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Prodigal Son 

A MONOGRAPH. 



EXCURSUS 

ON 

CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER, 

O. B. WILLCOX, 

STONE PROFESSOR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY AND SPECIAL 
STUDIES IN CHICAGO THEOLOGICAL^ 



AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, 

No. 150 Nassau Street, 

New York. 




\% c 10i 






COPYRIGHT, 1S90, 
AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 




CONTENTS. 



Page. 

The Parable 7 

Luke's Eeasons for Inserting It, ....... 9 

Parties Ee presented by the Two Sons, ... 10 

Attitude of Jesus Toward the People, 11 

Use of Miracles, .13 

Changed Attitude of the Pharisees Toward Jesus, . . 14 

The Three Parables of the Trilogy 17 

A Chief Object of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, . 18 

Commencement of the Parable 19 

Motives of the Younger Son, 20 

Gradual Growth of Evil in Him, 24 

What " Substance" He Wastes, .... 27 

Momentum in Souls, . 28 

Who Was the " Citizen" ? 31 

'•• Filled" —not " Fed," 33 

Coming to Himself, 36 

Nothing Moral in His First Utterance, ..... 37 

Our Lord's Object in That, ..... 38 

Unsound Views of God's Attitude Toward the Guilty, . 42 

Important Omission by the Prodigal, 44 

True Character of the Elder Son, 49 

Character of the Pharisees, „ 50 

Christ's Opinion of Them, . . ... . 51 

Why the Elder Son Eemained, . 52 

Dramatic Skill in Picturing the Servant, 54 

Elder Son Has No Use for " Father," 58 

Elder Son a True Pharisee 59 

His Spirit Toward His Brother, 01 

Jesus a Vigorous Hater, t>5 



CONTEXTS. 



EXCURSUS. 

1. Christ Taught as One Having Authority, , . 70 

2. He Pressed the Truth with Uncompromising Force. 73 

3. How He Taught Doctrines 75 

4. How He Taught by Silence 79 

5. How He Taught by Acts, 85 

The Conversation at the Well, 86 

6. His Use of the Old Testament 88 

7. Lessons from His Miracles 89 

8. His Use of Paradox and Solecism, 93 

9. His Skill in Exhibiting Character, 94 

10. His Word Pictures, 97 

11. His Style in Other Eespects, 99 

12. His Illustrations from Familiar Objects, . , . 101 

13. His Use of the Parable 102 

14. How He Draws Out His Hearers 106 



ILLUSTRATION. 

For Explanation, 107 

For Impressing Truth, . . . . 108 

For Awakening Sympathy, 109 

Christ the Grand Illustration, Ill 

All the Messianic Prophecies Blend in Him, . . . 112 



PREFACE. 



The parable of the Prodigal Son has long been a favor- 
ite study with the author. It is therefore now impossi- 
ble to recall and duly credit the source of every sugges- 
tion here used. Not a few fruitful hints of the story, 
which had occurred, in the author's studies, to himself, 
were subsequently found in various commentaries. These 
it was not thought necessary to acknowledge. In all 
instances, however, in which suggestions could be traced 
to those to whom they were due, credit has been given. 
Thanks are especially due to Eev. Dr. W. H. Willcox, 
of Maiden. Mass.. for very much and most valuable aid. 



CHICAGO THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 
January, 1890. 



THE PARABLE. 



Luke xv : 11-32. 



And he said, A certain man had two sons : And the 
younger of them said to his father. Father, give me 
the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided 
unto them his living. And not many days after the 
younger son gathered all together, and took his jour- 
ney into a far country, and there wasted his substance 
with riotous living. And when he had spent all, there 
arose a mighty famine in that land ; and he began to be 
in want. And he went and joined himself to a citizen 
of that country ; and he sent him into his fields to feed 
swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with 
the husks that the swine did eat : and no man gave unto 
him. And when he came to himself, he said, How many 
hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to 
spare, and I perish with hunger. I will arise and go to 
my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned 
against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy 
to be called thy son : make me as one of thy hired ser- 
vants. And he arose, and came to his father. But 
when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him. and 
had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed 
him. And the son said unto him, Father. I have sinned 
against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy 
to be called thy son. Bat the father said to his servants. 
Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him : and put a 



viii THE PARABLE. 

ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet : and bring hither 
the fatted calf, and kill it ; and let us eat. and be merry : 
for this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, 
and is found. And they began to be merry. Now his 
elder son was in the field : and as he came and drew nigh 
to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called 
one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. 
And he said unto him, Thy brother is come ; and thy fa- 
ther hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received 
him safe and sound. And he was angry, and would not 
go in : therefore came his father out, and entreated 
him. And he answering said to his father, Lo, these 
many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any 
time thy commandment ; and yet thou never gavest me a 
kid, that I might make merry with my friends : but as 
soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy 
living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted 
calf. And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me. 
and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should 
make merry, and be glad : for this thy brother was dead, 
and is alive again ; and was lost, and is found. 



Yhe Prodigal §on. 



In the common judgment of Biblical schol- 
ars this parable is the gem of the whole se- 
ries uttered by our Lord. While its rich truths 
have fed the mind of the world, the pathos of 
the story has melted its way into the heart. 
Had the Great Teacher long been elaborating 
it, or did it fall, at the moment, from his 
lips, perfect as a dewdrop in its beauty ? The 
query can only be added to the multitude of 
others revolved by John Foster. "I go through 
life," he said, "treasuring up questions to be 
answered in heaven." 

It seems to have been for two reasons that 
the "beloved physician," Luke, to whom alone 
we owe the report of the parable, stored it 
among the materials for his work. 

First, this is the gospel of contrasts. 1 And 



1 These are, in truth, so mimerous in the biography by Luke 
as to lead us through a ceaseless succession of lights and shades. 
Most of them are preserved only by him. See the doubts of Zacha- 
rias (1 :18), and the faith of Mary (1 :38), the child Jesus and the 
doctors in the temple (2 :41— 46), the Baptist's contrast of himself 



10 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

what more natural than that lie should seize 
with eagerness a parable which so exquis- 
itely contrasts the broken-hearted swineherd 
with the immaculate elder brother? 

But, for a second reason, Luke would gladly 
avail himself of this parable. Matthew photo- 
graphs the Master as the Royal Lawgiver, 
Mark as the Mighty Worker of miracles, John 
as the Son of God. Luke pictures Him as the 
Friend of Man. 1 From the angels' song of peace 
and good will at Bethlehem, to the ascension, 
in which (as no other evangelist has recorded), 
"while He blessed them, He was parted from 
them and carried up into heaven/' it is as the 
benignant Human Friend that He looks out 
on us in the third gospel. And where, more 

with Christ (3 : 16), Christ and Satan on the mount (4 : 1-12), Naa- 
man and the woman of Sarepta, and the lepers and widows of Is- 
rael (4 : 25-28), the Baptist's disciples fast, Christ's not, (5 : 33). 
new wine and old wine-shins (5 :37), woes added to blessings (6 :24- 
26), the beam and mote in the eye (6:4:2), the two foundations 
(6:47), the Baptist an ascetic, Jesus not (7:34), Simon and the 
woman who was a sinner (7 :39), Jesus amidst the hired mourners 
(8 :53), Chorazin and Capernaum (10 :13), Mary and Martha (10 :39- 
42), Ninevites and Jews (11 :31), faithful and faithless servants 
(12 :47), the hundred sheep, one lost (15 :3), the ten pieces of money, 
one lost (15 :8), the prodigal and his brother (15 :li), the rich man 
and Lazarus (16:19-31), the thankful and thankless lepers (17:18), 
the Pharisee and publican (18 :P— 14), the servants with the pounds 
(19 : 12), the tears and hosannas on Olivet (19 : 37), the rich and the 
poor widow at the treasury (21:1), the good Samaritan and the 
priest and Levite (10:30-37), the penitent and blaspheming 
malefactors (23:39). 

These vivid chiar-oscuro contrasts, lighting up the narrative 
with their Correggio-like effects, seem almost to lend color to the 
legend (drawn bv Ap. York, as quoted in Smith's Bible Diction- 
ary, from Nicephorus. ami from the Menology of the emperor Basil), 
that Luke was an artist as well as physician. One of these word- 
pictures, that of the hired mourners scoffing: at Jesus, is an ad- 
mirable scene for a painter. The mercenary performers, sud- 
denlv checking their groans and wails to strike attitudes and 
make grimaces at the calm, majestic Stranger, remind one of Ma- 
caulav's picture, from "Comus," of Milton's genius surrounded by 
the buffoons of the Restoration. "Amidst these that fair muse 
was placed, like the chaste ladv of the Masque, lofty, spotless and 
serene, to be chattered at and pointed at and grinned at by the 
whole rout of satvrs and goblins." 

1 Bernhardt "Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament. 5 



THE PRODIGAL SON. H 

beautifully thau iu the sceue of the father 
falling on the neck of the returning prodigal, 
is our Lord shadowed forth to us as the Friend 
of Man? 

Do the two sons in the parable represent 
the Jews and the Gentiles? The true answer 
to this question, much debated, would seem 
to be that the elder brother and the prodigal 
stand for any persons, anywhere, who share 
in their spirit. 1 Like a geologic specimen 
broken from the seam at which two different 
strata unite, the story epitomizes two vast sec- 
tions of human life and character. So far 
forth as the Jeiv on the one side and the Gen- 
tile on the other fell into these sections, they 
find their types in the prodigal and his brother. 2 

But to study the geologic specimen most in- 
telligently we must see it "in situ" — in con- 
nection with the bed-rock from which it was 
broken. And, to discover the first and most 
natural aim of Jesus in this parable, we must 

1 "Who is this elder son?" The question was once asked in an 
assembly of ministers at Elberfeldt, and Daniel Krummacher 
made answer, "I know him very well. I met him only yester- 
day." "Who is he?" they asked eagerly, and he replied solemnly, 
"Myself." He then explained that on the previous day. hearing 
that a very gracious visitation of God's goodness had been received 
by a very ill-conditioned man, he had felt not a little envy and 
irritation. 

2 But, if the parable represents Jews and Gentiles, it must be 
only by indirect suggestion. It is a maxim in science to assume 
no more causes than your phenomena require. The parable is a 
most natural and admirable reply to the cavil of the scribes and 
Pharisees. In rebuking them it finds its sufficient occasion. The 
elder son is so true a Pharisee, and the younger so true a publican, 
that no farther solution seems required. Alford, too fin loco), well 
says that the admission of Gentiles into Christ's church (as of 
the returning prodigal into the home) was not yet so disclosed that 
our Lord would represent them as of one family with the Jews. 
He adds that the Gentile should be the elder, the Jew not being 
constituted in his superiority till 2,000 years after the creation. 



12 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

return it to the occasion on which it was uttered. 

As He was slowly journeying and teaching 
in Perea, on his way to Jerusalem and the 
cross, the publicans and sinners, outcast and 
despised, whom no other rabbi would allow r 
to approach him, gathered about the Master. 1 

Here, as elsewhere, now as aforetime, the 
common people heard Him gladly. Simple 
souls as they were, they loved Him for what 
was really the profoundness of his view T of 
humanity. Shallow rabbis and scribes were 
intent on the incidentals of mankind, on office, 
wealth, and reputation. But Jesus, with Divine 
insight, looking through to the imperishable 
worth and essential dignity of man as man, 
apart from his accidents, led the poorest and 
guiltiest of his countrymen to feel that "one 
touch of nature makes the whole world kin." 2 
They felt that He "found" them, that He came 
home to their inmost life. 

He dealt plainly with their sins. But, as a 
friend who could be trusted, a teacher who 
brought down to their understanding a world 
of such truth as had never dawned before on 
their vision, He won their deepest love. In 
reaching them He came closer to the core of 
humanity than in dealing with classes of men 
more deeply enmeshed in the conventionali- 

1 De Wette (Handbuch zum N. T.) renders the imperfect, r\<rav 
Zyyl£,ovTe<;. es pflegten sich zu nahcrn. 

2 Though this word " touch" (Troilus and Cressida, Act III., 
Sc. 3.) probably means blemish (Old English tache). the common 
meaning given it is no serious perversion. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 13 

ties of the time. The austerity of Shammai 
and the liberality of Hillel were alike nothing 
to them. The Pharisaic slave to tradition, 
the scoffing Sadducee, the time-serving Hero- 
dian, looked on them from afar. The lowly 
range and narrow vision of their minds kept 
them nearer the heart of things than the sect, 
proud of its learning, which scorned them as 
knowing not the law (John 7:49). They knew 
that, as guilty, they needed a salvation. They 
felt that, as helpless, they needed a friend. They 
were steel to the magnetism of Jesus. 

And that He sought and found them was 
the crowning glory of Him and his Economy. 
His reply to the Baptist's question (Matt. 11:5) 
as to his Messiahship has seemed, to many, 
a strange anti-climax. Why, after pointing 
John's messengers up the sublime ascent of 
his miraculous wonders, the gift of sight to 
the blind, of speed to the lame, of health to the 
leper, of hearing to the deaf, yes, even to the 
sheeted dead of power to arise and go forth in 
the vigor of life, does He drop to so easy and 
commonplace a matter as the preaching of the 
gospel to the poor? Could not any one do that? 
But in this was the very pinnacle of the climax. 

"Miracles," says John Foster, "were the great 
bell of the universe, rung to call attention to 
the sermon that was to follow." The bell was 
soon to cease. Its echoes would soon die to 
silence. But the gospel it introduced would 



11 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

sound on forever. And, after centuries of aris- 
tocratic exclusiveness and pride and contempt 
of untitled humanity, that the poor should be 
invited into the brotherhood of God's great 
family was a monumental proof of the Messiah- 
ship of Jesus to which all miracles were but 
pedestal. This invitation opened the golden 
gate of a new era to the world. 

Little the " lords, high captains, chief estates 
of Galilee," the Roman statesmen, or the phil- 
osophers of Greece, imagined that in the 
preaching of this Friend of publicans and sin- 
ners was the germ of intelligence and power 
for the people, of free government for the ages 
to come. The broadest, grandest, most benefi- 
cent civilization of our century is the forest 
from that single seed. There was a power in 
the preaching of Jesus which, like the geologic 
forces that upheave the continents, is slowly 
raising the millions to-day into the political 
enfranchisement that is but a single incident 
of "the liberty of the glory of the children of 
God." 

"And both the Pharisees and the scribes mur- 
mured, saying, This man receiveth sinners and 
eateth with them." Upon this word "eateth" 
falls a heavy emphasis. We must bear in mind 
the oriental practice of reclining at meals. To 
lie side by side with a man from whom a rabbi 
would have shrunk as from the touch of fire, to 
allow his head, perhaps, to fall on one's bosom, 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 15 

as did that of the beloved disciple at the Sup- 
per, was a different matter from sitting, in our 
fashion, next him at the table. 1 

The Pharisees and scribes seem not to snspect 
the moral weakness they show in their fear of 
contamination from the "sinners." In Benja- 
min West's painting of "Christ Healing the 
Sick," Peter stands with his hand on his nos- 
trils, dreading infection from the diseased 
around him. A true type, so far forth, of the 
Pharisee. But Jesus, in the foreground, with 
outstretched hand in healing, is as fearless of 
taking in contagion as is the morning sun of 
being darkened by the shadows of night. More 
than that, He is consciously as rich in power to 
breathe out purity as is the sun to drive gloom 
from before it. "Be not overcome of evil, but 
overcome evil with good." 

But the scribes and Pharisees had, in their 
cavil, a second and more malicious object. In 
the outset of our Lord's public ministry they 
seem to have looked on Him rather with indif- 
ference than with hate. They were eager for 
a Messiah who could deliver them from Roman 
tyranny. In the pretenders on whom, hitherto, 

1 On another occasion, at Levi's feast in Capernaum (Luke 5 :30), 
the scribes and Pharisees made the same complaint. Von Ger- 
lach's comment on Lazarus in Abraham's bosom (Evang. St. Lucae 
16: 22) is suggestive. '-'Lap, or rather breast, means the bulging 
front of the garment, which is occasioned by wrapping about the 
breast. Jesus here presents the blessedness of eternal life as in 
chap. 13 : 25-29, Matt. 8 : 11, 26 : 29, under the image of a feast 
with the patriarchs, as the most intimate, joyous communion of 
life with them. At this banquet the favorite of the father of the 
family (here the father of believers, Abraham,) after the fashion of 
the ancients, lies on the couch in such position that, when out- 
stretched, he leans on his breast." 



16 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

they had set their hopes, they had found only 
disappointment and confusion. But now had 
appeared one under whom possibly they might 
sweep out, with the besom of destruction, the 
oppressors who had fattened on the spoil of 
the land. More than the ancient glory of David 
and Solomon might return to the children of 
Abraham. In the golden splendor which the 
prophets had seen from afar, the chosen people 
of God might find their recompense for centu- 
ries of hardship and shame. There was at least 
enough in his favor to suggest such a hope. 

Accordingly, for more than the first year of 
the public ministry of Jesus the Pharisees looked 
on Him less inimically than later. Indeed, up 
to the feeding of the four thousand, some two 
years after his baptism, the tide of his popu- 
larity among his countrymen seems to have 
run toward the flood. They would have taken 
Him by force and made Him a king. But at 
that point was high-water mark. He would 
play no such role as that which the Jewish 
managers had assigned Him. They turned 
from Him with disgust and contempt. And 
since to this blight on their hopes He had 
added the exposure of their moral hollowness, 
when He pricked the bubble of their self- 
righteousness and their sacred name before 
the people, disgust and contempt gave way to 
the rage that sought his life. 

Gladly they would have blackened his repu- 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 17 

tation. Unblushingly, and doubtless with con- 
scious mendacity, they ascribed his miracles 
to the Evil One. Could a point for the adhe- 
sion of a calumny have been found on his 
purity, they would have besmeared it with the 
dripping feculence of their scandal. But it 
was something to say that He had his associa- 
tions among the dregs of society. It was some- 
thing to intimate that a man is known by the 
company he keeps. More than a year before 
this (Matt. 11:19) they had called Him a glut- 
tonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of 
publicans and sinners. It is evidently with a 
second thrust of the same envenomed weapon 
that they now add the sarcasm, "This man 
receiveth sinners and eateth with them." 

