hurch set free to serve the Lord alone. The vineyard
will one day be delivered from the tyranny of usurping tenants, and its
fruit fully rendered to its rightful Lord.

Ah, my country, I dread the punishment of thy unfaithfulness! The same
righteous God, who cast out the Jews and admitted the Gentiles, reigneth
still. On the same principle he has taken the kingdom from Asia Minor
and Greece, and given it to this island of the sea. Alas, if we render
not to him the fruits of his vineyard, he may take our privileges in
judgment away, and give them to another nation, perhaps to
Italy--emancipated, regenerated Italy (Rom. xi. 19).

* * * * *

This parable is remarkable for the codicil taken from the Old Testament
and attached to it by the Lord on the spot and at the moment. The
picture of the tenant vine-dressers usurping possession--driving off the
owner's servants and slaying his son, although transparent in its
meaning and pungent in its reproof, does not contain all that the Lord
then desired to address to the Pharisees. It pleased him to employ that
similitude as far as it reached; but when its line had all run out, he
seized another line that lay ready in the Scriptures to his hand, and
attached it to the first, that by the union of the two he might make the
reproof complete. The first type taken from human affairs is not broad
enough to represent the kingdom of God at a crisis of its conflict. The
son whom the proprietor sends on an embassy to the vine-dressers, points
to Christ sent by the Father to his own Israel. The terrestrial fact
serves to show that the son was put to death by the rebels in
possession, but there its power is exhausted; it has no means of
exhibiting the other side of the scene,--that this son rose from the
dead, and now reigns over all. The parable, when it came to its natural
conclusion, left the lesson which it had begun to teach abruptly broken
off in the midst,--left a glory of the Lord unrevealed, and a terror to
wicked men unspoken. That he might proclaim the whole truth, and leave
his unrepenting hearers without excuse, the Lord proceeded then and
there to demand of them, "Did ye never read in the Scriptures, The
stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the
corner?"

The parable of the husbandmen has already shown that the Son was
rejected by the favoured people to whom he was sent; and this grand text
from the Old Testament Scr