at they were doing God service; yet they were spreading a
net for the feet of the innocent, and preparing to shed his blood.
Wearing broad phylacteries, making long prayers, and offering many
sacrifices, they were, notwithstanding, living in malice and envy,
hateful, and hating one another. With their lips they honoured God; but
in works they denied him. These, in as far as they are here represented,
were evil first and last. In the second son we have an example, not of a
man who meant to do good changing his mind and ultimately doing evil,
but of a man who, notwithstanding his fair profession, meant evil at the
beginning and perpetrated it in the end.

Nor are these lessons of the Lord limited to one private interpretation:
the lesson of this parable was not exhausted when the Pharisees died
out. As surely as the thorns, and the tares, and the lilies to which
Jesus on various occasions alluded in his lectures, grow on the ground
at this day, and have grown there through all the intervening
generations--so surely the various classes of human character which he
rebuked, warned, or encouraged in his ministry, have their
representatives going out and in amongst us in the present day. It is
meant that in this glass all the self-righteous to the end of the world
should see themselves; their profession is fair, but their life is for
self, and not for God.

In the stratified rocks many species and genera of plants and animals
are found in a fossil state which are not found in the flora or fauna of
our present earth; but the human characters that were fixed and stamped
as by photograph in the Scriptures are not so far removed from the men
and women who now live on the earth. No species has become extinct; and
even the minuter characteristics of distinct varieties remain legible
still.

* * * * *

Here spring two distinct warnings to two distinct classes, with
corresponding encouragements attached, as shadows follow solid bodies
in the sunlight;--to the Publicans and Harlots first, and next to the
Pharisees of the day.

1. There is a class amongst us answering to those publicans and sinners
to whom Jesus was wont to address the message of his mercy. Alas, they
may be counted by thousands and tens of thousands in the land! They are
the drunkards, the licentious, the profane, the false, the cruel,--those
who abandon themselves to a vicious life, and do not take the trouble of
attempting to hide