In reply, our Lord pronounces three parables. 
They are those of the Lost Sheep, the Lost 
Piece of Money, and the Prodigal Son. It can 
hardly be regarded as an accident that in 
the first of the three the loss is that of only 
one hundredth of the whole, in the second of 
one tenth, and in the third of one half. In 
this advance Jesus must have meant to empha- 
size the loss of these outcast countrymen of 
the Pharisees whom He would fain have won 
to himself and his Father. 

Nor is it without significance that in the 

first two parables of the trilogy the loss is that 

of an animal or a coin, while in the third it is 

that of a man and a beloved son. The first two, 

2 



18 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

"preluding some great tragedy,'' are as the 
propylaeum conducting us to the grandest 
structure of all the thirty parables, in which 
every "stone cries out of the wall, and the 
beam out of the timber answers it " with some 
rich and fruitful spiritual lesson. 1 

In the story of the sheep, and that of the 
coin, the interest is focused on the loss and 
restoration. We feel with the shepherd and 
the woman in their distress. We go with them 
in their anxious search through the wilds of 
the mountains and the rooms of the house. 
We are glad, too, in the recovery. Far away 
in our western homes and our later times, we 
are among the friends whom they call together 
to share their joy. 

There is no alien, like the elder brother, com- 
ing in from the field to glower jealously on the 
joy of either shepherd or housekeeper. All 
three parables, it is true, have part in our 
Lord's reply to the fling of his enemies as to 
his intimacy with the publicans. The first two, 
with their beautiful intimation, like an index- 
finger pointing heavenward, of the angels' joy 
over the lost soul recovered, carry their rebuke 
to the Pharisees. But the main object of those 
two is to hold forth the love of God to the 
wanderer. The main point of the third para- 
ble is not a repetition of those two, but the 

1 Godet remarks (in loco) that, while the first parable shadows 
forth to us the compassion of God for the lest soul, t lie second con- 
fers his sense of its value. We may add that the third includes 
both. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 19 

Pharisees' sanctimonious scorn of those who 
were their countrymen and their brethren. 

Jesus, here, turning more directly on his 
critics, " holds the mirror up to nature." First 
brightening the background of the picture with 
the love of the father embracing the prodigal, 
He sets out, in dark contrast, the figure of the 
elder son. The portrait, as we shall see, is a 
" composite photograph," in which the harsh 
features of many Pharisees meet and blend. 
But, on his way to this object, our Lord in 
his word-picture so exquisitely paints the de- 
parture and return of the younger brother, 
with such touching pathos He describes the 
father's welcome, that the heart of the church 
universal has been drawn to the prodigal. To 
the parable, which might as well have been 
known as that of "The Jealous Brother," the 
prodigal has given a name. 

11. u A certain man had two sons." A painter 
is careful not only of the grouping of his 
figures, but of the number that he admits on 
his canvas. Too many of them, by overcroAvd- 
ing, would break the unity of the effect. There 
was no room in this parable for more than two 
sons. Two characters only were to be set in 
contrast, each with the other and both with 
the father. 

12. "And the younger of them." De Wette 1 
claims, without giving reasons, that the younger 



1 Handbuch (in loco). 



20 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

son is not a direct representative of the pub- 
licans. But why not? The parable is to be 
judged by its setting, by the circumstances 
that occasioned it. Our Lord's intimacy with 

publicans is the charge to which He is reply- 
ing. The scribes and Pharisees bring the charg 
To whom else than publicans on the one side, 

and scribes and Pharisees on the other, should 
his answer refer? 

For the dramatic consistency of the parable 

the younger son is selected as the prodigal. 
With no previous taste of any bitter vicissi- 
tudes, with his heart incessantly singing, "To- 
morrow shall be as this day and much more 
abundant." with eyes eager for adventures, and 
without a doubt of his capacity to rake the 
helm of his life for himself, he will embark with 
all sails set to the nattering breeze. 

"Father, give me the portion of substance that 
falleth to me." That the younger son i unlike 
the elder i is never allowed in the narrative to 
lose sight of this dear word father, is full of 
significance. Clearly it intimates to the Phar- 
isees that, equally with themselves, the pub- 
licans and sinners are children of the one Great 
Parent of us all. By nature they were that. 
"Forasmuch as we are also his offspring." (Acts 
17: 2S.i John's strong language as to the wicked, 
"children of the devil " il. John. 3: 10), refers not 
to the nature or being, but to the moral charac- 
ter. By overlooking this distinction many have 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 21 

been led to the false and harsh tenet that "God 
is a father to none but the elect." 

Why the authors of the Kevision should 
have substituted "thy goods " for "the goods " 
as it stands in King James' version, does not 
appear. 1 There is nothing in the Greek to 
require the change. But the objection to it 
lies deeper. The heart of this son is already 
beginning to cool toward his father. The dis- 
ease which will presently show its symptoms 
without, is already beginning to infect him 
within. He is leaning away toward a self- 
sufficient independence. He has not indeed for- 
gotten the word "father,'* but he is more in 
the mood of demanding the inheritance as a 
right than of filially seeking it as a gift. 
In that mood he would, of course, evade recog- 
nition of the father's right to the estate. Eather 
"the" than "thy" substance would accord with 
his feeling. 

This son is falling out of the sphere of mutual 
love and community of interest with his father. 
We have no evidence that, in the life above, 
any one of the redeemed will own or care to own 

1 T6 enLfiaWov fj.epos rrje ovaiag. De Wette renders it "das mir zuial 
lende Theil des Vermogens." 

Says Edersheim (2 : 259) and on Deut. 21 : 17, " The demand whicl 
he makes for the portion of the property falling to him is founded 
on the Jewish law of inheritance. The elder would receive two 
thirds, the younger one third, of all movable property." Indeed 
it is one of the finest points in the parable, which interpreters have 
left far too much under shadow, that these few words of the young- 
er son so skilfully steer clear of any recognition of obligation to the 
father. The son not only demands a portion of '• the " rather than 
"thy" goods, but the ivip&kkov, rendered "falleth to me," is 
adroitly chosen. It means substantially (see Thayer's lexicon) 
"belongeth to me." It descends to him, as he claims, by the duo 
course of things, by hereditary gravitation, with which the father's 
will has no concern. 



22 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

a particle of substance. Our jealous distinc- 
tions of "mine" and "thine" they have probably 
left behind forever. Each and every one is 
heir of the universe. His enjoyment of the 
universe is as full and intense as if he owned 
it alone. But from any such atmosphere of sub- 
lime unselfishness this younger son is descend- 
ing to the level of jealous rights and titles and 
fee-simples. The more complete, in that sense, 
his ownership, the less will he, in the true sense, 
own anything whatever. 

This son is tired of depending on daily gifts 
from the father. "Give us this day our daily 
bread," says the Master. It is that gifts re- 
ceived and thanks returned may be as shut- 
tles weaving us into close union with God. 
It is that the points of contact and of freshly 
imparted life may be multiplied. And it is that 
the soul may find its strength and safety in 
closely clinging at every moment to the Al- 
mighty. By the same gale through which an 
ivy clings inseparably to the wall a grape vine 
is torn from its trellis and hurled to the ground. 
The vine sends out its tendrils at long inter- 
vals — the ivy at every quarter-inch on the path- 
way of its growth. 

But this son would have, like the Rich Fool, 
instead of daily bread much food laid up for 
many years, that he may eat, drink, and bo 
merry. He would hang more loosely, if at all, 
on the father. He would have an "independent 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 23 

fortune.'' He does not see that, the more he 
gains of such substance without, the more mea- 
ger and hollow he becomes within. Like a 
youth among us, looking eagerly to a brilliant 
career of "success," he forgets that he will 
rise as a rocket rises, only by burning out its 
own intestines as it goes, till it bursts and 
falls, the empty and charred shell of what 
it was. 

By Jewish law a man might, if he chose, dur- 
ing his life-time, bestow his whole property 
on strangers. 1 Neither the elder nor the younger 
son had in this case, therefore, any absolute 
right to the estate. Though the younger son 
is too self-sufficient to ask the property as a 
gratuity, it is only as a gratuity that he can 
receive it. But, notwithstanding, the father 
" divided unto them his living." Unto them — 
then to the elder his two-thirds 2 as well as to 
the younger his one. The elder, however, 
receives his portion not till the death of his 
father. 

In the father's ready assent to the demand 
of the younger son Jesus points us to the tre- 
mendous and perilous fact of moral liberty. 
"Each poorest day," says Emerson, "is the 
confluence of two eternities." Yes, and it 
may be also the point from which two eter- 
nities diverge with their immeasurable des- 
tinies. 

1 Ederskeim 2-259. 

2 Edersheira, &.2S9. 



24 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

" Men think it is an awful sight 

To see a soul just set adrift 
On that drear voyage from whose night 

The ominous shadows never lift. 
But 'tis more awful to behold 

A helpless infant, newly born, 
Whose little hands unconscious hold 

The keys of darkness and of morn." 1 

Said Samuel J. Mills, when, in the hour of 
conviction and trembling, "the powers of the 
world to come " were borne in upon him, with 
the choice of destinies that they forced into 
his hand, "Would to God I were a dog!" 

A common view of the younger son's subse- 
quent course has been that it was the unfolding 
of a plan formed before asking for his share of 
the goods. But this misses a chief lesson of the 
whole story. "Xemo repente fit turpLSsamus." 
One object of the parable, as we conceive it, 
is to outline, first, the gradual lapse of a soul into 
sin, and its no less gradual recovery. The dis- 
ease works slowly within before the symptoms 
begin to appear. The fire that has smouldered 
at the center of the heap finds its way to the 
surface. This young man, when his love begins 
to swerve from his father and he asks for a 
separate ownership, has no suspicion of the 
issue. As his joy in the communion of hearts 
is gone, he tires of the community of goods. 
He woidd say no longer "our," but "my." He 
would hold whatever he holds at all under the 
dictate of his sole, irresponsible will. 

He is now relieved from the daily prayer for 

1 J. R. Lowell, "Extreme ruction." 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 25 

daily bread. And in the relief is the begin- 
ning of ruin. Faster and faster advances the 
inward alienation. Now, too, the silent rebuke 
of his father's contrasted example begins to be 
more than he can bear. In a certain Christian 
college a young lady resigned a position to which 
she had been appointed. "Is the work too hard 
for yon?" she was asked. "No, not at all," was 
her answer. "Is the salary, then, insufficient?" 
"No." "Why, then, do you resign?" "Well, 
to be frank, I find that the atmosphere aronnd 
me here is such that, if I remain, I must become 
a Christian. And that I am determined not 
to do." The atmosphere of the prodigal's home 
is such as, with a character like his, he can no 
longer endure. 

13. "And not many days after." The parable 
is the picture of a life-time. Within a few verses 
it covers years. It is like the fan that the fairy 
Paribanou, in the "Arabian Nights," gave to 
Prince Ahmed. When closed, it was a toy for 
a lady's hand. When spread, an army could 
rest under its shade. The "not many days," 
therefore, allow ample time for the growth of 
selfishness in the soul of the prodigal. And 
steadily it has grown till his whole inner life 
is saturated with it throughout. The aliena- 
tion from his home is complete. 

" The younger son gathered all together. " The 
glory of a man is to be a fount of blessing. Like 
a steam fire-engine, working with its tremen- 



26 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

dous energy before a burning building, and 
crying, as it were, to the hydrant "give," and 
to the building "take," he is to receive the gifts 
of Providence only that he may become the 
larger benefactor to men. The talons and claws 
of birds and beasts of prey turn inward. The 
human hand is made to open vide. Each is an 
object lesson. The younger son now bends him- 
self as abjectly as the miser to clutch and rake 
together for his own greed. He has lost al- 
ready much of the natural generosity of his 
youth. 

Matthew Henry is apt in his suggestion here, 
that they who depart from God venture and 
risk their all. Every farthing of his gather- 
ings this young man sets afloat on the wild ex- 
cesses .in which they will soon all sink together. 

When "he took his journey into a far country " 
he was not, like the wandering sheep, uncon- 
sciously straying. 1 It was a deliberate act of 
self-will. He was resolved to level down and 
dissolve by distance the sharp contrast between 
his father's spirit and his own. The "far coun- 
try " which a godless soul of our day puts 
between the Father and himself is the diver- 
sions and distractions of the world. Like the 
ostrich with her head in the bush, he thrusts the 
God who is "oat of sight " also "out of mind." 

The self-deception cannot last forever. A 
prisoner in the French Ba stile, who had re- 

1 Edersheim, 2: -2bS. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 27 

signed himself to Ms lot, was startled by the 
sight of a human eye intently watching him 
through a little aperture in the ceiling of his 
cell. In no corner was there any escape from 
it. He looked forward to evening for relief. 
But at sunset the dungeon was lighted, and 
all night long, as through the day, an eye was 
there, intent, unmoving, relentless, seeming 
to pierce his inmost life. He pined away under 
it as a torture. Yet there was no indignation 
in the eye — nothing to carry remorse to the 
heart of the prisoner. Let the world's distrac- 
tions be swept from around a godless soul, let 
him find himself, with no escape, under an eye 
aglow with the just indignation of abused and 
outraged love, and how must it rankle within 
him! 

"And there wasted his substance with riotous 
living." In the outer framework of the story, 
substance, of course, can mean nothing but the 
wealth he had received from his father. Wast- 
ing can mean nothing but wild prodigality 
in expending it. But the parable is not so shal- 
low as to reach only that. It is not so narrow 
in application as to touch only the spendthrift 
and the debauchee. There is included, also, 
the inner substance of the spiritual being, that 
capacity for conviction, affection, desire, resolve, 
aspiration, with which the soul, as an immor- 
tal creature, is endowed, and which, by god- 
lessness, may be wasted and ruined. The "ca- 



28 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

pacity for religion" ma}- be "extirpated by dis- 
use." 1 The soul may be caged in a bondage 
to the senses till it loses the use of its pinions. 
It may be dismantled and paralyzed till it falls 
prone in impotence, with its moral elasticity 
hopelessly lost. 

All this may be done without scandal in the 
outward life. It is a disease which has vice 
or crime as a mere symptom of one of its 
forms. In self-will and self-righteousness and 
covet ousness and pride it works within. Like 
ants in the East Indies, that pulverize the fiber 
of the timbers of a house, leaving the surface 
sound and smooth, it saps the soul's moral 
vitality and 

" Spreads a poison through the frame 
Without a deed that men can blame/' 

14. "And when he had spent all." We should 
think it quite needless, after mentioning that 
a man had fallen from a house, to add that he 
had struck the ground That follows as a thing 
of course. So our Lord does not pause to say 
that the prodigal did spend all — that this waste- 
ful career ended in exhaustion. But, none the 
less, there is a pregnant lesson in it. 

As in bodies, so in souls, there is an awful 
momentum. Once under headway, they hold 
on, especially in a downward career. lender 
the fearful gravitation in evil a man gathers 
force as he descends. In Chicago, not long since, 



1 Dr. Horace Bushnell. Sermons for the New Life, p. 1C5. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 29 

a ponderous iron tank, which had been hoisted 
to the top of a twelve-story building, broke 
through the floor. Plunging down through 
one story after another, it carried not only its 
own momentum, but that of the ruins it tore 
from every floor through which it passed, till 
with a tremendous crash it reached the ground. 
So does a man, plunging down through one 
restraint and warning after another, carry 
from them, each and all, an added and resist- 
less force. 

"There arose a mighty famine in that coun- 
try." At the crisis at which the soul discovers 
its emptiness the world most utterly fails. 
The famine was only "in that country." There 
was none of it in the prodigal's native land. 
There is in the world, as to any spiritual sup- 
plies, always a famine. The unhappy youth 
now only becomes aware of that which existed 
before. 

"And he began to be in want." As we have 
already seen (on v. 13), the parable is the 
picture of a life-time. As such it shows the 
gradual lapse of a soul to the depths of sin and 
woe. In this beginning to be in want we have 
another slip in the long, dark descent. The 
prodigal has not yet drunk to the dregs the 
bitter cup. He is in arrears as to his desires 
only. He will soon be so as to his necessities. 
He is taking only his first taste of misery. Up 
to this day he has reveled under sunny skies; 



30 THE PEODIGAL SON. 

but now the clouds begin to lower. He looks 
with a shudder down the dark vista opening 
before him. 

But the ease is not yet quite desperate. 
There is a recourse left. His pride, therefore, 
is unbroken. It stands against a humble return 
to his home, still stiff and strong. Pride is, 
in truth, the spinal column of a godless char- 
acter. It upholds whatever faculty begins 
to weaken and incline to righteousness. Or 
it is the stem that bears the weight of the 
whole evil growth. Though all be lost, pride 
still remains. In the winter of the soul, when 
the foliage of wealth and pleasure has been 
stript away, and harsh winds of adversity sweep 
through the branches, pride stands as the trunk 
in its lone desolation, unbending and defiant. 

15. "And he went and joined himself to 
one of the citizens of that country." He 
"went." Instead of returning on his footsteps 
homeward, he kept on in the same ill-omened 
direction in which he had traveled before. 
His back was still toward home. 

"And joined himself." The verb 1 means liter- 
ally glued himself. He stuck to him from 
whoni he sought bread. He was a drowning 
man clutching a straw. It implies, moreover, a 
cold reception. 

1 eKoWrjdr). "It was," says Godet (in loco), "as the publi- 
cans, whom the prodigal represents, adhered to their heathen 
Roman masters." Also, u the unhappy wretch is a sort of appen- 
dage to a strange personality.'' He adheres to him as murually 
foreign substances are glued together- ••But," says Bengel, "he 
did not himself become a citizen." 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 31 

Tlie citizen would gladly have shaken him off. 
How different, as he afterward turns his steps 
homeward, is the reception he has from his 
father! He meant only to "see life" for a 
while in the strange land, and then return 
home. He sees more of it than was in his plan. 
The pitiless trap has sprung and caught him. 
"His own iniquities shall take the wicked him- 
self and he shall be holden with the cords of his 
sins." (Proy. 5:22). 

Who is this citizen? Trench 1 intimates, some 
more inveterate sinner, and quotes Bengel as 
suggesting Satan himself. At all events, he 
is no stranger, but a permanent dweller in 
the far land. He has no concern with the 
father's house, no thought of ever seeing it. 
So, as one drifts into evil, he drifts into asso- 
ciations with those who were evil before him. 
Like seeks like. The soul lets go above and 
takes hold below. She makes fast to those 
whose downward momentum is heavier and 
swifter than her own. 

