ay first approach by the other side: love
of the world may be the earlier matured and more imperious passion. The
farm and the merchandise may become the soul's first and fondest love;
and that love possessing all the soul's faculties, may cast or keep out
Christ and his redemption. If you suppose those invited guests to have
been previously wedded to the idolatry of covetousness, worshipping gain
in secret as their god, you can easily comprehend how they should grudge
a day taken from traffic in order to honour their king; so in the
interpretation of the parable, when riches or pleasures increase, and
the possessor sets his heart upon them, he has already obtained his
portion, and will not cast it away for Christ; he will mock the
messengers who bring the distasteful proposal.

Among the invited guests, however, there is another class who treat the
king's servants in another way. The first class made light of the
message; the second murdered the messengers. It is intimated that while
the bulk of those to whom the Gospel was preached, neglected the offer
and busied themselves with earthly gains, some rose against the
preachers and persecuted them unto the death. These last, however, seem
to have been in point of numbers an inconsiderable minority,--"the
remnant entreated them spitefully and slew them."

There were persecutors in the earliest days of the Gospel, and there
have been persecutors in every generation since. The Pharisees plotted
that they might put Jesus to death: Saul of Tarsus at a later date was
their willing tool in a desperate effort to quench the life of the
infant Church in the blood of its members. After he was turned, and the
mighty stream of his life compelled to flow like a river of water in the
opposite direction, a constant succession of cruel men has been kept up
in this restless, sin-stained world, whose life-work is to crucify
Christ in his members. The unchanged, unrepenting hierarchy of Rome,
successor not of Peter the apostle, but of Saul the persecutor, does yet
all that it can and dare to treat spitefully and slay those servants of
the king who invite them and the world to the marriage-supper of the
King's Son.

But the crucifiers of Christ are not all shedders of human blood. Deadly
enmity to the truth and its publishers may be manifested where stakes
and fagots are out of fashion and inconvenient. The soul of the
persecution which the parable represents lies in entreating spitefully