, wasting his substance in riotous living; who, indeed,
_has_ wasted it, and who is now feeding the swine of the stranger, and
longing to fill his belly with the husks that the swine do eat?
Behold, now, the father standing upon the threshold shading his eyes as
longingly he gazes along the road which climbs the distant hill. A
world of trouble is in his eyes. "Yonder young fool who has wandered
away is not worth a single sigh of this grand old man," we say. "He is
reaping as he has sown," we moralise. Time was when this youth went
brightly to and fro in the homestead, when innocence sat throned upon
his forehead, when truth shone brightly from his eyes, when purity and
modesty mantled with blushes his boyish cheek. The old man loved him
_then_. But this watching from the threshold, this long, long tearful
look down the road winding away to the land of profligacy and shame,
these are the glories of his love. Here is _pity_. This is affection
glowing in its fairest flower, its most precious fruit. Before us is a
dim adumbration of the pity of God, the highest manifestation of His
love for man. Similarly the pity of man for man is the highest
manifestation of our love one for another. It is by pity, and by pity
only, that humanity can be brought into true unity. It is by pity that
the preacher comes into oneness with his congregation. There is a
sense in which he comes nearer to his hearers through their sufferings
and their sins than through their joys and their virtues, for suffering
and sin give occasion for compassion. Only let the man in the pulpit
feel this emotion toward the man in the pew; only let the tragedy of
his wrong-doing, the poverty of his soul resultant from his neglect of
higher things, the awful fact that he is without God and hope in the
world come home to the preacher's heart; only let the shadow of this
man's fate cast its darkness upon the preacher's soul and oh! how
precious does that man become, sinner though he be. Let the man in the
pew but feel that the heart of the man in the pulpit is almost breaking
for the longing it has toward him and how differently will he receive
the reproof that man may bring; with what new reverence will he attend
to the solemn warning he may utter. At last a _brother_ seeks his soul!

For another result of pity will be that the Gospel of reconciliation
will be preached indeed. If from the compulsion of compassion the
preacher declared the terrors of