The citizen who would be willing enough to 
cast off the prodigal completely, in contemptu- 
ous pity so far relents that 

"He sent him into his fields to feed swine." 
"Be off, vagrant," that is, "to the edge of my 
lands! Make no show of your woe-begone face 
at my table or about my house. Shift for your- 
self amongst the swine." It is the sort of sym- 

1 "On the Parables," p. 333. 



32 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

pa thy that the world, everywhere, out of Chris- 
tendom, too often in it, has for the unfortu- 
nate. If guilt has mingled with the ill-fortune, 
adding to the misery of the case, and therefore, 
one would think, pleading harder for compas- 
sion, so much the more stony is the world's 
face, the more heartless its tone. 1 

This feeding swine was not only a deep and 
harrowing humiliation. To a Jew, such as was, 
presumably, the prodigal, it involved sin as 
well. A curse rested on it. A prohibition, sup- 
posed to have originated with the Maccabean 
Sanhedrim, 2 rendered the ownership, and by im- 
plication the feeding, of these animals unlaw- 
ful for every Israelite. To a Jew no lower deg- 
radation was easily conceivable. This brings 
up to us another truth. Iniquity has grappling 
hooks for the soul. A man half detected in 
crime, in the desperate struggle to extricate him- 
self adds a lie, a forgery, or a murder. Like one 
floundering in a bog, by every effort at escape he 
defiles himself more thoroughly with the mire. 

16. "And he would fain have been filled with 
the husks that the swine did eat." "Would fain" 
gives but half the meaning of the Greek word. 3 

1 An incident related by Mr. C. L. Brace, of the Children's Aid 
Society, of New York, will serve as an illustration. Meeting a 
poor girl who had wandered from her home in the country, and, 
after a wild life, was in wane and distress, he wrote to her father, 
informing him of her penitence and eagerness to return. The 
reply was substantially—" Dear Sir, my daughter had as good a 
home as child could wish. She left it, disgracing herself and 
her friends, and shall never enter my house again/' 

2 Edcrsheim, 2 : 2G0. 

3 Zne&vnei. It isused of Lazarus (Luke 16 : 21) hungering after the 
rich man's crumbs, and Luke 17 : 22, " Ye shall desire to see one 
of the days of the Son of man.'' 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 33 

He longed, in his famished condition, for any re- 
lief from the pangs of starvation. It hints that 
awful hunger of the soul, compared with which 
the craving of the body is the weakest relish. 

Various writers 1 have pointed to this word 
"filled" as differing from "fed." Significantly the 
Great Teacher chose the word. As little as the 
pods of the carob tree, 2 the food of swine, with 
some sweet savor, but little nutriment, can 
feed the body, can the world's wealth or pleas- 
ure feed the soul. Indeed, the world, or the 
Evil One who acts through it, serves us a still 
worse turn. When the anarchists of the Com- 
mune had fired the buildings of Paris, the fire- 
men, bribed by them, were detected in throw- 
ing petroleum from their engines on the flames. 
So Satan deals with the fires of passion and 
remorse and despair that rage in a human soul. 

And this thought of filling himself, cheating 
himself into the idea of being fed, with the 
husks, is a hint to us of the greatness of the being 
of man. An animal is content with coarse food, 
finds his pleasure in that, because he has no re- 
serves of a higher life in his own nature which 
such food fails to supply. He is down near the 
level of inanimate things. We can pour happi- 
ness into him and pour it out, as we do water 
with a pitcher. Give him his fodder and he can 

1 Stilla, Ambrose, Augustine, quoted by Trench, -Parables," 
p. 325. 

2 Keparla. These, says Lange, grew in Egypt and Syria to 
the length of a foot. The pods were given to swine. The bean, 
or kernel, was the smallest weight used by Jewish tradesmen, 



34 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

hardly be miserable. Take it away and he can 
hardly be anything else. 1 So, too, with the ani- 
mal part of onr own being. Keject all luxuries 
for which the body never asks as food, all 
costumes for which it will never thank us as rai- 
ment, and the costly mansions, more than it 
needs for shelter, come down to what for its 
own sake alone it requires, and how easily we 
could find wherewith to live ! 

These all are supplies demanded by the vast, 
deep, hungering soul. She attempts to crowd 
herself down within the body, to feed upon the 
food of that. The place is too narrow, the sup- 
plies are too small, for her being. And so see 
her struggling by unnatural appetites and ex- 
travagant indulgences to expand it. We call 
these the sins of the flesh. A groundless slan- 
der on the flesh! It is not the body that wants 
them. It is this- unseen, but gigantic, occupant 
of the body, which, when the body is full to re- 
pletion and nausea, insists upon more. One 
Roman enrperor wished for the neck of a crane 
that he might taste his delicacies the longer. 
Another brought his jaded palate to the habit 
of throwing off his food before digestion, that 
he might enjoy many meals in a day. Still 
others invented numberless and nameless forms 
of vice. In our own day men go mad with drink 

1 The English orator and wit, Sheridan, is said to have once 
asked his friends at table. " Shall we drink like men now or like 
beast-?"* Astonished and indignant, they answered. "Like men, 
of course."' "Ah. well, then," -aid he, "we shall soon be all tipsy. 
No beast will drink more than he needs.*' 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 



35 



to drown their sorrows. What have we here hut 
the soul, in her awful need, attempting to be 
"'filled" with the body's beggarly elements? 

"And no man gave unto him." This, it has 
been claimed 1 in view of the famine in the land, 
implies that he was denied even the husks. But 
that seems overstrained. As the prodigal cer- 
tainly fed the swine, and at a distance from their 
owner, he could help himself from their food. 
"No man gave unto him " food fit for a man. 

In his fearful descent he has now touched 
bottom. He is at the edge of starvation. Like 
a man driven by a tornado to the brink of a cliff, 
like one drifting out helplessly, on an ebb-tide 
at midnight, into a howling ocean- storm, he 
awakes to the full horror of the scene. The 
gloom is absolute, his home is far away below 
the horizon. No helper in earth or heaven ap- 
pears. Only the pitiless powers of darkness 
seem closing in around him. And conscience 
whispers sternly from within that his own guilt 
has brought its penalty. 

"I, I only," he is forced to acknowledge, "am 
author of it all!" 

"I flung away 
The keys that might have open set 
The golden sluices of the day, 
But clutch the keys of darkness yet. 

I hear the reapers, singing, go 
Into God's harvest. I that might 

With them have chosen, here below 
Grope, shuddering, at the gates of night !'* 

1 De Wette. Handbuch (in loco). " Niemand gab ihm davon.*' 
Von Gerlach says, "In dieser Zeit dor Notli. waivn seinem llemi 
die Schweine wichtiger als der Hirt." 



36 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

What now shall he do? But one thing is pos- 
sible. Let us, still remembering that the par- 
able is the picture of a life-time, that the un- 
happy youth has been perhaps years in his 
descent, trace the slow course of recovery. 

17. "But when he came to himself." This has 
been often taken as implying a full return to a 
right state of heart. "To come to one's self and 
to come to God," says Trench, "are one and 
the same thing." Xot so, as we apprehend, at 
all. His first utterance, as we shall see, gives 
no hint of that. 

Coming to himself was simply coming to his 
senses. He had been beside himself. He had 
been perpetrating a slow suicide. He discovers 
the fact. He begins to act like a rational being, 
with an intelligent view to his own welfare. 

"How many hired servants 1 of my father's 
have bread 2 enough and to spare, and I perish 3 
here 4 Avith hunger!" We have, in all this, 
a hint of the Divine method in the arrest of 
souls in sin. The misery which sin has brought 
on the prodigal is made to work toward his 
redemption from sin. It has been illustrated 
from the ocean. Against the sea, charging with 

1 MiWioi, hired, not SoSAoi, slaves. Their condition was like his own 

Even such a servant as lie had, in his father's house, 
bread and to spare. "The hired servants," says Dean Pluraptre, 
'• are obviously those who serve God not in the spirit of filial love, 
but from the hope of a reward." The prodigal has sunk too 
low in his sensuous life, his spiritual vision is too much bleared, to 
see the freedom and gladness of love. 

2 Bread, not husks. God's poorest supplies are better than the 
world's best. 

3 \-6\\viJLai, middle voice, "am letting myself perish." 

4 'nSrj in this wretchedness, so different from his home. This word 
ie not in King James' version. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. ^< 

the heavy shock of billow after billow, stands 
the solid breastwork of the shore. But what 
reared the sandy breastwork? Only the sea it- 
self. With the surges that dash on the walls 
of its prison it has built the walls higher and 
higher. Guilty indulgences build barriers 
against themselves. They waste a man's re- 
sources. The} 7 break down the health with 
which he has enjoyed them. If not with a soul 
recovered, then with a body blighted, they com- 
pel him to pause, perhaps to turn. 

This arrest, too, brings a man to self -recogni- 
tion. He has, before it, been dazzled by his 
surroundings or his prospects. "Who will show 
us any good?" has been his constant cry. Into 
the depths of his own being he has never looked. 
The tremendous question of his errand from his 
Creator in the world is one that he has never 
asked. When first he sets himself before the 
mirror of his own reason, when he probes him- 
self with the query, "Who and what am I, and 
whither tending?" he returns at least to sanity. 1 
But not at once, perhaps — not of necessity at 
all — does he advance one step farther. 

This first exclamation of the prodigal has not 
a moral sentiment in it. There is no confession 
of his sin, no sign of contrition, no plea for par- 
don, no aspiration for a better life. It is only 

1 Dr. N. W. Taylor, of New Haven, Ct., used sometimes to dis- 
cuss the theological puzzle, " How does one make his first start 
toward Christ? "As a sinner?— then it is not a start toward Christ. 
As a Christian ?— then it is not his tirst start.'' His reply was that it 
is as a man made in God's image, in the use of the native moral 
powers that God gave him. 



38 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

the lioarse, IioIIoav cry of his human nature in 
her anguish. He is starving. He remembers 
where food can be had. For the present it is 
nothing more. If we see in the whole story the 
picture of a life-time, Are may well allow an am- 
ple period for the advance from the 17th to the 
18th yerse. By taking these verses as both 
uttered at the same moment, we lose sight of 
the ascent of the prodigal from one spiritual 
plane to another. That ascent is as gradual as 
we saw (v. 13) his lapse into evil to be. 

By making him start at so low a point as the 
wants of his animal nature, our Lord beautifully 
teaches how low He gladly stoops to recover a 
lost soul. So soon as any feeling of even want 
or suffering arises, He reaches down to lay hold 
on that. And, responding to it, by the contrast 
with his own perfections He awakens the soul 
to a sense of sin and need of pardon. u Now 
mine eye seeth Thee; wherefore I abhor myself 
and repent in dust and ashes."(Job 12 : 6). 

In all his shame and gloom he has still kept in 
memory this dear word "father." Without the 
use of it he never speaks either to him or of him. 
Our Lord, by constantly putting it into his lips 
through the story, is steadily reminding the 
Pharisees, to whose scoff (v. 2) He is replying, 
that the publicans and sinners were from the 
same Father with themselves. But the word is, 
though in a good sense, Janus-faced. It looks 
not only toward the Pharisees, but toward the 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 39 

prodigal himself. His own use of it — ah! what 
a flood of bitter memories it brings rushing in 
upon him! His innocent boyhood, his happy 
home, the love of his father, his base return for 
it, his rich desert of all he has suffered, the place 
he must be content to take if he shows his dis- 
honored face again among the friends of his 
youth — how they roll as billows over him! Yet 
not to submerge him in despair. Presently 
they lift him rather, as a ground-swell, toward 
a higher life. 

18. "I will arise and go to my father, 
and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned 
against heaven and in thy sight." "I will 
arise," from among the swine. He seems aware 
that that alone will be no easy or insignificant 
act. "And go unto my father" — my father, 
who is everything to me. "And will say unto 
him, Father." I will begin with the word that 
shall itself plead for me. It shall remind him of 
the dear tie that all my sin and shame have not 
severed. "For Thou art our Father, though 
Abraham knoweth us not, and Israel doth not 
acknowledge us." (Is. 63 : 16). "I have sinned." 
The prodigal has already advanced to a higher 
spiritual level. The pangs of conscience, too, 
have, as a counter-irritant, dulled those of hun- 
ger. "Against heaven." He had learned (as 
had the Psalmist, "Against Thee, Thee only, 
have I sinned," Ps. 51: 4), that a sin against God 
is immeasurably worse than a crime against men. 



±0 THE PJRODIGAL SON. 

"And in thy sight," openly, flagrantly. 1 liave 
abused thee to thy face. 

19. "I am no more 1 worthy to be called thy 
son. Make me as one of thy hired servants. " 
Though I am thy son, I am no longer fit to bear 
the title. 2 As Godet says, he is like the publican 
in the temple, who "stood afar off and woidd 
not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven." 
(Luke 18:13). "Make me as one of thy hired 
servants." Among such types of selfishness 
as the fair-weather friends who fled when 
his wealth was spent, and this citizen who 
has sent him to the swine, it is hard for him 
to conceive of a magnanimity like that of his 
father. 

This poor notion of his father, moreover, 
seems thrown in by our Lord as a hint of the 
weakness of the prodigal's faith. It is like the 
eyes of the new-born babe that cannot yet bear 
the light. He does not see that, as says Godet, 
"pardon implies complete, instantaneous resto- 
ration." He expects that, even if his father shall 
receive him at all, he will show some sternness 3 
of look, some bitterness of tone. Though the 

1 Ovkc'tl, no longer. 

2 As he has squandered, his own share of the estate, he can ex- 
pect no more of that. 

3 The writer, in conducting a mission-school some years ago, 
asked a young Irish boy, who had, seen nothing bur neglect or 
abuse at home, and was specially intractable, if he could think 
of anv motive, except the hope of doing good, which would have 
brought the teachers to that work. •• Well," he answered, after 
thinking a moment, "the praste don't want ye here!" He was 
told that the teachers were not aiming to proselyte— that they were 
willing, if the children would follow ( hrist, that they should remain 
Catholics. After thinking again, he answered briskly, as if he 
hid Kiiessod the secret. "Well, anvhow, the city pays ye for it!' 
lie seemed sceptical of the possibility of a disinterested motive. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 41 

prodigal is arising from spiritual death, the 
grave-clothes still hang round him. 

But while his faith is slow, he has, at another 
point, already made good progress. His only 
idea, when the first thought of the hired ser- 
vants occurred to him, was that they had abun- 
dance of food — " enough and to spare." It was 
better in quality, too, than his OAvn — not husks, 
but bread. And he is now as earnest as theD to 
be one of their number. But it is for a very 
different reason. It was starvation then. It is 
humility now. It is contrition for his sin. It 
is a harrowing sense of his ill-desert. The body 
demanded it before; the soul pleads for it now. 
So it is that, as motives rise, their heavenly al- 
chemy changes the same outward act or utter- 
ance from base metal into gold. 

20. "And he arose and came to his father." 
Not to, but rather toward. 1 Quite a journey in- 
tervened. 

"But while he was yet afar off, his father 
saw him, and was moved with compas- 
sion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed 
him." How is it that the aged man, presum- 
ably with dim and failing sight, is the first of 
all the household to discover him? Is not that 
a beautiful touch on the word-picture? The 
father alone was watching for the wanderer. 
No one else about the premises cares for his 
return. To them he is a wretched vagabond. 



1 irpo?. "1st nicht das vollemlctc Kommen," says De Wette. 



42 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

His room they prefer to his company. But the 
father we seem to see standing, with hand 
shading his eyes, eagerly, tearfully looking to- 
ward the last point on the horizon whence his 
boy disappeared. Therefore it is that he, of all 
in the home, first sees him. Our Lord is pictur- 
ing here to the Pharisees his own solicitude, 
the yearning and straining of his heart, toward 
these outcast countrymen of theirs, the publi- 
cans and sinners. And likewise, as we may 
easily believe, He is lifting his eyes above and 
beyond his immediate surroundings; He is pro- 
claiming to all wanderers, sin-burdened, in every 
land and age, how^ eagerly, travailing in soul for 
them, He longs to draw them to Himself. 1 

"And was moved with, compassion/' He 
might, not unnaturally, have been moved with 
indignation. He might have demanded satis- 
faction for the past. But he is in no such mood. 

1 Plain as the Master made all this two thousand years ago, 
it would seem till recent times to have almost perished, like the 
-lost arts," from the recognition of the church. Too often our 
Lord was pictured as a sovereign, seated in his majesty, whom the 
penitent must besiege and beseech, through a long agony of '• law- 
work," before he could hope for mercy. The imagery of one of the 
older hymns, for instance, is taken from Queen .Lstner, venturing, 
with her life in her hand, before the merciless tyrant Ahasuerus, 
the Xerxes of profane history. 

" Perhaps He will admit my plea ; 

Perhaps will hear my prayer; 
But if 1 perish, I will pray 

And perish only there." 

A far better type than Aha>uerus, of the waiting Redeemer, we 
have in the familiar story of the Scotch mother whose daughter 
had wandered into a life of sin in London. The child, growing 
penitent, resolved to return to her home. From fear of discovery 
by old neighbors, she timed her arrival at night. As she caught 
sight, from a hill-side, of her mothers cottage, she was surprised 
to see a light at the window. Coming to the door, she was still 
more surprised to find that unfastened. And when, after a warm 
welcome, she asked what these things meant, the answer was, "My 
child, that lipht has been set at the window, and that door left un- 
fastened, every night since you went away." 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 43 

The foundations of the great deep of sympathy, 
affection, joy, in him, have been broken up. 
This is their hour and the power of love. 

" And ran and fell on his neck," in all his rags 
and dirt, as the prodigal is, from among the 
swine. Observe that this is an oriental father 
of the early ages. In what dignity the head of 
the household ruled his little realm! How the 
children stood uncovered before him, and rev- 
erently deferred to his commands ! But the love 
of this father, like a bursting freshet, has swept 
his dignity along its current. He can wait for 
no ceremony. His heart will have its way. 

" And kissed him." Or, as the Greek 1 implies, 
kissed him again and again, in a passion of love 
that could find no utterance. "What warmer 
reception," exclaims Bengel, " could the prodi- 
gal have had coming back from a faithful life?" 
A fine practical comment is all this on James 
4:8, "Draw nigh to God, and He will draw 
nigh to you." 

