r gavest me a kid." Now, in this we have a fact true
to Christian experience. Joy seems to be felt more vividly and more
exuberantly by men who have sinned much, than by men who have grown up
consistently from childhood with religious education. Rapture belongs
to him whose sins, which are forgiven, are many. In the perplexity
which this fact occasions, there is a feeling which is partly right
and partly wrong. There is a surprise which is natural. There is a
resentful jealousy which is to be rebuked.

There is first of all a natural surprise. It was natural that the
elder brother should feel perplexed and hurt. When a sinner seems to
be rewarded with more happiness than a saint, it appears as if good
and evil were alike undistinguished in God's dealings. It seems like
putting a reconciled enemy over the head of a tried servant. It looks
as if it were a kind of encouragement held out to sin, and a man
begins to feel, Well if this is to be the caprice of my father's
dealing; if this rich feast of gladness be the reward of a licentious
life, "Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in
innocency." This is natural surprise.

But besides this there is a jealousy in these sensations of ours which
God sees fit to rebuke. You have been trying to serve God all your
life, and find it struggle, and heaviness, and dulness still. You see
another who has outraged every obligation of life, and he is not tried
by the deep prostration you think he ought to have, but bright with
happiness at once. You have been making sacrifices all your life, and
your worst trials come out of your most generous sacrifices. Your
errors in judgment have been followed by sufferings sharper than those
which crime itself could have brought. And you see men who never made
a sacrifice unexposed to trial--men whose life has been rapture
purchased by the ruin of others' innocence--tasting first the
pleasures of sin, and then the banquet of religion. You have been a
moral man from childhood, and yet with all your efforts you feel the
crushing conviction that it has never once been granted you to win a
soul to God. And you see another man marked by inconsistency and
impetuosity, banqueting every day upon the blest success of impressing
and saving souls. All that is startling. And then comes sadness and
despondency; then come all those feelings which are so graphically
depicted here: irritation--"he was angr