eech which, at the turning point of his
repentance, he had resolved to address to his father, and began to
recite it as he had conned the words in exile:--"Father, I have sinned
against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy
son;" but there stopped short, omitting the portion about being content
with the position of a hired servant. Bengel suggests that the father
may have cut the prodigal's speech short by giving aloud an order to the
servants for the kind and honourable reception of his child; but another
thought, also suggested by the same acute and experimental expositor,
brings out, I think, more truly the deep significance of the
omission:--The son lying on the father's bosom, with the father's tears
falling warm on his upturned face, is some degrees further advanced in
the spirit of adoption than when he first planned repentance beside the
swine in his master's field. There and then the legal spirit of fear
because of guilt still lingered in his heart; he ventured to hope for
exemption from deserved punishment, but not for restoration to the place
of a beloved sen. Now the spirit of bondage has been conclusively cast
out by the experience of his father's love; the fragments of stone that
had hitherto remained even in a broken heart are utterly melted at last,
as if by fire from heaven. He could not now complete the speech which he
had prepared; its later words faltered and fell inarticulate. He could
not now ask for the place of a servant, for he was already in the place
of a son.[83]

[83] The paraphrase of this Scripture, in a selection employed in
most of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, stumbles at this
point, and misses the meaning of the text. Overlooking the mighty
step of progress which the prodigal had made between the time when
his accumulating convictions turned the balance first in favour of
repentance, and the time when the last fragment of distrust melted
away in the flood of a full reconciliation, the hymn represents the
son as still pleading specifically to be sent away into the place of
a servant, after the embrace, and the kiss, and the tears of his
father had bestowed and triply sealed his sonship.

"He ran and fell upon his neck,
Embraced and kissed his son:
The grieving prodigal bewailed
The follies he had done."

"No more, my father, can I hope
To find paternal grace;
My utmost wish is to o