Observe that the embrace and the kiss go 
before the opening of the prodigal's lips. 2 
Enough for the father that it is his long-lost 

1 Ka.T<t>»i\ricrev. In the tender and tearful scene of Paul's de 
parture on the shore at Miletus (Acts 20 : 37) we have the same 
word. 

2 "Trench on the Parables," p. 332. Edersheim (1,507) says: 
"As regards the sinner, all other systems (than the Christian sys- 
tem) know of no welcome to him till, by some means, inward or 
outward, he has ceased to be a sinner and become a penitent. 
They would first make him a penitent and then bid him welcome 
to God. Christ first welcomes him to God and so makes him a 
nenitent." He calls attention to the fact that the words " to re- 
pentance " (Matt. 9 : 13 ; Mark 2 : 17), which are excluded from the 
Revision, are spurious. But nothing of all this, of course, implies 
that one who should continue impenitent would continue to be wel- 
come. 



44 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

son returning-. If any coldness is still left in Lis 
heart, the father will not keep him at a distance 
till the frigid reception has frozen him dead. 
Rather, with the warmth of his generous wel- 
come he will melt the coldness out. If any 
low motive still lingers in him, the father, with 
his own higher life, will raise it. 

21. "And the son said unto him, Father, I 
have sinned against heaven, and in thy 
sight; I am no more worthy to be called thy 
son." His resolution has persisted, his peni- 
tence has held out, through all the long journey 
from the far land. 1 

But the striking fact in these words of the 
prodigal, which has been often noticed, is that 
he entirely omits the request to be made one of 
the hired servants. 2 Has he forgotten it ? That 
is incredible. Has his pride rallied against it? 
His humble confession of sin forbids that ex- 
planation. Two solutions have been offered. 
One is that his father's magnanimous welcome 
shames him out of the thought of that humili- 
ation. He shrinks from it, as a reflection on 
his father's sincerity. It would seem like class- 
ing his father with the citizen who had sent him 
to the swine. He has been living so long 
amidst selfishness and heartlessness that this 



1 " Beweist die Ernstlichkeit unci Xachhaltigkeit seiner Rene." 
De Wettc. 

2 This request, which the Revision repeats here, but only in the 
margin, is inserted (in brackets) in the Greek text by Westcott and 
Hort. It wa^. however, so evidently thrust in by some superser- 
viceable copyist, who supposed Luke had forgotten it, as to be be- 
yond question spurious. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 45 

flood of disinterested love bewilders him. Coin- 
ing out of darkness, lie is dazzled by so mnch 
light. Deterred from saying what he had in- 
tended, he knows not what to say. 

Another, and perhaps better, interpretation 
of our Lord's thought, in suppressing these 
words of the prodigal, is that the father inter- 
rupts him. It is he who prevents the proposi- 
tion. He has seen enough, in the son's whole 
manner and tearful confession, to show that he 
has returned a changed man. Before this con- 
fession and these words of deep contrition he 
could only embrace him with a father's kiss. 
But now he sees him ripe for the old honors of 
his sonship. The moment the prodigal speaks 
of his un worthiness, therefore, the father, antici- 
pating what may follow, seems to silence him 
with tender pereinptoriness, saying, as it were, 
"No, no, my son! Away with all that! It is 
out of the question!" 

But another beautiful feature of the story is 
that the father's reply is made, not to the son, 
but to the servants. 

22, 23. "But the father said to his serv- 
ants, Bring forth quickly the best robe and 
put it on him, and put a ring on his hand 
and shoes on his feet, and bring the fatted 
calf and kill it, and let us eat and make 
merry." 

The meeting of the father and the prodigal 
had been "afar off." The two have been return- 



46 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

ing to the house together. They are now in the 
midst of the servants, who have gathered to the 
spectacle of their master running in so strange 
fashion. The sight of the prodigal, in his un- 
kempt and soiled and ragged condition, moves 
them to anything but reverence. Presumably, 
both father and son perceive it. The father, 
therefore, in one breath, with the same words, 
replies to both the son and the servants. He 
summons these menials to fall at once into their 
old relations to the son. As aforetime they are 
to serve him. The question whether he is 
to become as one of them is promptly and effect- 
ually answered. 

" Bring forth quickly." The adverb (added 
by the revisers) sIioavs his excitement in the ex- 
cess of his joy. He must have his son instantly 
honored. "The best robe " — a rich festal robe, in 
honor both of the son and of the occasion. 1 "And 
put a ring on his hand." From the most an- 
cient times the ring was a token of special con- 
fidence and distinction. 2 "And shoes on his 
feet." The prodigal, after his long wandering 
and miserable penury, may easily have been 
barefoot. And this, among the ancients, was 

1 Srox;?, from o-re/Uw, our English "stole," is any stately robe; 
and Ions sweeping garments wotuld have eminently this stateli- 
ness about them; always, or almost always, a garment reaching to 
the feet. or. trainlike, sweeping the ground. Trench, "Synonyms 
of the New Test.,'' p. 186. 

2 Gen. 41:42, Esther 3:10. '-This right of wearing the 
golden ring, which was subsequently called the "jus annuli aurei,' 
or the ' jus annulorum,' remained, for several centuries at Rome the 
exclusive privilege of senators, magistrates, and equites, while all 
other persons continued to use iron rings."' Appian. quoted in 
Anthon's Diet, of Gr. <fc Rom. Antiq. Art. Rings. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 47 

commonly the condition of slaves. The shoes 
would, like the robe and the ring, imply that the 
son had, as before his departure from home, 
the freedom of the house. " And bring forth the 
fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and be 
merry." 1 Let us, i. e. the whole household. It 
is as in the two previous parables of the shep- 
herd who recovers his sheep and the woman 
who finds her coin; each cries, "Kejoice with 
me." A generous joy is social and sympa- 
thetic. It hates exclusiveness. It insists on 
others sharing it. 

The robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted 
calf all point in the same direction with those 
great words of the Apostle, "For all things are 
yours" (I. Cor., 3:21). He who refuses Christ, 
standing out in self-will againt Him, makes the 
whole universe his enemy. He is like one who, by 
leaping from a precipice, makes our beneficent 
mother earth, which upholds and feeds us 
from her bosom, his foe. She clutches him in 
the terrible grip of her gravitation and dashes 
him on the rocks below. But he who yields to 
Christ makes the eternal laws of moral and 
physical order his friends. The stars in their 
courses fight for him. He is geared into the 
machinery of the universe, runs in harmony 

1 The spiritualizing process, by which the robe is made to mean 
the imputation of Christ's righteousness, the ring the gift of the 
Spirit, or the pledge of the betrothal of the soul to Christ, the shoes 
" the preparation of the gospel of peace," and the fatted calf the 
great Atoning Sacrifice, seems more ingenious than sound. It is 
clearly not the intent of our Lord in the parable to teach a system 
of dogmatic theology. 



4=8 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

with that, and has all its forces pledged to work 
for his welfare. 1 

"And let us eat and make merry." The king- 
dom of God is often compared to a feast, never 
to a funeral. 2 Outward pleasures, no less than 
inward peace and joy, are the normal attend- 
ants of righteousness. Man has put asunder 
what God has joined together. Eighteousness 
linked with suffering, iniquity with enjoyment, 
are an exception, a parenthesis in the story of 
the unfolding plan of God. Disturbed rela- 
tions have their day and go by. Mutual affin- 
ities, first or last, shall re-assert themselves. 
That a righteous and omnipotent Ruler sways 
the universe is our voucher for that. 

24. "For this my son was dead and is alive 
again; he was lost and is found." "My son" is 
a re-announcement to both the son and the ser- 
vants that he is fully restored to his old honors 
in the house. "Was dead and is alive again." 
He might have been that in the far country as 
well as at home. The father would have neither 
enjoyed nor seen the recovery. Therefore fol- 
lows the clause, "Was lost and is found." The 
wanderer is restored not only to spiritual life, 
but to the father's house. 

1 Godet explains to us why we have no reference ro any atone- 
ment here before the father's reception of the prodigal. -The 
absence of every figure iitted to represent the sacrifice of Christ 
i> at once explained when we remember that we have here to do 
with a parable, and that expiation has no place in the relations 
between man and man.'' Very ingenious— and very needless. 
It is quite considerate in the interpreters to looh with so much 
care after the orthodoxy of our Lord. There was no need that this 
parable, or any other, should cover the whole scheme of redemption. 

2 Abbott's Commentary on Luke (in loco). 



THE PEODIGAL SON. 49 

We now come to a chief, if not the chief, 
object for which the parable was spoken. The 
elder son brings in a contrast, broad and deep, 
with the prodigal. 

There has been, as to this brother, considera- 
ble difference of opinion. Trench 1 sees in hiin, 
or in those whom he represents, "a low, but not 
altogether false, form of legal righteousness." 
He pnts it to his credit that while his brother 
had wandered he had remained at home. He 
points to the father's allowing this son's boasts 
of his own fidelity to go mi contradicted. Goebel, 2 
on the contrary, offers no extenuation for him 
whatever. This last was the view, as cited by 
Trench, of Jerome, Theophylact, and others. 

Our Lord's intent in picturing the elder son 
is to be learned from the circumstances in which 
He spoke. Beyond question, the three parables 
of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Prodi- 
gal Son were all uttered on the same occasion. 
They were in reply to the complaint of the Phari- 
sees and scribes, "this man receiveth sinners 
and eateth with them." In the first two Jesus 
portrays his eagerness to win these outcasts to 
Himself. In the third He advances a step far- 
ther. Turning more directly to his critics, He 
makes the elder son pose as the true Pharisee. 

Kitto (art. Pharisee) remarks that Paul, who 
must have known of our Lord's denunciations 



1 "Parables," p. 340. So De Wette, Hier spricht sich nun der 
Tugendsioiz des sonst wirklich, unbesenoitiien gOi/eentes &olmes, &c. 

2 "The Parables of Jesus," by Siegfried Goebel, trans, by Prof. 
Banks, pp. 214, 215. 



50 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

of this sect, not only has not a word against it, 
but boasts of having belonged to it. 1 Doubtless 
there were Pharisees and Pharisees. Josephus 2 
makes them to have been 6000 in number. Mco- 
demus, one of them, and Joseph of Arimathea, 
probably another, were certainly estimable men. 
But, with two or three such exceptions, those 
w r hom our Lord encountered, or of whom He 
spoke, w^ere all that we mean by the word Phari- 
see as used in our day. The disposition of 
many modem writers to palliate their faults 
gets no countenance from Him. Infallible as 
He was in judging men, the very soul of impar- 
tiality and charity as He was, He never, unless 
possibly in a single slight particular, 3 lightens 
by a shade the blackness of their character. 

Take in succession the instances in which He 
meets or refers to them. He warns his disci- 
ples that, unless their righteousness shall ex- 
ceed the righteousness of the scribes and Phari- 
sees, they shall in no case enter into the king- 
dom of heaven. 4 An ominous intimation as to 
the future of the Pharisees themselves. He is 
maligned by them in the base calumny that He 
represents Satan on earth. 5 He bids his disci- 
ples beware of their teaching. 6 They approach 
Him with their crafty questions as to divorce. 7 
He declares that they lay on men heavy burdens, 

1 Acts 23 : G ; 26 : 5 ; Phil. 3 : 5. 

2 Antiquities— Book 17, chap. 2. 

3 Matt. 23 : 23, in regard to the tithes of mint, anise and cum- 
min. " These ought ye to have done, and not to have left the 
others undone." 

4 Matt. 5 : 20. 5 Matt. 9 : 34. G Matt. 10 : 6. 7 Matt. 19 : 3 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 51 

which they will not move with one of their own 
fingers, 1 that they are hypocrites, 2 that they will 
neither enter the kingdom, of heaven themselves 
nor suffer others to enter, 3 that they make their 
converts two-fold more the sons of hell than 
themselves, 4 that they have cast off judgment, 
mercy and faith, 5 that, while making an out- 
ward show of cleanness, they are full within of 
extortion and excess, 6 that they are like whited 
sepulchres, 7 that they have the malice of them 
who slew the prophets, 8 that they are a genera- 
tion of vipers who can hardly escape the judg- 
ment of hell, 9 that they love ostentation and 
flattery; 10 aud we are told that they rejected 
for themselves the counsel of God, 11 and were 
lovers of money. 12 In one instance they endeavor 
to drive him over from Perea into Judea, where 
they would have had Him in their power, 13 
as hunters drive their game into a corral. They 
send officers to take Him, 14 and, by the questions 
in regard to the woman taken in adultery, 15 and 
about the tribute-money, 16 they lay snares for 
his life. 

This, then, being so clearly our Lord's opinion 
of the Pharisees, we can look for no different 
character in their representative, the elder son 

1 Matt. 23 : 4. 2 Matt. 23 : 13. 3 Matt. 23 : 13. 4 Matt. 23 : 15 
5 Matt. 23 : 23. 6 Matt. 23 : 25. 7 Matt. 23 : 27. S Matt. 23 : 31 
9 Matt. 23 : 33. 10 Luke 11 : 43. 11 Luke 7 : 30. 12 Luke 16 : 14 

13 This, as Trench holds, in '-'Studies in the New Testament."' 

is the true explanation of Luke 13 : 31. 

14 John 7 : 32. 

15 John 8 : 1-11 (if we account this genuine). 
1(> Matt. 22 : 15—17. 



o'Z THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

in the parable. When the hand of Jesus drew 
a portrait it was a good likeness. 

His object was neither resentful nor irrecon- 
cilable. He would fain, by exhibiting them to 
themselves, induce them to avert through re- 
pentance their coming doom. 

25. "Now his elder son was in the field. " And 
how comes he there? Why has he not been 
invited into the house? Why has he not been 
called to share the rejoicing? Clearly enough, 
because the father has already seen enough of 
his spirit to know that he would decline. The 
elder son has, doubtless, often expressed his opin- 
ion of his brother — often thanked God that he 
was not as other men, or even as this prodigal. 

The father, when the younger son asked for 
his share of the goods, divided unto them 
his living. All that the younger son, when de- 
parting, had left behind had, therefore, been 
allotted to the elder. In reversion, if not in 
actual possession, it was his. 1 His work in the 
field is really, then, in his own interest. But, 
in form at least, he is still in his father's ser- 
vice. He is tithing mint, anise, and cummin. 
Like a true Pharisee he keeps a fair exterior. 
And, as we shall see, he makes the most of it. 

The younger son, after the disease of selfish- 
ness had begun to break out over him, found 
the contrasted spirit of his father a sharper, 




THE PRODIGAL SON. 53 

though silent, rebuke than he could bear. 
Why is not the same effect wrought on his 
brother? Why has not he too taken his depart- 
ure? Because the same disease in him has 
struck in. Showing fewer eruptions, it is only 
so much the deeper and more deadly. A model, 
he imagines himself, of self-sacrificing, filial 
fidelity. The notion of any serious contrast 
between his father and himself has not oc- 
curred to him. Or if there be a contrast — so much 
the worse for his father. 

"And as he came and drew nigh to the house he 
heard music and dancing." Had he then had any- 
thing of the spirit of the true son, how promptly 
would he hasten into the house! How eager 
would be his cry, "What has happened? What 
is the good news?" With what glad heart- 
throbs, too, would he fall on the prodigal's neck 
and take up the refrain, "For this my brother 
was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is 
found!" That he can possibly abstain from all 
this is itself, before a word from his lips, proof 
enough that his heart is unsound. He will soon 
give us proof more than enough. 

26. "And he called to him one of the servants 
and inquired what these things might be." He 
does not, says Godet, feel at home in the house. 
^N T o one within the doors has come up to 
his own level of zeal and labor for the house. 
He is shocked by their levity while there is so 
much to be done. The cruel necessity, therefore, 



54 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

is laid on liini of turning to one of the menials 
about the premises. In other words, not to 
put too fine a point upon it, he has already in 
spirit become "as one of the hired servants." 
He has sunk in soul to the plane of them with 
whom, in outward condition, he would scorn 
to he graded. He would rather consort with 
one of them than with his father. 

"And inquired what these things might be." 
There is an imperiousness in the very cast of 
the words — an insolent calling of the whole 
household to account. He will have an explana- 
tion of all this ado to which he has not been in- 
vited. Possibly he half suspects the cause of it. 
If so, that adds only more gall to his bitterness. 

27. "And he said to him, Thy brother is come, 
and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, be- 
cause he hath received him safe and sound." 
With what singular dramatic fitness this low 
menial is made to speak — how exactly like him- 
self ! Not a clause, hardly a word, fails to betray 
the man that he is. Let us see. 

The father's announcement of the return 
of the prodigal glows with a tremulous joy. 
We seem to see a new light in the dim eyes, 
a light in which the glad tears glisten as he 
speaks. We seem to hear a voice broken with 
excess of feeling in his exulting cry, "'For this 
my son was dead and is alive again!" and then, 
repeating as for emphasis, "was lost and is 
found!" Kecovery, restoration, redemption, is 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 55 

the thought that thrills him. But what is the 
servant's announcement of the same fact? 
How the glory and the beauty fade out of it. 
How clean gone is the festal charm! How 
meager and miserable a platitude is left! a Thy 
brother is come/' — has passed from one locality 
yonder to another here — "only that, and noth- 
ing more." The servant can appreciate nothing 
more. The father's words are to his what 
pyrotechnics are to the sticks that remain, 
what an overture of Beethoven is to the rosin 
and the strings. 

But again. "And thy father hath killed the 
fatted calf." Nothing has the servant to say 
of the robe, the ring, or the shoes. They are all 
nothing to him. They lie beyond his range 
of interest. But one thing he can appreciate 
— this fatted and petted calf. It fills his whole 
horizon. Probably he has fed and tended it. 
He has given his whole mind to it. He may have 
seen this swineherd returning in his rags from 
the far country. And it is for him that the 
master has ordered killed the servant's pet! 
He who has been feeding swine must now feed 
upon the fatted calf! With the wary diffi- 
dence of a true menial, he dares not give vent 
to his feeling. But his meaning is easily read 
between the lines. 

