of the case is plausible, and judging from the
frequency with which it occurs must to some minds be very convincing,
but nothing could be more superficial, or more unjust both to Jesus and
the apostles. A parable is a comparison, and there is a point of
comparison in it on which everything turns. The more perfect the
parable is, the more conspicuous and dominating will the point of
comparison be. The parable of the prodigal illustrates this. It
brings out, through a human parallel, with incomparable force and
beauty, the one truth of the freeness of forgiveness. God waits to be
gracious. His pardoning love rushes out to welcome the penitent. But
no one who speaks of the Atonement ever dreams of questioning this.
The Atonement is concerned with a different point--not the freeness of
pardon, about which all are agreed, but the cost of it; not the
spontaneity of God's love, which no one questions, but the necessity
under which it lay to manifest itself in a particular way if God was to
be true to Himself, and to win the heart of sinners for the holiness
which they had offended. The Atonement is not the denial that God's
love is free; it is that specific manifestation or demonstration of
God's free love which is demanded by the situation of men. One can
hardly help wondering whether those who tell us so confidently that
there is no Atonement in the parable of the prodigal have ever noticed
that there is no Christ in it either--no elder brother who goes out to
seek and to save the lost son, and to give his life a ransom for him.
Surely we are not to put the Good Shepherd out of the Christian
religion. Yet if we leave Him His place, we cannot make the parable of
the prodigal the measure of Christ's mind about the forgiveness of
sins. One part of His teaching it certainly contains--one part of the
truth about the relation of God the Father to His sinful children; but
another part of the truth was present, though not on that occasion
rendered in words, in the presence of the Speaker, when 'all the
publicans and sinners drew near to Him for to hear Him.' The love of
God to the sinful was apprehended in Christ Himself, and not in what He
said as something apart from Himself; on the contrary, it was in the
identity of the speaker and the word that the power of the word lay;
God's love evinced itself to men as a reality in Him, in His presence
in the world, and in His attitude to its sin; it so evinced itself,
finally and