truth, and gets out of it a triumphant
sarcasm against religion. They tell us that just as the caterpillar
passes into the chrysalis, and the chrysalis into the butterfly, so
profligacy passes into disgust, and disgust passes into religion. To
use their own phraseology, when people become disappointed with the
world, it is the last resource they say, to turn saint. So the men of
the world speak, and they think they are profoundly philosophical and
concise in the account they give. The world is welcome to its very
small sneer. It is the glory of our Master's gospel that it _is_ the
refuge of the broken-hearted. It is the strange mercy of our God that
he does not reject the writhings of a jaded heart. Let the world curl
its lip if it will, when it sees through the causes of the prodigal's
return. And if the sinner does not come to God taught by this
disappointment, what then? If affections crushed in early life have
driven one man to God; if wrecked and ruined hopes have made another
man religious; if want of success in a profession has broken the
spirit; if the human life lived out too passionately, has left a
surfeit and a craving behind which end in seriousness; if one is
brought by the sadness of widowed life, and another by the forced
desolation of involuntary single life; if when the mighty famine comes
into the heart, and not a husk is left, not a pleasure untried, then,
and not till then, the remorseful resolve is made, "I will arise and
go to my Father:"--Well, brethren, what then? Why this, that the
history of penitence, produced as it so often is by mere
disappointment, sheds only a brighter lustre round the Love of Christ,
who rejoices to receive such wanderers, worthless as they are, back
into His bosom. Thank God the world's sneer is true. It _is_ the last
resource to turn saint. Thanks to our God that when this gaudy world
has ceased to charm, when the heart begins to feel its hollowness, and
the world has lost its satisfying power, still all is not yet lost if
penitence and Christ remain, to still, to humble, and to soothe a
heart which sin has fevered.

There is another truth contained in this section of the parable. After
a life of wild sinfulness religion is servitude at first, not freedom.
Observe, he went back to duty with the feelings of a slave: "I am no
more worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of thy hired
servants." Any one who has lived in the exciteme