Once more, in the analysis of the servant's 
answer. Why, according to him, has the best 
of all the herd been sacrificed? Because the 



56 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

father has recovered his child from wretch- 
edness and disgrace? Because a soul has been 
won to a noble life? Nothing of all that. But 
" because he hath received him safe and sound." 
He has returned with a whole skin. No bones 
are broken. In this the servant's notions cul- 
minate. They rise no higher. The soul, with 
its interests, is nothing. The body is all in 
all. "The natural man receiveth not the things 
of the Spirit of God, * * * and he cannot 
know them, because they are spiritually dis- 
cerned." 

And now we return to the elder brother. 

28. "But he was angry and would not go in." 
He is not the man to consort with a vagabond. 
If his father in his weakness "receiveth sinners 
and eateth with them," so much the more must 
some one in the family retain his self-respect. 

"And his father came out and entreated him." 
The natural and just reply of the father to the 
announcement from the son that he would not 
go in, would have been, "Then let him stay with- 
out! If he has no more than this of the 
spirit of a true son or brother, let him remain 
till he comes to a better mind, where he is." 
But no. With the same impartial love with 
which he ran to embrace the prodigal, the father 
goes out to his brother. He does more than 
invite. There is no room here for the embrace 
or the kiss. Though the youth n^eds both, 
he would welcome neither. And so, as if de- 



THE PEODIGAL SON. 57 

pendent on him, as if his presence in the honse 
were a necessity, the father stoops to entreat 
him to be reconciled. 

. As to the character of the Pharisees, Eders- 
heim 1 falls in with the judgment of our Lord. 
And this elder son, who represents them, now 
proceeds to show us how accurate is the por- 
traiture. 

29. "But he answered and said to his father." 
Why these two w^ords, "his father " ? To des- 
ignate the person meant they are certainly not 
needed. There are but two parties to this inter- 
view. It could be no one else but his father that 
he answered. In the father's rejoinder (v. 31) we 
have (not, he said unto his son, but) "he said 
unto him." 2 Is it not designedly that our Lord, 
introducing the son's insolent reply, brings in 
these words? It was to his father, who at the 
moment was entreating him, that he answered 
in this arrogant style. So lost he w^as to all 
sense or thought of the reverence due from a 
son. 

And now another point must be noted. The 
younger son, as we have seen, nowhere loses 
sight of the dear word "father." Low as he 

1 1 : 312, 313. "Indeed," he says, "some of the sayings of the 
rabbis, in regard to Pharisaism and the professional Pharisee, are 
more withering than any in the New Testament." "Their asser- 
tions of .purity were sometimes conjoined with Epicurean maxims 
betokening a very different state of mind;" as, "Make haste to eat 
and drink, for the world, which we quit, resembles a wedding- 
feast;" or this, "My son, if thou possess anything, enjoy thyself, 
for there is no pleasure in Hades, and death grants no respite." 
Maxims these to which also too many of their recorded stories 
and deeds form a painful commentary. 
2 Likewise (v. 27) the servant "said unto him." 



58 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

falls, he never sinks beyond sight of that. 
When he asks for his share of the goods, when 
among the swine he remembers his home, when 
he resolves to return, when he meets the em- 
brace and the kisses of welcome, that word 
comes again and again to his lips. Fearfully 
as he had strained the tie to the forsaken par- 
ent, he had never completely parted it. 

But this word is one for which his brother 
has no nse. He prefers not to recognize the 
relation. He has wandered a greater distance 
from his father in his heart than his brother 
had wandered with his feet. 

"Lo!" 1 the first word, which should be 
" father, " is more like a blow in the face. Sub- 
stantially it is, "See here! look you to this! how 
true and faithful a son you have been neglect- 
ing here at home! " And in view of the rever- 
ence expected from a son among the orientals 
of old towards a father, the affront seems still 
more gross. 

"These many years do I serve thee." Here leers 
on us again the face of the genuine Pharisee. 
We encounter him a little later in Luke's gos- 
pel. He is always as true to his character, 
in his utterances, as we have seen the hired 
servant to be to his own. "I fast twice in the 
week; I give tithes of all that I get." 2 The 

1 "I&ov, defined in Thayer's lexicon as "a demonstrative particle 
* * * giving a peculiar vivacity to the style by bidding * * * the 
hearer attend to what is said." We should think it did, in this 
case, add a very peculiar vivacity to the style. 
2 Luke 18 : 12. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 59 

Pharisee at the temple has drawn the Lord, as 
he imagines, far into his debt. He has done 
more than the law required. While an annual 
fast was prescribed 1 he had fasted twice in the 
week. While tithes of the increase of only the 
field and the cattle 2 were demanded, he had 
tithed all he acquired. So with this elder son. 
For these many years he has been heaping up 
merit. And, as the word 3 he uses intimates, it 
has been by a slavish drudgery, hard to bear. In 
this marvelous, disinterested, unrequited fidelity 
of his he has shrunk from nothing that could 
promote his father's interest. 

"And I never transgressed a command- 
ment of thine." Here again is the same type 
of Pharisee with him at the temple. "God," 
he cried, "I thank thee that I am not as the rest 
of men, extortioners," etc. How keen the irony 
of our Lord's putting this word, above all 
others, into his lips! He belongs to the class 
of worthies "which devour widows' houses," 4 
"and are full of extortion and excess." 5 It is 
as if one of our modern Shylocks, who make 
"corners " in beef and grain and pork, were to 
thank the Lord for inspiring him with so tender 
an interest in the poor. But this elder son is 
like-minded. Boasting that he has never trans- 
gressed a commandment of his father, he is 
doing it at this identical moment. His father 
is entreating him, and he is insolently refusing, 

1 Lev. 16 : 29-30. 2 Lev. 27 : 30-33. 3 SovAevw. 

4 Luke 20 : 47. 5 Matt. 23 : 25. 



M THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

to go into the house. The perfection of his 
hypocrisy is exquisite. 

And now, haying established his own right- 
eousness, the way is open to exhibit the in- 
iquities of his father. 

"And yet/' notwithstanding ail I haye done 
for thee, "thou neyer gayest me a kid." In the 
Greek 1 he thrusts himself much more conspic- 
uously forward. "And to me," it reads, "thou 
neyer gayest." So before yet mentioning his 
brother he puts himself, in sharp contrast, 
beside him. 

And here, too, he shows how completely he 
is diyorced in feeling from his father. "Thou 
neyer gayest me" shows the same spirit as that 
of his brother in his "Give me the portion of 
the substance that ialleth to me" — the spirit 2 
of which his brother had bitterly repented. 
And the elder son is putting everything down 
on the cold, legal ground of work and reward. 3 
Love for his father has leaked out of his heart, 
and left it, like the bones in Ezekiel's vision, 
exceedingly dry. 

"Thou never gavest me a kid," the smallest of 
all possible creatures in the herd, "that I might 
make merry with my friends." How sharp the 
contrast here with the magnanimous sympa- 
thy, the all-embracing joy, of the father ! " That 
I might make merry with my friends," says 
the son. "Let us eat and be merry," says the 

1 Kai e/ioi oiSeirore, 2 Alford (in loco). 3 Edersheim 2 : 26Q, 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 61 

father. An electric charge can as well trav- 
erse half a net-work of steel, and no more, as 
the joy of a generous man can confine itself 
within him alone. 

The analogy between the sons is much closer 
than the elder imagines. The one had wished 
something set apart to him that he might feast 
separately in the far land. The other wishes 
something set apart that he may feast sepa- 
rately at home. The alienation from the 
father is in the two cases equally complete. 
The elder, showing the same spirit of which 
his brother had repented, is like the Pharisee 
in the temple, disgraced by the very extortion 
which was his chief charge against the pub- 
lican he so despised. 

But now, having opened the vials of his wrath 
on his father, he turns part of their contents 
on his brother. 

30. " But when this thy son came." As a bee's 
cell is made to contain the most possible honey 
under a given surface, so do these words seem 
shaped to contain the utmost amount of gall. 
"This thy son" — as an angry brother among 
us would clearly enough indicate to his father 
his feeling with, "That boy of yours." But 
it is not clearly enough for this elder brother 
Something more explicit is to come. 

"Thy son," as many interpreters have noted, 
are words chosen to disclaim all relationship 
of his brother to himself. As he began with evad- 



62 THE PRODIGAL SOX. 

ing the word "father," lie continues with eva- 
sion of "brother." The father alone must be 
responsible for the new-comer. 

"Came." So the elder son, too, has gone 
down to the level of the hired servant, Xo 
more than the servant can he appreciate the 
glory of the father's view of it — "dead and alive 
again; lost and found." He has become in soul 
(what his brother had thought to do only in 
outward condition) "as one of the hired serv- 
ants." 

"Which hath devoured 1 thy living with har- 
lots." "Devoured thy living," which I, by serving 
thee these many years, have toiled to keep and 
increase. "Thy living," an insinuation thrown in 
as a wedge of jealousy between the father and the 
prodigal. The fact was that the latter had wasted 
only his share of the estate. "With harlots" 
comes, as a climax, with the deadliest thrust of 
all. And it may be as false as it was malicious. 
Wasting substance with riotous living would 
not of necessity imply it. Even if it be true, 
the elder brother, who has not yet seen the 
prodigal, can hardly be supposed to have heard 
of it. He is bent on putting the worst construc- 
tion possible on the conduct of his brother. 2 
Thou hast killed for him the fatted calf," while 

1 'O KaTa<f>ayw, perhaps as strong and violent a word as could 
have been found. 

2 Trench seems to us quite in error when in a note on the 
prodigal's wasting Ms substance (" Parables,-'' p. 322) he says, •• We 
are not, in this early part of the parable, expressly told, but from 
v. 30 we infer, that he consumed with' harlots the living which he 
had gotten from his father." Matthew Henry, in his commentary, 
comes much nearer the truth. 



THE PRODIGAL SON. 03 

I could have not even a kid. Here again this 
brother shows how far he has descended to- 
ward the level of the servant. As completely as 
the servant he is absorbed in the loss of the 
calf. He is not ashamed to betray that his 
whole heart was on the creature. 

31. "And he said unto him, Son." How beau- 
tiful the contrast of this with the son's arro- 
gance! "Son!" — if thou, that is, wilt not even 
recognize me as father, that shall not prevent 
me from claiming thee. The word itself then, 
before the appeal goes farther, is a tender re- 
minder. The Greek word 1 it represents is not the 
same with that for "son" just used by the elder 
brother. It is "my child," in the most touch- 
ing expostulation. 

" Thou art ever with me." 2 I am thy exceeding 
great reward. Why talk of kids and calves 
and jealous lines of ownership? In heart and 
in possessions let us be one ! 

"All that is mine is thine." 8 Let us be done 
with claims and rights, and fall into the union 
of love. 

It is a mistake in many writers, as it seems 
to us, who infer from the loving words of the 
father that he found something to approve in 
the elder son. Those words show nothing but 

1 Tewov, child, while the brother had used uios. "The word 
(t4kvov) is used," says Thayer's lexicon, "in affectionate address, 
such as patrons, helpers, teachers, and the like, employ.'' lie cites 
Matt. 9 : 2, " Son, be of good cheer;" Mark 10 : 24, "Children, how 
hard is it for them that trust in riches," etc. 

2 Which is far better than your '-'friends," Bengal (in loco), 

3 The younger son had already taken his share. 



64 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

parental anxiety to pour some sweetness into 
the son's bitter spirit. Of complacency in his 
character they give no hint. To learn what is 
that character we have only to look to the words 
and acts of the son himself. In them there 
is no redeeming feature to be found. 

32. "But it was meet to make merry and be 
glad." The making merry is outward rejoicing. 
The being glad is inward delight. "For this thy 
brother" (whom the older of the two had coldly 
called "thy son") "was dead and is alive again; 
he was lost and is found." He had done more 
than "come," as his brother, with no sense of 
the greatness of the recovery, declared. 

And so the marvelous story, like a string of 
gems, with every word, almost, a brilliant, 
rounds to its close. 

The reader will perhaps complain that the 
older son has, in these pages, been judged too 
severely. But this son, as we have held, was 
intended by our Lord to represent the Pharisees. 
Several considerations prove this. Jesus was 
now directly addressing Pharisees, in reply to 
a cavil of theirs. The older brother treats the 
prodigal precisely as the Pharisees treated their 
outcast countrymen. This son has unmistak- 
ably the same features with the Pharisee pray- 
ing in the temple. 

Holding therefore that the elder brother is a 
Pharisee, and remembering our Lord's judg- 
ment of them, we seem forced to the conclu- 



THE PKODIGAL SON. <>5 

sion that he meant to give their character to 
this brother. And if Ave look for his real spirit, 
not in the words of his father, but his own, 
we seem led to the same conclusion. 

What but righteous indignation toward a 
spirit like that of the Pharisees was possible, 
to our Lord? What but a discredit would any- 
thing else than indignation have been to Him? 

It is essential to a perfect character that one 
should be as good a hater as lover. Dr. Arnold, 
of Kugby School, said he never felt sure of a 
boy who only loved good. It was not till he 
began to hate evil that he knew him to be safe. 
Then he showed himself in earnest. Nor was it 
enough for the inspired writer (Heb. 1:9) to de- 
scribe our Lord as having "loved righteousness." 
Something more must be added. "Thou hast 
loved righteousness and hated iniquity; there- 
fore God, even thy God, hath anointed Thee." 
Jesus hated evil as intensely as he loved good. 
From the same lips that tenderly invite the la- 
boring and heavy laden fall those awful words, 
"Fill ye up, then, the measure of your iniquities. 
Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can 
ye escape the condemnation of hell?'' 

The key to the mystery is not far away. "Ye 
lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, 
and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with 
one of your fingers." "Ye devour widows' 
houses, and for a pretense make long prayers." 
They were saints in the synagogue and knaves 
5 



66 THE PRODIGAL SON. 

iii the market. And it was the sheer, pure love 
to the outraged poor of the Friend of publi- 
cans and sinners, who could weep with them 
that weep, which thundered in those sentences. 
It was the Good Shepherd turning against the 
wolves because He loved the sheep. 

The German artist, Maurice Eetzsch, has pic- 
tured, with deep spiritual insight, a battle be- 
tween angels and demons. The heavenly legions 
mount no guns, discharge no musketry. Xo 
sabre among them flashes in the air. They 
sprinkle roses, only, over the hosts of hell. But 
every rose, in falling, turns to flaming fire. It 
burns its way into the very vitals of whomso- 
ever it strikes, till he sinks and writhes in 
anguish. So is it with the wrath (not of the 
"lion of the tribe of Judah," but) of the Lamb, 
from which the guilty multitudes entreat the 
mountains to fall and hide them. 

This indignation of Jesus, like all righteous 
indignation, was at bottom pure benevolence. 
In the character of the ingrate son, boasting of 
his unrequited service, our Lord exhibits the 
Pharisees to themselves only that He may, if 
possible, even at the eleventh hour, draw them 
to repentance and life. 



KXCURSIJS. 



Christ as a Public Ye^cher. 



It niight be expected that a Divine Teacher 
would be instructive not only in the truths he 
would convey, but in his way of conveying 
them. If our Lord was infallible, He showed 
it no less in his methods and manner than in 
his subject-matter. That a the common people 
heard Him gladly" has been generally ascribed 
to the beauty of his life and doctrine, the tender- 
ness of his sympathy, the contrast, at every 
point, with the teachers to whom they had been 
accustomed. But He took care to be an effec- 
tive speaker. He showed marvelous power 
and skill in his use of occasions and object- 
lessons and words. 

How far the human in Him was aided by the 
Divine will ever, on earth at least, remain a 
mystery. What amount of study He gave to 
his style of speech, how far it was spontaneous 
and unconscious, will never be known. But, 
whatever may have been the process, the results 
remain as a charming and exhaustless theme for 
study. 

There has been, we are persuaded, a serious 
error as to this matter. The external acts of 
our Lord, in general, are by no means an 



70 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

invariable guide to us. They were largely modi- 
fied by the usages of his life, land, and age. They 
were foliage — not roots; shifting sands — not bed- 
rock. We have naturally and rightly turned 
to the great principles He unfolded, which no 
conventionalities can reach, no changing cus- 
toms touch. 

So we have drifted under the impression that 
his methods of speech and instruction, like Ms 
costume and posture at meals, were peculiar to 
his day and locality. We hare looked little to 
them for suggestion and help in the great art of 
holding the attention and reaching the hearts 
of men. But this essay will fail of its purpose 
if it does not show that many of these methods 
were addressed, not to Jews of the first century, 
as such, but to man as man, to human nature 
and the human mind, working under laws that 
never can 

" Grow old or change or pass away." 
From the teachings of Jesus there are hints 
to be drawn as to practical tact in reaching and 
leading men, as to the choice of words, the shap- 
ing of sentences, the art of illustration, which 
to any Christian teacher are invaluable helps. 
I. "He taught them as one having author- 
ity (Matt. 7:29), and not as the scribes." He 
recognized the difference between moral and 
mere scientific truth. The latter follows from 
induction and ratiocination. It carries no self- 
evidential power. It shines, like a planet, in 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 71 

reflected light. But moral truth, as a sun, carries 
a light of its own. It speaks with an impera- 
tive to the moral sense. And, in clear recogni- 
tion of all this, Jesus spoke. The scribes and 
lawyers, with their casuistries and sophistries, 
raised more doubts than they laid. Dialectics 
were the atmosphere in which they lived and 
breathed. In a mechanical way they skimmed 
the surface of things. It was with them as if 
one were to say of BaphaeFs Transfiguration, 
"This painting is of the right proportions of 
height to breadth. The pigments are laid on 
with the proper thickness. The laws of per- 
spective have been observed. Therefore it is a 
fine painting." 

Our Lord put the truth He taught, not only 
in such "sweet reasonableness," but in such com- 
manding power, that as the words fell from his 
lips the mind of the hearer echoed its reverent 
Amen! What occasion for argument there? It 
would have been as crutches to Samson. And 
in a Teacher who quietly and authoritatively 
assumed the truth of what He said there dwelt 
a power over the rough natures around Him 
like that which a resolute man has over a wild 
animal. 

In all this there is a lesson for a preacher of 
our time. He does not, indeed, speak like the 
Master with personally Divine authority. But 
that authority, if not in him, is behind him. The 
day for argument to establish the great staple 



72 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

truths of our religion lias, in the main, gone by. 
Christianity has not, for many centuries, stood 
before the world as an experiment. It is no 
mendicant, with hat in hand to beg favors. In 
a Christian country the burden of proof, in any 
discussion of its great truths, lies on the objec- 
tor. These truths have often enough been 
weighed in the balances and not found wanting. 
The preacher who gratuitously puts them in 
again throws away his advantage. He dis- 
honors the word of his Master. "I am not in 
the pulpit/- Dr. W. M. Taylor has said, "to 
defend the Bible. The Bible is there to defend 
me." 

