men in their prime does this man stand as the representative ; men so en¬ grossed in the business or pursuits of the world that they positively do not know that God has any claims upon their time,—so busy in pushing forward mercantile or scientific or literary or political or military affairs, that it never once occurs to them that there are other objects for the sake of which these affairs should be for a time suspended. All men appreciate what con¬ tributes to bodily comfort, to convenience of moving from place to place, to rapidity in at¬ taining a competence ; and those arts and skilful applications of science which are daily with in¬ creasing success contributing to these ends, come to be almost worshipped by us. There is a palp¬ able utility which imparts a dignity to the cul¬ tivation of the arts which enlarge and beautify life, and few escape the temptation to ascribe to them even greater power than they possess. When we do choose them as our pursuit in life, and discover the real wonders they work, and the mysterious and apparently limitless powers that lie in them, we are fascinated. To check a man in the launching of some great undertaking which is to bring material advantage to a city or country, to recall him from the abstraction of deep research, or the anxiety of fine and pro- 96 TIlE GREAT SUPPER. longed experiment, to interrupt him in a cal¬ culation of some large financial scheme, to in¬ vite him to curtail the time he gives to business for the sake of entering more fully into the en¬ joyment of fellowship with God—this seems to many a man a mere impertinence, an absurdity bordering on madness. The objects for which men labour are to them so real and command¬ ing that they do not see that they are required to justify an entire devotion of themselves to these objects. A man’s life seems to be nobly spent in subduing the powers of nature to the - --use of his fellow-men ; but these powers, how mysterious and beautiful soever they be, are but as the five yoke of oxen when compared with that closest intercourse with the God of nature to which we are invited. And as this man would have had more temper to manage his young oxen in the morning had he treated his host \ with proper respect, and put friendship before self-interest, so there is no one of us who will not make a better use of the powers of this world if he himself is inspired with the thoughts and purposes which spring from fellowship with God. 3. The third who refuses to go to the supper gives as his reason ; “ I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.” These several grounds of refusal are instanced as illustrating that anything is considered sufficient ground, THE GREAT SUPPER. 97 and as showing also the various engagements which occupy men to the exclusion of fellowship with God, rather than because each has some distinctive and significant feature. If it be sup¬ posed that this refusal is distinctive, then it may be said that it reminds us that pleasure as well as business prevents us from paying due regard to the appeals of God. Marriage, if not always really so, is at least symbolically joyful; and it seems to this man that the host takes quite the wrong time to invite him. So, with a greater harshness than the former decliners, he almost rudely refuses the invitation. Many feel as if God’s invitations came at the wrong time. They think God might stand aside for a little. The thought of perfect purity, of a life of consecra¬ tion, of devotedness to the highest aims, of re¬ nunciation of all that is paltry and self-pleasing, comes inopportunely when they have just launched on a current that promises quiet domestic pleasure, and a happiness that tempts to forgetfulness of others’ woes and wants. The three refusals have this in common, that under a very thin disguise there lies a real in¬ difference to the feast. They had better engage¬ ments elsewhere—more exciting, profitable, and pleasant than conversation with their professed friend. His kind intentions are nothing to them : whatever he can have provided for their entertainment is beneath their notice. They H 9 8 THE GREAT SUPPER. can apologize afterwards, but meanwhile they must attend to more important matters. Had they really liked his society and heartily hon¬ oured him, they would have found it easy to go. The land would not have vanished before next day ; the cattle would have been proved in time to get to the feast; and even the wife would not have been an insuperable difficulty. But any engagement was enough to compete with one they wished to decline. And the Parable is spoken that men may be warned and may see clearly how amidst considerable profession of friendship with God there may exist a real distaste for His society and His pleasures. If there is anything else to attend to, it will receive our first attention. God is postponed to every¬ thing else. This fact, so obvious in the life of many of us, should let light in upon our true state of heart; and it will let light in where such light is honestly desired. It is a severe Parable, saying very pointedly to many now as to this sanctimonious person who provoked it, That is your real estimate of communion with God :__you talk a great deal about it, you extol spiritual pleasures, so that, to hear you, one would sup¬ pose you scarcely belonged to earth, but your _Jife reveals a very different state of matters. Judging by your verbal acknowledgments of the excellence and infinite superiority of spiritual to worldly things, one would expect to find you THE GREAT SUPPER. 99 absorbed in the work of Christ, but your actions give the lie to your words, and prove them to be pitiful cant—phrases with which you uninten¬ tionally blind yourself to your real likings. Judging, then, not from our words, not from the easy phrases that drop from our lips as readily as remarks about the weather, but judg¬ ing from our life and actions, where are we to say that our real pleasures lie ? What is it for which we will defer any engagement ? what is it we never forget, never neglect, never find tedious and an unwelcome interruption ? Let us know this; for it is not our profession that we ought to be spiritual, nor our acknowledg¬ ment that we ought to love God that avails; but what avails is our being spiritual and our actually loving God above all. When we think of the kingdom of God as a future state in which all shall be assembled as to a family gathering in the quiet and cool of evening, it is easy to express desire to be present there. Who does not feel some desire to see face-to-face the real person of the Lord, and have leisure to scan the features of this Host to whom he is so intimately linked ? Who does not desire to exchange thoughts with Him, and so to learn how per¬ sonal and searching is the interest the Lord has taken in him ? But these desires are apt to be merely sentimental, and before we trust them they must be tested by the actual use we ' ' ' ~ ■ ■- ' ‘ < i - *-7 ; , : '■ : } f £ p t < Ay t \jL^^^ 1