this parable conclude that God receives sinners into
favour without a propitiation, and those who endeavour to escape from
that conclusion by affirming that the father in the parable represents
Christ, err equally, although on opposite sides.[84]

[84] Stier's observations on this point are excellent:--"The
well-meaning efforts which are made to explain the absence of
reference to the mediating _propitiation_ of the Son of God in this
instant exhibition of the _Father's mercy_, are altogether needless;
they rest fundamentally on false dogmatic views of this
propitiation, as if there were not existing in the Father's being
the same love which is expressed in the Son,--as if the Father
needed abstractly to be propitiated in order to entertain this love!
We are not to seek _Christ himself_ as mediator in the person of
this father; nor (though Melancthon has strangely ventured to affirm
it), afterwards in the fatted calf, as sacrificially slain. _His_
place here is rather to be sought in his thus authoritatively
testifying of the Father's mercy. As Nitzsch excellently says:--'If
he seems to conceal himself here, he is all the more manifest there,
where the Shepherd seeks the lost sheep. For _the_ Son--who is
neither an elder nor a _younger_, the _eternal_ Son of the Father,
one with him, his eye and his heart towards the lost--is come into
this world, although invisible and unnamed in the parable, to reveal
the Father where he had been ever invisible, and where no man knew
him: and he is to the children of the law and the curse, not only a
living herald of the propitiable--we shall rather say of the already
propitiated--Father, but the (that is _our_) propitiation itself,
and the way whereby every one of us may come back to God.' The
mediation of Christ is no more denied by this silence than the
seduction of Satan was denied in the sinner's apostasy at the
beginning of the parable. We may also say with Von Gerlach that the
'coming out of the father to meet his son, here figuratively
exhibits the sending of the Son.'"--_Stier in loc_.

The notion that a mediator is not needed, because a mediator is not here
specifically represented, proceeds upon the assumption, obviously and
inexcusably erroneous, that all truth must be taught in every parable.
While occasionally visiting the printing works of the publishers as
these sheets are passing through the press, I have observ