Life is too short, time is too precious, to be 
wasted in incessantly laying foundations. There 
is work enough to be done on the grand super- 
structure that from age to age so steadily and 
sublimely rises. 

The minister of Christ, therefore, who stands 
where he should, at the height of his vocation, 
will do no timid apologizing for the instruc- 
tions, invitations, and warnings he utters. 
Neither will he nervously declare or affirm or 
insist. We have no more occasion to re-enact 
the moral law of God than the law of gravita- 
tion. The wise preacher will take for granted 
the basilar truths of Christianity. He will as- 
sume them as the bed-plate on which the whole 
machinery of his service is to run. In all meek- 
ness, arrogating nothing to himself, yet remem- 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 73 

bering in whose name lie stands, he will speak 
"as one haying authority. 7 ' 

II. Jesns pressed with uncompromising force 
whatever truth He had in hand. "I came not 
to send peace, but a sword. " "I am come to set 
a man at variance against his father, and the 
daughter against her mother." "Of him that 
wonld borrow of thee turn not thou away." 
"And he that hath none, let him sell his cloak 
and buy a sword." Paradoxes and half-truths 
had no terrors for Him. He knew that but half 
a globe can be seen at once. He knew that, to 
present a truth in all its broad relations, is often 
to press the soul rather with a surface, easily 
resisted, than with a point that pierces. A fully 
rounded, carefully balanced statement of a truth 
is an anodyne to the intellect. The work that 
the intellect ought to be summoned to do has 
been already done for it. "The truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth," may indeed 
have been presented. But what will a mind 
receive of it that is too dormant to receive any- 
thing ? The amount of profit to the hearer will be 
in direct ratio to the activity stirred within him. 
That activity is what exercise is to a convales- 
cent. For the invalid's recovery no vehicle will 
answer in place of exertion of his own muscles. 

But a bold, perhaps hyperbolic, statement of 
a truth is a goad to the soul. Provoking re- 
sistance, it compels to thought. "But it leads 
to error!" No; the danger of misapprehension 



74 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

is small. Tlie advantage of thinking one's 
way through the paradox is great. 

Our Lord was, therefore, more bent on stir- 
ring his hearers to receive some truth than 
on a vain attempt to load them with more truth 
than they would carry. Wielding the sword of 
the Spirit, which is the word of God, He looked 
rather to its temper and keenness than to its 
symmetry or beauty. It is quite impossible for 
us, to whom his pointed utterances have become 
dulled by long use, to appreciate the startling 
shock with which they struck his hearers' ears. 
The outcries of astonishment 1 in reply, show 
plainly that the arrow had reached its mark. 

This method of address is, in a modern teacher, 
of course liable to abuse. Easily it may run to 
an extravagance which the occidental mind is 
slower to forgive than the oriental hearers to 
whom Jesus spoke. But, none the less, it is a 
powder with which no wise preacher will wholly 
dispense. Precision of thought and speech is 
not the only requisite. Our congregations are 
more in danger of nodding a drowsy and un- 
meaning assent than of falling into error. Many 
a preacher, in mincing his words and cumber- 
ing his sentences to guard against misunder- 
standing, clogs their entrance to the minds of 
men. Better the truth incisively, clean of all 
obstructions. Then put the counterbalancing 
truth, if required, on some other occasion. 

1 Matt. 19 : 25. 



CHEIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 75 

III. It is often said that our Lord taught doc- 
trines less than Paul. It would be nearer the 
truth to say that He taught the more practi- 
cal aspects of doctrine. There is, perhaps, no 
one of such dogmas of the faith as are legiti- 
mately drawn from Scripture, and which con- 
front us in imposing order in our theologies, 
which does not, in some form, appear in his 
teachings. But as He himself brings down to 
us the majesty of the Most High under the lowly 
lineaments of a human life, so is it that these 
doctrines take shape in his simple, informal 
words. They lay by their stateliness of bear- 
ing and their regal costumes, and come home to 
the heart as work-day truths for common life. 
Jesus leads us into no metaphysical discussion 
of the origin or nature of sin. But in the exam- 
ple of the young ruler (Matt. 19:21-23) how 
fearfully He exposes its tenacious hold on the 
soul ! He gives us no treatise on the impotence 
of a godless morality to fulfill obligation. But 
as this same amiable youth turns away sorrow- 
ful with his great possessions, facing toward 
the dark, we seem to see the Master looking 
sadly after him with a lamentation like that over 
Jerusalem: "How hardly shall they that have 
riches enter into the kingdom of God !" 

Our Lord gives no doctrinal statement of 
atonement. He is little concerned to set the 
Great Kedemption, with its profound and awful 
mystery, sharply outlined before us in the dry 



76 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

light of intellect. But with what touching 
tenderness does He commend it to the heart! 
"The Good Shepherd giveth his life for the 
sheep." 1 " This is my blood of the new cove- 
nant, which is shed for many for the remission 
of sins." 2 "The Son of man came to give his 
life a ransom for many." 3 His aim is not so 
much to draft a "plan of salvation" as to move 
the soul with the appeal of the transcendent 
fact. 

Jesus formulates no dogma of regeneration. 
But under exquisite imagery He shadows out 
the features of the momentous change. De- 
scribing it as a new birth, He teaches that it is 
a revolution of one's character as radical as if 
he were to go back into non-existence and com- 
mence his life anew. He gives it, in one of his 
word-pictures, as a strait gate, with an unwel- 
come humiliation to pride. The narrow portal, 
tearing off as we enter it all tinsel of self- 
righteousness, all faith in sacraments or creeds 
as a groundwork of hope, leaves the soul in its 
naked helplessness to throw itself on Christ. 
Again, Jesus figures the great change as leaven 
thrust into the meal. It is as gradual in the 
transformation, then, as it is radical and com- 
plete. Though at first like the distinct mass of 
the leaven, almost an alien principle in the soul, 
working against old habits, estimates, and moral 
drifts, it comes in time to dissolve and blend 

1 John 10 : 11. 2 Matt. 26 : 28. 3 Matt. 20 : 28. 



CHEIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 77 

itself as homogeneous with, the whole inmost 
life. So, instead of a dry, doctrinal treatise 
on regeneration, nnder a score or two of heads 
and sub-divisions, Jesus instructs us by this 
striking imagery, rich in its wealth of sugges- 
tion. 

Again, He discusses no dogma of the perse- 
verance of the saints. He spins no gossamer 
theory of the harmony of necessity and certainty, 
builds no cloudy structure of 

"Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute." 
But, looking on us through the loving features 
of the Good Shepherd, who knows his sheep 
and is known of them, He assures us, of his 
sheep, "they shall never perish, neither shall any 
man be able to pluck them out of my hand.'' 
(John 10 : 28). 

We shall find in his teachings no theologi- 
cal discussion of repentance. The questions, 
debated for centuries, whether faith or love or 
contrition is the first act of the renewed soul, 
whether "efficacious grace" or "natural ability" 
only is requisite, whether regeneration must 
precede conversion in the order of time or only 
in the order of nature, get no illumination from 
a word of his. But any benighted wanderer, 
sin-burdened, heart- sore, and glad to surrender 
his life to his Saviour, will find more light in the 
story of the prodigal returning, and the father's 
kiss, than in all the systems of theology ever 
constructed. 



78 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

So as to justification. Whether the pardoned 
soul has been ransomed, according to the theory 
of the earlier Christian centuries, as a prisoner 
taken in fair fight, from the captivity of Satan, 
or delivered from a debt, on the commercial 
theory, or from a penalty, on the moral govern- 
ment theory, we shall not learn from the Great 
Teacher. But in the beautiful story of the 
"woman which was a sinner," who "loved 
much" and whose sins, which were many, were 
forgiven her, we have all the justification of 
which any guilty soul will need to know. 

In these methods of our Lord there is a lesson 
for the modern preacher. The mistake is com- 
mon of supposing that, unless one has taken 
up the doctrines serially, calling the roll and 
forming them in lines as for a parade, unless 
he deals with them in a more or less technical 
discussion of the ingenious theories with which 
our theologies attempt to explain them, he has 
failed to preach the doctrines. 

Jesus, if we may judge from his example, 
thought otherwise. Doctrines are instruments 
or implements to be used in the upbuilding of 
souls. To that end they ought to be well shaped 
and adapted. In the hands of too many a 
preacher, with his obsolete speculations, they 
are as if one were to cling to the watches, the 
flint and tinder, the matchlocks and plows and 
flails, of a century ago. The methods of Jesus 
are perennially new. They come home to the 



CHEIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHEE. ™ 

heart. They touch the deepest life at the core 
of one's being. They show these grand, eternal 
truths of the gospel as living truths, that vital- 
ize souls dead in sin. 

TV. It is instructive to study those silences 
of our Lord in which He refrained from audi- 
ble teaching. His sparse disclosures of the life 
beyond the grave, especially in contrast with 
the abundant and astonishing revelations of 
Mohammedan and Eomish teachers and 
Spiritualist mediums, have been often noted. 
His wise design seems to have been to mass, 
for a solid moral impact on the soul, the rewards 
on the one side, and the woes on the other, of 
the life to come. He knew the inevitable 
effect of a multitude of such details as to the 
surroundings, the language, the social life, the 
occupations, of the redeemed as would gratify 
our curiosity. These details and minutiae, even 
if it be possible to disclose them to us in our 
earthly life, would have comminuted and 
frittered away those weighty moral sanctions 
which He wished to bring to bear, in their un- 
broken bulk and weight, from the world to come. 

At another point there has been some wonder 
as to his silence. Why not have given us ample 
light as to denominational questions that so 
distract the Christian world? How easy for 
Him to have settled all controversy as to bap- 
tism of infants, immersion, predestination, 
church polity! What divisions and schisms He 



80 CHRTST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

might have saved! How far more harmonious 
and effective might the churches, as one com- 
pact body, have been! Xatural questions these 
all seem. But is it certain that one vast organ- 
ism would have been more in the interest of the 
kingdom of Christ? Has it so proved in the 
Komish or the Greek church? Do we not all 
know the sure drift toward despotism of an 
immense corporate body necessarily entrusting 
enormous power to a few hands? Probably, with 
all the evils flowing from sectarian bigotry, it 
is better that Christians should fall off into vari- 
ous sects and communions than that the 
churches should, as a single huge organism, be 
ruled by a hierarchy. 

If this be so, it was well that the minor dis- 
tinctions, around each of which a denomination 
has crystalized, were not swept away by an 
utterance of the Master. 

But in single instances as well how striking 
in his silence! In the account of the woman 
taken in adultery (John 8: 3-11), assuming the 
passage to be genuine, how solemn is the pause 
after those searching words, "Let him that is 
without sin among you cast the first stone !" 
How suggestive of the yet more awful silence 
of eternity, in which guilty consciences may yet 
speak to souls. Again, when He is summoned 
to entertain Herod and his men of war by call- 
ing up infinite wisdom and omnipotence to per- 
form for their amusement (Luke 23:8-11), in 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 81 

what majestic meekness, with sealed lips, He 
stands! In what unutterable pity, bound and 
helpless and mocked as He is, He looks on the 
king and his officers in the splendor of their 
purple and gold! Why has not some great 
artist taken the scene for his pencil? 

A still more striking lesson from the silence 
of Jesns we haye in the case of the Syrophoeni- 
cian woman. 1 We will consider this some- 
what more fully. "He entered into a house," 
says Mark, "and wonld have no man know it." 
He w^as tired down with excess of work in 
doing good. Elsewhere He w^as so exhausted 
that He conld sleep through all the uproar of 
a storm on the lake. And now He was willing 
to allow his burdened and complaining body a 
little rest. 

"But," as Chrysostom has it, "the ointment 
betrays itself." And He whose "name was as 
ointment poured forth " could not be hid. This 
Syrophoenician woman, though brought up in 
both an alien nation and religion, had heard of 
Him. Where or how she came to the keenness of 
spiritual insight and strength of faith she soon 
betrays, we are not informed. It is reasonable 
to suppose also that the Master knew of her. 
He who perceived in Perea that Lazarus had 
died in Bethany (John 11: 11-11), may well 
have been no stranger to this good woman, even 
before He met her. 



Matt. 15 : 21-28, and Mark 

6 



82 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

She lias left, it appears, in her home a daughter 
possessed by a devil. Day after day the wretched 
mother has sat beside the child in silent, help- 
less anguish, 

"Love watching madness with unalterable mien." 

But now the wonder-working Healer of disease 
has come. She has heard of his power 
and compassion. She has been told of demons 
that had scoffed at all other exorcists, but had 
heard from Him the voice of a master and 
obeyed. Xot a moment is to be lost. He never 
came her way before — may never come again. 
He will hear her cry, as He has heard a thousand 
cries, with relief and gladness in his answer. 

But now a strange, dark mystery. He answers 
her not a word. What can be the meaning of 
it? Does He despise her as a heathen? Are all 
the reports of Him false? Or is his power only 
a lying invention? 

At this point the disciples interpose. "Send 
her away, for she crieth after us." They speak 
in no better spirit, apparently, than that of the 
godless judge in the parable: "I will avenge 
her, lest by her continual coming she weary me." 
The disciples are tired of the woman and would 
gladly be rid of her. 

But still the Master keeps his silence. He 
will not speak the word of relief. "I am not 
sent," He replies to them, "but to the lost sheep 
of the house of Israel." A rebuff that comes 
like a cruel blow to the sad woman's hopes. 



CHEIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 83 

Not a syllable yet spoken to her. Not a syllable 
of sympathy for her. Only cold, hard words, 
which possibly she overhears. 

Bnt still, like a bird driven back seaward 
by harsh winds from the shore, yet straggling 
with tired wings for shelter, she holds on and 
holds out. Close to his feet she comes, and kneel- 
ing to look up into his face, she cries, "Lord, 
help me!" He replies as if his heart were turned 
to stone, "Let the children first be fed. It is 
not meet to take the children's bread and cast 
it to dogs!" 1 There is no hope. He scorns 
her as a heathen dog. He is a narrow, haughty, 
heartless Jew. 

But no — that cannot be. It is Jesus of Naz- 
areth! She watches Him more closely, kneel- 
ing there at his feet. Does she detect, through 
this disguise of bigotry and scorn, a glance 
from the true Jesus? The keen insight of faith ! 
The quick wit of inspired humility! "Truth, 
Lord," I am a pagan dog : and therefore I claim 
the blessing; for "the dogs eat of the crumbs 
that fall from their master's table." "She 
snares the Lord," says Luther, "in his own 
speech." 

And now He lets drop the disguise. Like 
Joseph, when ruler in Egypt, first sternly re- 

1 Kwdpia, literally, "little dogs." Some interpreters have seen 
in. this a mitigation of the harshness of our Lord's repulse. 
Others have thought it an aggravation, as more contemptuous than 
"doss," without the diminutive. There is apparently little ground 
for either view. But the word is certainly harsh— was intended 
to be— as part of the test to which our Lord was putting the Syro- 
phcenician's faith. As Trench remarks ("■'Miracles." p. 275), the 
nobler qualities of the dog are nowhere recognized in Scripture. 



84 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

pelling his brethren till he can learn what man- 
ner of men they hare become in his long absence, 
and then revealing himself to welcome them 
with open arms, the Lord Jesns shows the love 
that lay hidden behind this harsh rebuff. "O 
woman! great is thy faith! For this saying, go 
thy way. The devil is gone out of thy daugh- 
ter." 

The use He makes of silence is as beautiful 
as anything in all Scripture. A lapidary spends 
small pains on any common stone. The stone 
might crack and fly in fragments; or, if fin- 
ished, might not pay for the labor on it. But 
when some priceless diamond in the rough 
comes into his hands, he cuts and grinds and 
files and shapes and polishes, till the full beauty 
of the brilliant is brought out. So there were 
weaklings whom our Lord could take through 
no such discipline of exclusiveness and mystery 
and repulsion. To the leper He replied 
at once, "I will ; be thou clean I" 1 At the gate of 
Xain, amidst the widow's woe over the dead form 
of her son, before she asks for sympathy, 
"Young man, I say unto thee, arise!" 2 To the 
impotent man at Bethesda, without waiting for 
a prayer for healing, " Arise, take up thy bed and 
walk." 

So, in other instances, the feeble faith of 
some could stand no strain of delay. "The 
bruised reed He would not break, or quench the 

1 Matt 8:3. 2 Luke 7 : 14. 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER, 



85 



smoking flax." But this Syrophoenician wo- 
man was neither reed nor flax. Her faith was 
strong. Her spiritual sight was keen. So the 
Master folds in his loye and yeils it over. He 
brings out the beauty and power of her trust in 
Him. He holds it up, honored and glorified, 
to the world's admiration to the end of time, 
that no sad soul, hard pressed and long waiting, 
may eyer despair. 

V. There are lessons, also, in the acts of our 
Lord, when He is not by word of mouth directly 
teaching. Dr. Horace Bushnell 1 beautifully 
sketches his sleep on the fisher's boat. "No wild- 
est tumult without can reach the inward com- 
posure of his rest. The rain beating on his face, 
and the spray driving across it, and the sharp 
gleams of the lightning and the crash of the 
thunder and the roar of the storm and the 
screams of the men, not all of them can shake 
Him far enough inward to reach the center 
where sleep lodges and waken Him to conscious- 
ness." What a suggestion here, though indi- 
rectly, of the energy with which He labored to 
bless men. Believing the body and comforting the 
soul of every sufferer, to his own worn body He is 
a pitiless master, incessantly demanding from it, 
" Give, give, more work for the lame, deaf, blind 
and leprous and possessed, more teaching for the 
benighted multitudes!" till it sinks on the deck of 
the little vessel, utterly exhausted and worn out. 

1 Christ and his Salvation, p. 140. 



86 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

"What a suggestion, too, of eagerness for ser- 
vice, even at fearful cost (Mark 10 : 32), in Ms 
going before the disciples on his way to Geth- 
seniane and the cross! In his three months in 
Jerusalem the Jews had plotted to assassinate 
Him, had twice mobbed Him, had once issued 
an order for his arrest, 1 and had been fired, by 
the raising Lazarus, to still more desperate 
rage. 2 ^To wonder that the disciples, as they fol- 
low Him while He presses on before them in the 
way, are amazed and afraid. How searching and 
pathetic a rebuke to any one of us inclined to 
complain of too many demands for Christian 
work, too many calls on his purse ! 

