aluable and equally
valued, produces no such commotion either in the heart of the father
or his home.

In the meantime, it is very sweet to learn from the lips of Jesus that
this law, which may be clearly traced on earth, penetrates to heaven,
and there prepares for repenting sinners, not a bare escape from wrath,
but an abundant entrance into the joy of their Lord.

But while the parable thus demonstrates that even though the claim of
the Pharisees were granted their objection falls to the ground, it most
certainly does not grant that claim. So far from conceding that they
needed no repentance, the Lord makes it evident that they kept company
with the publicans in sin, and only differed in this, that they did not
repent and forsake it. The elder brother, towards the close of the
parable, presents a life-likeness of the Pharisees; in him they might
have seen their own shadow on the wall.

The self-righteousness, the pride, the peevishness, the jealousy of the
elder brother in the close of the parable represent, in its most
distinctive features, the character of the Jewish people and their
leaders, in the beginning of the Gospel. One of their leading reasons
for refusing to own Jesus as the Messiah was his manifested willingness
to extend the blessings of redemption to the needy of every condition
and every name. When the Lord reminded them that Elijah was sent past
many suffering widows in Israel to relieve a stranger at Sarepta, and
that Elisha left many lepers uncured among his own countrymen when he
healed the Syrian soldier, they were so exasperated by the suggestion
that God's favour had already flowed out to the Gentiles, and might flow
in the same direction again, that they "rose up and thrust him out of
the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was
built, that they might cast him down headlong" (Luke iv. 29). The same
spirit burst forth when they were touched on the same tender point in
the ministry of the apostles. Paul was permitted from the stairs of the
fortress attached to the temple at Jerusalem to address an excited
multitude on the faith as it is in Jesus. Loving the Hebrew tongue in
which he spoke better than the Greek, which they had expected him to
employ, they listened with interest and in silence to the story of his
conversion through the appearing of the risen Jesus; but when in the
progress of the narrative he found it necessary to inform them that the
Lord his Savi