on the head of this wayward youth aptly represent the bitter
fruits which sin, even in this life, bears as an earnest of the full
wages in the second death, which it promises to pay its servants.

His sufferings did not in the first instance turn him from his sin:
human sorrow is not all or always godly sorrow. Although the prodigal
was in want, he did not return to his father. Convictions and terrors in
the conscience seldom bring the wanderer at once to the door of mercy:
he generally tries in succession several other methods in order to
obtain relief. As the prodigal attempted to keep body and soul together
by the most desperate and loathsome expedients, rather than throw
himself on his father's compassion; so an alienated human soul,
conscious of having wantonly offended a good God, and therefore hating
deeply the Holy One, will bear and do the will of the wicked one
to the utmost extremity of misery rather than come home a beggar,
and be indebted for all to a father's love. The picture, although drawn
by the Master's own hand, is necessarily drawn in the colours of
external nature, and therefore it comes far short of the original, which
is a spiritual wickedness. The cherished son of an affluent and
honourable house in Israel has become the swineherd of a stranger in a
famine-stricken land: the transition is as great as could be displayed
on the limited stage of the present world; but when he who was made in
God's image and treated as God's child is bound by the chain of his own
passions, and indentured as a slave in the devil's service, the fall is
greater, as heaven is higher than the earth, and the world of spirit
deeper than the world of flesh. "No man gave unto him:" when a son
deserts the Father of lights, from whom every good gift comes down, his
soul cannot be satisfied from other sources: the world's breasts are
dry, or yield only poison to the eager drawing of the famished child.

There is a blank in the history here. The later stages of the prodigal's
misery are not exhibited in the light: fully exposed, they might have
been shocking rather than impressive. Every height has its opposite and
corresponding depth: as eye has not seen nor ear heard in all its
fulness the blessedness that God hath prepared for them that love him;
so neither can our faculties measure the miseries of sin, in their
foretastes here and their fulness hereafter. How the prodigal fared
under that veil, as his misery day by day incre