Another act of Jesus, which seems at first 
reading insignificant, is fruitful in suggestion. 
Sitting ("wearied," again, as on the fisher's 
boat) by the well-side, He says to the dissolute 
Samaritan woman, "Give me to drink." 3 He 

1 John 7 : 19-32 ; 8 : 59 ; 10 : 31-39. 

2 John 11 : 45-50. 

3 John 4:7. Some most interesting points in the conversation 
that follows are noted by Trench " Synonyms of the N. T., on aireo. 
The woman in her reply, " How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest 
drink," etc., uses curew which, like the Latin peto, implies a peti- 
tion from an inferior to a superior. She evidently, at first, looks 
on Jesus as a friendless wanderer. But He, in his rejoinder, care- 
fully avoids the use of her word and the concession it would in- 
volve. '• If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith 
to thee, Give me to drink;" then, proceeding, He significantly 
adopts her word, " thou wouldst have asked of Him, and He would 
have given thee living water." Instead of supposing thyself supe- 
rior, thou wouldst have acknowledged thine inferiority to Him. 
Cremer, in his lexicon, remarks that Trench (who is supported 
bv Bengel, and bv Webster in " Syntax and Synonyms of the X. 
T.") "wrongly limits the use of aiTeiw,wken he says that, like the 
Latin peto, it is submissive and suppliant : as many examples of 
the opposite might be quoted: Deut. 10:12; Acts 16:29; etc." 
It is true that, in Deut. 10 : 12, " And now Israel, what doth the 
Lord thy God require of thee," alrelTai can have no such suppliant 
meaning. Also, Acts 16 : 29, where the jailer " called for a light," 
must be conceded to Cremer. Perhaps, too, he would claim Luke 
1 : 63, where Zacharias asks for a writing-table. Another instance, 
(Ephes. 3 : 13), " I desire that ve faint not at my tribulations," is not 
so clear. It would be quite like the great apostle, in his meekness 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 87 

asks a favor. And nothing so gratifies and con- 
ciliates a person in humble life as to be solicited 
for a favor that he can easily grant. Jesus 
understood human nature. And his methods 
of approaching those whom He sought to bene- 
fit are a study in themselves. 

Another suggestive act of our Lord is the re- 
moval of the hired mourners from the room 
where lay the dead maiden. (Mark 5 : 40.) It 
is easy to imagine how utterly repulsive to his 
sensitive nature must have been these charla- 
tans ("skillful in lamentation/' Amos 5:16), 
howling like dervishes, and as hollow-hearted 
as the "sounding brass and clanging cymbals" 
which aided in the uproar they made. He came 
to be, not a perfect man, but a perfect human 
being. All the finest qualities of both sexes 
were harmoniously blended in Him. As no man 
ever equalled Him in the sterner, masculine 

and gentleness, to adopt toward his brethren a word generally 
used by an inferior. 

But airelv is used in the New Testament, no less than seventy- 
one times. And in every instance, with the above few possible 
exceptions, it is in a request made to a superior. The following 
examples are taken at random : Matt. 5 :42 ; Mark 6 :22 ; Luke 
11 :9 ; John 15 :7 ; Acts 12 :20. A usus so uniform could be no 
matter of accident. 

Thayer's lexicon (sub verbo) asserts that Prof. Ezra Abbott 
proves, in the N. Am. Review (1872, p. 182), that Trench is wrong. 
Not so. Dr. Abbott, who makes atrew occur seventy-one times, 
says only, "The following passages must, at least, be regarded as 
exceptions, and may suggest a doubt as to the distinction asserted." 
He adds no exceptions to those above cited but I. Cor., 1 : 22, " the 
Jews ask for signs," and I. Pet., 3 : 15, "everyone that asketh of you 
a reason of the hope that is in you." Allowing both these, they 
would make five, at most six, instances, out of seventy-one. Dr. 
Abbott did well to speak cautiously. 

Another suggestive point, though a little aside from our line of 
discussion is that to the Samaritan woman's first reply to our 
Lord we find no "Sir" prefixed. The omission corresponds to 
her presumptuous use of alrelv. But in her second reply, struck 
by the words of Jesus, "If thou knewest who it is," etc., as well 
as, probably, by the unconscious dignity of his manner, she com- 
mences with "Sir," or "Lord," *vpie. 



88 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

virtues, so no woman in the refined sensibility 
with which He shrank from everything un- 
seemly, everything spurious and false. 

In the rude age and land in which He had 
chosen to live He had, from such sources, trials 
to endure that rarely occur to us. There could 
hardly be a more striking scene than this of the 
Master standing in his majestic calmness, be- 
fore pronouncing the almighty word that was 
to raise the dead, with these tragic harlequins 
jeering and scoffing around Him. 

The intense significance of that other act 
(Luke 22 : 61) in the court of the high priest, 
when "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter" 
swearing to his falsehood, and the apostle 
"felt how awful goodness is," we pass with no 
vain attempt at description. 

Instances in which there was a startling power 
in the very appearance of Jesus, in which the 
hidden divinity must have shone through the 
lowly exterior, the reader can study for himself 
in Matt. 21 : 12; Mark 9 : 15; Luke 1 : 20, 30; 
John 7: 41-16; 18: 6. 

VI. There is suggestion in our Lord's con- 
stant citation of the Old Testament Scriptures. 
For one reason this is specially remarkable. 
Being Himself the Truth, as well as the Way 
and the Life, He was, independently of Scrip- 
ture, an infallible source of instruction. Also, 
as introducing the New Economy, which was to 
sweep away so large a portion of the require- 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 89 

ments of the Old, had He referred less than He 
does to the latter He might not have surprised 
us. 

And yet, in driving out the traders from the 
temple (Mark 11 : 17), in replying to the cavil 
of the scribes about the resurrection (Mark 12 : 
20), when tempted by Satan (Matt. 4 : 1-11), 
on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24 : 27), almost 
everywhere and at all times, He is bringing in 
some utterance of Moses, the Psalms, or the 
Prophets. 

Is there no lesson here for preachers of our 
time? They have too often been content with 
"motto texts" — texts which are simply figure- 
heads to a sermon. One old New England divine 
is reported to have said that he "wanted nothing 
from a text but to get a subject out of it." There 
was formerly much of that style of discourse. 
But more recently the sermon is the direct child 
of the Scriptures. It lies on the bosom of Scrip- 
ture and draws its life from that. It becomes, 
in consequence, less technical and formal. It 
has greater variety, richness, freshness of 
thought. 

VII. But various lessons our Lord taught by 
his miracles of healing. We have seen some- 
thing of these in the story of the Syrophoenician 
woman. Quite as striking is that of the woman 
with the issue of blood. And, equally with that, 
it seems to call for special notice. 

When a man has been placed on an insula- 



00 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

ting stool and then thoroughly charged with 
electricity, one may, with a tonch of the hnger, 
draw off from any part of his person a share 
of the mysterious fluid. It may be done with- 
out his wish or knowledge. He may be slyly 
approached from behind. The electricity is not 
in his will, but in his body. And his body will 
communicate it through a touch. So this woman 
evidently supposes the healing power to be in 
Christ. Tormented with a cruel disease, which 
is slowly wearing out her life, she expects to 
find Him so overflowing with the curative virtue 
that it saturates even his garments. She means 
to steal, from behind, some share of this virtue 
with a touch, and then to make off with her 
blessing before He is aware. 

Her whole notion,- of course, is a delusion. 
There is a large alloy of superstition mixed with 
the gold of her faith. And, had our Lord been 
as narrow and harsh as too many a servant of 
his through the ages since, He would have bid- 
den her begone with her wretched conceit and 
to wait for a cure till she had learned how to 
approach Him. 

But not so the gracious Master. The poor 
woman's body is to be healed and her soul 
instructed. But the healing comes first. To 
ask her to come out, while diseased and doubt- 
ing and trembling, with a full disclosure of her 
sad condition, would have been too stern a test 
for her feeble faith. He will take a gentler way. 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 91 

He honors at once this dim-sighted, supersti- 
tious faith of hers. He falls in, for the moment, 
with her way for the healing. 

Quick as an electric flash, and thrilling as that, 
the throb of returning health runs through her 
nerves and startles her with a vigor never 
known for many a weary year before. Now 
she can stand the test of exposure. "The joy 
of the Lord is her strength. " Now, not till now, 
the Master turns with his searching question, 
"Who touched my clothes?" The magical virtue 
in his clothing, as the woman supposes, has had 
its effect. The Master knows nothing of what 
has been done. She will hide within her own 
bosom the gladdening secret and escape with 
it undivulged. 

But the Lord cannot let her evade Him with- 
out a better and more lasting blessing than she 
had in her thought. Her renewed, invigorated 
body will, ere many years, be mouldering in the 
dust. Into the undying soul, therefore, Jesus 
will throw new life and light. "Who touched my 
clothes?" is his persistent question. Peter, of 
course and as usually, wiser than his Master, 
thinks the question absurd. "The multitude 
throng Thee and press Thee," he cries, "and say- 
est Thou, Who touched me?" But Jesus is not 
to be baffled in his loving search for this 
daughter of Abraham. "Though many had 
thronged," says an old interpreter, "only one 
had touched Him." Through the contact of the 



92 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

others went out no stream of blessing; through 
that of the woman passed life for the dying. 

When, in a flutter of mingled joy and awe, 
she comes out to fall down before Him and tell 
all the truth, the word follows which is to glow 
to her latest day in her memory: "Daughter, be 
of good comfort : thy faith hath saved thee. Go 
in peace." "I knew," that is, "who was behind 
me. I knew how feeble and benighted was thy 
hope. It was no magic in my garment, but my 
love for thee, in response to thy faith, that has 
cured thee. Xot only trust and be healed in the 
body, my daughter. Believe and be saved in 
the soul." 

The whole beautiful narrative shows the use 
and value of an immature, ignorant faith. 
It teaches at how low a point in darkness and 
error the Lord Jesus is able and eager to lay 
hold on a soul. 

Again, take the account of the palsied man 
(Matt. 9 : 1-8). In all his wretched helpless- 
ness he is laid by his Mends, on his pallet, be- 
fore the Master. They desire nothing so much 
as the sovereign word of cure. But how indif- 
ferent seems the Lord to his sad condition! 
For some time not a syllable of relief from it 
falls from his lips. There is no sign reported 
of sympathy Avith his sufferings. There is not 
a trace of recognition of them in any way. Yet, 
while the man is still lying unrelieved, Jesus 
cries to him, "Son, be of good cheer!" What, 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 93 

to most of the bystanders, could this have 
seemed but irony? Jesus evidently intended to 
intimate, as well to them as to him, that the 
body is nothing — that, even if cured of its ail- 
ments, it soon goes to the dust — and that the 
soul is the jewel within the casket. 

"Thy sins be forgiven thee!" That great de- 
liverance, He will have all present understand, 
may well thrill one with gladness, however 
palsied and distressed the outward frame. 

It is not till after the charge of blasphemy 
from the Pharisees, and the necessity of vindi- 
cating his Divine prerogative in the forgiveness 
of sins, that He pays any attention at all to the 
body of the sufferer. Even then He brings in 
the miracle only incidentally. ' ' Now, "He seems 
to say, "since I have granted this poor sinner 
the greatest boon conceivable, in the forgiveness 
of his sins, if you count the little matter of the 
healing of his body of so much moment, before 
dismissing him I will attend to that." The man- 
ner of the miracle is every way as instructive as 
the miracle itself. 

VIII. Our Lord's way of startling his hearers 
by paradoxes and solecisms is remarkable. 
"Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood 
hath eternal life" (John 6 : 54). "She is not dead, 
but sleepeth" (Matt. 9 :24). "Destroy this tem- 
ple, and in three days I will raise it up " (John 
2 : 19). These and like utterances sometimes 
seem as if He cared for nothing so much as to 



04 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

rouse the dull minds around Him and bolt them 
into some activity of thought on the great 
themes He handled. 

There is danger to the preacher, of course, in 
following this example, that he may ran into 
sensationalism and extravagance. But nothing 
of much value is to be had without danger. And 
without more or less of this style of speech the 
preacher is exposed to a more serious danger 
— that of inattention and indifference to his 
words. 

IX. The dramatic skill with which Jesus 
makes the characters in his parables speak, each 
one like himself, is admirable. Take, for exam- 
ple, the two sons bidden by their father to go 
into the vineyard. (Matt. 21 : 28.) The father 
uses, as in the story of the prodigal, the filial 
title "Son." This is an intimation both of his 
rightful authority and that he commands not 
as a heartless task-master. But the first son, 
who represents the reckless, defiant publican or 
sinner, answers without the corresponding 
"Father." His surly reply is short, sharp, and 
decisive: "I will not!" x 

But his brother is a true Pharisee — a model 
of hollow, unmeaning obsequiousness. "I go, 
Sir." 2 He lays great stress on the "I." It is 
like him who prays in the temple. "I thank 
Thee that I am not as other men." "I fast twice 

1 Or rather, as, in contrast with his brother, lie omits the iyu>. 
it is " Will not '* (ov M u ). He puts all force into his rebellious will. 

2 eyw, icvpie. 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 95 

in the week. I give tithes of all that I get." 
Again, the "go" is not a word used by this 
hypocritical son. It is thrown in by the trans- 
lators. The son omits it, apparently to give more 
prominence to the "I." And finally the "sir," 
which his rongh brother omits, he deferentially 
inserts. His reply is, "I, sir!" "I am the model 
son, who knows the respect due to a father." And 
his sycophancy ends in words. 

So is it with the Rich Fool (Luke 12 : 17-19). 
What fine irony in making him congratulate his 
soul on having a store of luxuries for the 
palate! As if one, reversing the process, were 
to feed the body on the nutriment of the soul — 
on grand ideas and hopes and aspirations. How 
absolute a fool he is! And with what tragic 
power comes in the voice of God, "This night 
thy soul," for which thou hast provided thy 
dainties, "shall be required of thee!" — to startle 
him from his fatuous dream. 

Again, in the parable of the Pounds (Luke 
19 : 12-27), as contrasted with that of the 
Talents (Matt. 25 : 14-30), there are lessons in 
che bearing and acts of the characters intro- 
duced. In the latter parable, the several ser- 
vants have different sums entrusted to them, five 
talents, two, and one, with, of course, different 
grades of responsibility. When then they ren- 
der accounts, their master addresses him who 
with five talents, has gained five more, in the 
words, "Well done, good and faithful servant; 



96 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

thou hast been faithful oyer a few things; I will 
set thee over many things; enter thou into the 
joy of thy lord." 

Then comes he who has doubled his two tal- 
ents. He has brought to his master less than 
half what his brother has earned. But relatively 
to his ability he has done precisely the same. 
Not only, therefore, does he receive the same 
reward, that of entering into the joy of his lord, 
however much or little this may mean, but it is 
conveyed to him, syllable for syllable, in the 
same words. The verse which contains it, one 
of the very longest in the whole parable, cannot 
have been so carefully repeated by the Great 
Teacher without an object. Jesus plainly meant 
to stamp deep into our conviction the truth 
that God is no respecter of persons, that the 
humblest, lowliest disciple, if equally faithful 
with his eminent brother, shall have, to the last 
particle, as large and rich reward as he. 

But turn, now, to the parable of the Pounds. 
Here the amounts entrusted to the servants 
are not, as the talents, unequal. But each 
receives, like every other, one pound. And in 
the reckoning, after the lord's return, he who 
has multiplied his pound ten-fold has an "en- 
trance ministered unto him abundantly" into 
his master's favor. Hear the welcome, "Well 
done, thou good servant! Because thou wast 
found faithful in a very little, have thou author- 
ity over ten cities." Almost every word is praise. 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 9? 

The utterance blooms and shines along the lines 
with commendation. 

But how with him who, with the same 
ability and opportunity, has been but half as 
faithful? He has gained but five pounds. How 
different the Lord's answer to him! No long- 
verse repeated, as to the servant who had earned 
two talents. Not a word of commendation now. 
No "well done!" for him as for his brother. 
No "thou good and faithful servant!" for him. 
No "because thou wast found faithful in a very 
little." He had received more than a very little. 
And short and abrupt is the answer, "Be thou 
also over five cities." He is "saved so as 
through fire." 1 

In the parable of the Pharisee and the publi- 
can at the temple, what keen irony (in view of 
his offering not a single request or petition) in 
saying, "The Pharisee prayed thus with him- 
self'! The publican's plea, on the other hand 
"God be merciful to me a sinner!" is all peti- 
tion. And, with downcast eyes and hands beat- 
ing his breast, he strives, in the intensity of 
his feeling, to find a tongue in every limb. 

X. Our Lord is remarkable for his word-pic- 
tures. Like a true artist, He never paints with- 
out a background. He looks well to the lights and 
shades. He puts truths and facts by comparison. 

1 These significant distinctions, as well as the "entrance 
ministered abundantly " and the " saved as through fire" (escaping 
from a house on fire), indicate far greater differences of reward in 
heaven, far more occasion for regret on the part of self-indulgent 
Christians, there, than most Bible readers imagine. 



98 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

To warn Ckorazin of the giddy height and 
tremendous peril of her privilege, He points her 
to Sodom and Gomorrah (Matt. 11:21), which, 
with her light, would have long ago repented 
in sack-cloth and ashes. To rebuke the churl- 
ish ruler of the synagogue, canting about the 
Sabbath, he contrasts the poor woman, delivered 
from a demon, with the sheep released from a 
pit on the Sabbath day. (Matt. 12 : 11.) In 
cheering his disciples with the assurance of 
their Father's protection and care, He reminds 
them of Him who feeds even the fowls of the 
air, and clothes with more than the splendor of 
Solomon, the lilies of the field. (Matt. G:26- 
29.) That He may raise the standard of char- 
acter among his disciples, He takes, as the foil 
on which to exhibit the righteousness He re- 
quires, that of the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 
5:20). Though despised and rejected of men, 
He reminds those around Him, with the assur- 
ance, "A greater than Solomon is here,' 1 (Matt. 
12 : 12) of the transcendent majesty of his per- 
son. 

There is in all this a rhetorical suggestion 
for the young preacher. He comes upon many 
a great truth which, because it is great, has been 
so often repeated as to seem threadbare. He is 
at a loss how to give it so fresh an utterance as 
will hold attention. Let him remember that a 
painter often brings out a figure, not by touch- 
ing it at all, but by darkening its surroundings. 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 99 

Let the young preacher paint a background, 
show a contrast, to his thought. So he may 
easily throw it out into new and more vivid light. 

XI. The style of our Lord in public speech 
is at other points instructive. It abounds in 
hints as to "the art of xuitting things." Every 
student of rhetoric is aware how superior in 
vivacity and energy is the metaphor to the 
simile. It is more forcible to call an extortioner 
a shark than to say that he acts like a shark — 
to declare that a good woman is an angel, than 
that she is like an angel. 

JS'ow our Lord's style of speech wonderfully 
abounds in metaphor. A tame speaker might 
have said that He was the source of sacred truth 
to men. Jesus says, "I am the light of the 
world." The unskilled preacher might have 
reminded believers that they were a preserva- 
tive element among men. Jesus says, "Ye are 
the salt of the earth." So, "I am the good shep- 
herd," "I am the door," "I am the vine; ye are 
the branches," "I am the bread of life." 

The objection to metaphor is, that it is liable 
to obscurity and misapprehension. But often, 
even at the risk of that, Jesus adheres to it. 
For instance, in the beautiful metaphors (John 
10 : 1-5) of the shepherd, the sheep, the porter, 
and the fold, "they understood not what things 
they were which He spake unto them." He is 
obliged to come out more plainly with his 
meaning. 



100 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

Jesus had peculiar modes of illustration. 
He often unfolded a great principle, not so much 
by taking analogies from animate or inanimate 
nature as by selecting a special instance, a con- 
crete application, of the principle itself, and, 
with wonderful power, picturing and pressing 
that home on the souls around Him. 

Instead of enjoining meekness in general 
terms, He says "If a man smite thee on the one 
cheek, turn to him the other also." Urging 
philanthropy, He says, "From him that would 
borrow of thee turn not thou away." Instead 
of asking, in general, what father would refuse 
favors to his children, He demands, "If a son 
ask bread of any of you that is a father, will 
he give him a stone?" Instead of forbidding 
uncharitable judgments, with what vividness 
He puts it: "Why beh oldest thou the mote that 
is in thy brother's eye, and considerest not the 
beam that is in thine own eye?" (Matt. 
7 : 3). 

As Wkately remarks, too, this is an excel- 
lence in style which, without loss of power, cam 
be translated into other tongues. The eloquence 
of many a fine rhetorician, rendered into a 
foreign language, is like the golden clouds of 
sunset condensed into a spatter of water drops. 
Macaulay says of "Paradise Lost," that not a 
word could be altered or displaced without injury 
to the poem. But the wonderfully effective 
style of Jesus is essentially the same in any 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 101 

human tongue. Is it hard to see a Divine 
prescience in all this? 

XII. Jesus illustrates, not only with familiar 
speech, but from familiar objects. The wine, 
the sheep, the tree, the nets, the bargains in 
the market-place, the lost coin in the house, 
the wine- skins with their contents, the salt 
losing its savor, the servant called in from feed- 
ing cattle, the sower and his seed, the wheat 
and the tares, the plowman looking back from 
the plow, the leaven, the mustard- seed, the 
importunate widow and the judge — all are made 
to move as in a panorama before us, each with 
its golden lesson. 

So each of these objects becomes, in its turn, 
a preacher eloquent in its silence, to remind 
disciples of their Master's words and to speak 
in his name long after He has passed away. 
The salt that has lost its savor becomes a savor 
unto life, and the barren fig-tree bears such fruit 
as never hung- on tree before. 

Again, Jesus was no indifferent observer of the 
events of his time. From them, as from other il- 
lustrations,He drew lessons of wisdom. He warns 
the disciples against the foul influence of Herod. 
(Mark 8 : 15.) He cautions them against the exam- 
ples of the scribes. (Matt. 23: 3.) He admonishes 
them to draw no hasty inference as to the guilt 
of them whose blood Pilate mingled with their 
own sacrifice (Luke 13:2, 3), or them on whom 
had fallen the tower in Siloam. (Luke 13 : 4.) 



102 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

He teaches Christian duty toward the Ko- 
nian emperor (Matt. 22:21). He shows himself 
abreast of the times, awake to what goes on 
around Him and to the duties which flow ont 
of the hour that is passing. 

Here, too, there is a lesson for the pulpit of 
our time. Not that the preacher should secular- 
ize himself or his work. Xot that, from a mere 
temporal point of view, he should deal with mere 
temporal interests. But the grandest truths 
of Christianity lie often in close connection with 
the passing events of the time. They look out, 
with fresh light and meaning in their faces, 
through these events. Prof. Phelps, of Andover, 
records the x>owerful impression made by a 
Boston pastor, at the time of the conviction and 
execution of Prof. Webster of Harvard College, 
by drawing from that event lessons as to 
retribution. 

XIII. The parable was pre-eminently the 
beauty and glory of our Lord's way of teaching. 
''Without a parable spake He nothing unto 
them. (Matt. 13:34) 

A parable is very precarious ground on which 
to build any great doctrine of Scripture. A doc- 
trine which is taught elsewhere in literal 
speech, we may recoguize as re-appearing in one 
of these beautiful pictures. But where and how 
far the imagery of the parable represents literal 
fact is no easy matter to decide. 

The use of the story is not so much to teach 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 103 

any new doctrine as to illustrate and enforce 
what is elsewhere taught. It appeals, like 
an allegorical painting, to the imagination. It 
is rather for suggestion and impression than 
for information. And the suggestive richness 
of it is largely due to the fact that it faces, with 
different incidental meanings, in various direc- 
tions. 

In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which might 
be regarded as a sort of modified and extended 
parable, what is the meaning of the "Valley of 
the Shadow of Death"? To one reader it means 
a time of deep spiritual gloom; to another, of 
terrible bereavement that left him alone in 
the world; to another, of heavy reverses that 
swept away his livelihood. The dismal Valley 
serves indifferently for any or all these trials. 
And because it does, it is far richer in themes for 
thought than a baldly literal statement of truth. 

The right view of analogies between the 
material creation and moral truth, we conceive to 
be that they are no accident. They are not in- 
genious inventions. They were divinely in- 
wrought in the plan of creation itself. The world 
is a vast diagram drawn to shadow forth truth. 

Take, for example, the relation of parent to 
child. What could be more superficial than to 
suppose it instituted solely for the perpetuation 
of the human species? How easily that might 
have been accomplished by direct creation, as 
of Adam in Eden! But the plan of God was 



101 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

evidently first to bring ns into the world, in a 
helpless infancy, from human parents; and then, 
when with every tendril of our being we have 
clung to an earthly father, when a thousand 
endearing memories and associations have 
sanctified the word father, God comes in to 
proclaim Himself the Infinite Father and invite 
us to a childlike trust in Him. 

So again, the solid bulk and weight of things 
in the visible creation, controlled as it is by 
such ethereal, unseen forces as gravitation, 
animal and vegetable life, heat, light, electric 
currents — what room for question that all this 
was originally designed of God to shadow forth 
"the invisible things of Him" which are "clearly 
seen in things that do appear"? 

All nature, in short, is a vast and infinitely 
varied system of diagrams, or object-lessons, 
with spiritual uses of suggestion and instruction 
inwoven with its material laws. 

But Jesus, in his illustrations of truth, goes 
even farther than this. He finds "a soul of good 
in things evil." His parables are remarkable 
for the suggestions they draw from the selfish- 
ness, the cruelties, the iniquities in general, of 
men. 

Sometimes the parable, as the one which is 
the main theme of this volume, touches the truth 
illustrated at many points of contact. But again 
it has, as in these analogies from the sins and 
crimes of men, hardly more than one such point. 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 105 

Thus, froni the story of the Unjust Steward 
(Luke 16:1-9) we learn only that we are wisely 
to make provision, not only for the life that now 
is, but for that to come. The parable of the Un- 
just Judge (Luke 18 :l-8) is simply a dark back- 
ground on which to paint the contrasted loye of 
God for his people. In the parable of the Un- 
merciful Servant (Matt. 18:23-35), whose lord 
commands him and his wife and children all to 
be pitilessly sold into slavery, Jesus, without 
intending to ascribe to God such cruelty and 
injustice toward the innocent as this, is only 
warming an unforgiving soul of its peril. 

When the man finding a treasure hid in the 
field (Matt. 13 : 44), instead of honestly report- 
ing it to the rightful owner or his heirs, hides 
it again, and selling all that he has, buys the 
field for himself, the only lesson is that we 
must make any sacrifice for the priceless treas- 
ure of immortal life. 1 

This method, as a whole, of extracting good 
from evil falls in with the Divine policy of 
making the wrath of man to praise Him. "My 
Father worketh hitherto and I work." It hints 

1 The parable of the Leaven (Matt. 13 : 33 and Luke 13 : 21) also 
seems to illustrate our Lord's way of extracting; pood from evil. 
In the Old Testament, leaven, as implying fermentation and 
incipient decay, is used as a symbol of depravity. The only appar- 
ent exceptions are Lev. 7:13, 23:17; and Amos 4:5. The first 
two instances are those of the consecration of the first-fruits of the 
bread made from the new wheat. It was such bread as was eaten 
in the households. The instance in Amos is indignant irony 
against those who worship false gods with offerings of leaven, 
in the New Testament leaven typifies moral corruption. It must 
have been, through the training of centuries, associated in the 
Jewish mind with sin. It is quite remarkable, therefore, that 
Jesus, in the parable, should have made it a type of moral purity. 



106 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

to us, also, that in all Christian effort, whether 
of instruction or of securing help for Christian 
ends, we are to make the best use possible even 
of evil men. 

XIV. Our Lord, in his teaching, drew out 
from his hearers the expression of their own 
thought. He quickened in that war their 
mental activity in receiving the truth. Question 
and answer was largely his method. He 
endorsed the Socratic method. The following- 
are examples: Matt. 9:2,8; 17:25; 20:22; 
21:25-31. Mark 8:27-29; 10:3. Luke 10:26, 
36. And often, as we saw above (VIII), He 
threw his thought into such paradoxes as, even 
more effectually than questions, would stimu- 
late the mind. 

Question and answer, in the delivery of ser- 
mons, are, of course, impracticable. But a far 
larger share than has been common, of the 
attention of the pulpit, ought to be given to the 
children of the congregation. With them this 
method is indispensable. It is the easiest way 
of holding their attention. It impresses truth 
deep on the memory. It will, better than any 
other method, awaken the mind to activity. The 
saying applies to these little hearers under in- 
struction, as fully as elsewhere, that "it is more 
blessed to give than to receive." 

The entire subject of illustration in public 
address is one as to which the discourses of Jesus 
are rich in suggestion. It is a subject which our 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 107 

liomiletical teachers have strangely neglected. 
Two bulky octavo volumes on sacred rhetoric, 
of more than 600 octavo pages each, occur to us, 
in neither of which is more than two pages 
given to this whole matter. 1 ^ot so the Great 
Teacher. As to this excellence in his methods, 
no less than as to others, "never man spake like 
this Man!" 

It was with various objects and aims that He 
resorted to illustration. 

I. For explanation of a truth. When the 
Pharisees and Herodians, hoping to compass 
his destruction, ask whether or not to pay 
tribute to Caesar, how clearly, with a coin as 
an object-lesson, He sets the case before them: 
"Whose is this image and superscription?" 
"Caesar." "Kender, therefore, to Caesar the 
things that are Caesar's, and to God the things 
that are God's." By the very stamp, that is, 
which you put on your money you acknowledge 
the emperor's authority. Act, then, as to the 
matter of tribute, accordingly. 

Again, after the question why his disciples 
do not, like those of John the Baptist, fast, when 
explaining that the liberty of the Christian 
Economy cannot be imprisoned within old Jew- 
ish rites, how happy his illustrations (Matt. 
9:16, 17) of the folly of that! The new cloth 
must not be sewed into the old garment. It 

1 Prof. F. W. Fish's "Manual of Preaching," which devotes to 
illustration an entire chapter, indicates an advance toward a fuller 
appreciation of the subject. 



108 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

would only, by tearing away the edges, enlarge 
the rent. The new wine must not be ponred 
into the old skins. Its vigorous ferment would 
soon burst them. One such illustration is worth, 
for explanation, a whole treatise. 

So, when the Jews charge Jesus with casting 
out demons through the prince of the demons, 
He asks (Matt. 12:29), "How can one enter 
into the house of the strong man and spoil his 
goods, except he first bind the strong man?" 
How could I snatch his victims from Satan if 
I had not a supernatural power over Satan? 
The commonest of the people could see, if the 
Pharisees could not, the point and force of that 
question. 

Once more, listening to his explanation why 
bad men must be allowed, for the present, to 
live amongst the good, the dullest disciple would 
see how the roots of the tares become entangled 
with those of the wheat — how, lest the wheat 
be uprooted, they must be suffered to grow with 
it till the harvest. 

II. Jesus used illustration for impressing 
such truth as needs little or no explanation. 
What power for that purpose in Nathan's touch- 
ing story (II Sam. 12:1-7) of the ewe lamb! 
How tame and weak, in comparison, would have 
been a direct complaint to David of his infa- 
mous treatment of Uriah! When the prophet 
had first gathered a storm of just indignation 
in the king against the imaginary rich man 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 109 

oppressing Ms poor neighbor, and then turned 
the point of it round against the king himself, 
it might well pierce within him the fountain 
of contrition and tears. 

In Matt. 8: 19, 20, where one who, if we may 
judge from the reply of Jesus, was governed by 
self-interest, 1 offers to follow our Lord, it would 
have been a feeble reply for the Master to say 
that He was poor. But the illustration, with its 
pathetic contrast — how absolute a destitution 
it pictures : " The foxes have holes and the birds 
of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath 
not where to lay his head." No mercenary for- 
tune-hunter would travel far along the road 
which led to that. 

Again, to preach a homily on the sovereign 
right of God to allot to his creatures, who of 
right can claim nothing, such conditions as 
seem to Him best, might have wearied many 
and convinced none. But when, in the parable 
of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20: 1-16), 
the employer had paid all for which the men 
engaged in the morning had agreed, every 
hearer would see that he was entitled, if he 
chose, to give to those who had toiled but an 
hour an equal sum. 

III. For awakening sympathy Jesus uses 
many a touching illustration. The Good Samar- 
itan, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, have 

1 The man probably expected Jesus to set up a temporal king- 
dom and reign in splendor. Like James and John (Marft 10 : 37), 
he was apparently an office-seeker. 



110 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

moved men of every generation to tears. In 
another case, the reply of the people (Matt. 21 : 
41), "He will miserably destroy those wicked 
men, and will let out his vineyard nnto other 
husbandmen," shows how Jesus, like Xathan 
the prophet, actually moved the indignation of 
his hearers against imaginary offenders who 
were simply the hearers' own reflections in a 
mirror. 

IV. Our Lord's different ways of introduc- 
ing illustrations will well reward study. This 
is a matter in which the average preacher, if he 
illustrate at all, often falls into monotony. "This 
subject may be illustrated as follows," or "Let 
us suppose a case for illustration," is enough 
to tire a hearer with what is coming before he 
has heard the first word of it. Jesus, on the 
contrary, illustrates sometimes by metaphor 
(Matt. 5 : 13, 14), sometimes by simile (Matt. 
13 : 33; Luke 13 : 19), now by analogy, then by 
contrast (Matt. 11:21; Luke 18:1-8), now by 
assertion (Matt. 13 : 45), then by question (Matt. 
7 :10; Luke 11 : 5), again, by an object-lesson 
(Matt. 18:2; Luke 5:10; 7:44). At times He 
draws out his fictitious narrative with no inti- 
mation, at first, of the uses to which He will 
apply it (Luke 8:5; 10:30). In some cases 
(Matt. 13:18-23, 37-42), He explains a para- 
ble. Often He leaves us to find for ourselves the 
application. 

Jesus was indeed, in Himself, in his whole 



CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. HI 

personality and mission, a grand visible illustra- 
tion of the unseen, eternal Godhead. It was as 
natural that exquisite word-pictures of truth 
should fall from his lips as that light should 
flow from the sun or fragrance from a grove of 
spices. He so marvelously shadowed forth, 
under visible forms, both the glory of the Divine 
nature and the lowliness of a perfect and suffer- 
ing humanity, that neither hostile Jews nor 
friendly disciples admitted to intimacy could 
comprehend Him. 

That the same Being, born of a virgin, throw- 
ing the shadow of mystery in advance, from 
even before his birth ; should be both "Wonder- 
ful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, 
Prince of Peace," regnant in transcendent 
majesty, and also that, when we see Him, there 
is no beauty that we should desire Him, despised 
and rejected of men — is it any marvel that 
saint and seer alike, along the centuries of the 
older Economy, studied the mystery of his 
nature in vain? 

As one looks along the face of the famous 
cliff in the White Mountains for the outlines of 
that gigantic face, of which he has heard, he dis- 
covers nothing but angles and jags of rock 
jutting out in seemingly wild confusion. They 
have no form or comeliness. They appear to 
have nothing in common. But, going on, till, 
at a turn in the pathway, a finger-board signifi- 
cantly points upward, he looks again. And 



112 CHRIST AS A PUBLIC TEACHER. 

there lie beholds, in clear, sharp relief against 
the azure, all these scattered crags and notches 
blending sublimely into the grandest semblance, 
perhaps, on the planet of the " human face 
divine." The ancient believers, searching what 
time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ 
which was in them did signify, when it testified 
beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the 
glories that should follow them, among all the 
scattered, incongruous features of his Messiah- 
ship, foretokened through the centuries, "found 
no end in wondering mazes lost." But when, 
in due time, was reached the exact, essential 
point of view, there showed these strange, isolat- 
ed features of his life, so long predicted, falling 
harmoniously into the one perfect and Divine 
humanity. What could such a Being be but 
the Way and the Truth, no less than the Life? 
If in Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily (amazing words!), how inevitably shall 
we find in Him also, for the matter not 
only, but the manner as well, of DMne illustra- 
tion, an exhaustless study, an unfailing inspira- 
tion! 









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