Chapter 30 - Page 2

laws. And if you merely despise the gifts, and refuse to use them--then I will cast you out of my kingdom, inside which is freedom and happiness, and light and knowledge, into the darkness outside, bound hand and foot, into the ignorance and brutal slavery which you have chosen, where you may reconsider yourself, weeping and gnashing your teeth as you discover what a fool you have been.

Our Lord's parable has fulfilled itself again and again in history, and will fulfil itself as long as foolish and rebellious persons exist on earth. This is one of the laws of the kingdom of heaven. It must be so, for it arises by necessity out of the character of Christ, the king of heaven.--Infinite bounty and generosity; but if that bounty be despised and insulted, or still more, if it be outraged by wanton tyranny or cruelty, then--for the benefit of the rest of mankind--awful severity. So it is, and so it must be; simply because God is good.

At least, this is the kind of king which the parable shows to us. The king in it begins, not by asking his subjects to pay him taxes, or even to do him service, but to come to a great feast--a high court ceremonial--the marriage of his son. Whatsoever else that may mean, it certainly means this--that the king intended to treat these men, not as his slaves, but as his guests and friends. They will not come. They are too busy; one over his farm, another over his merchandise. They owe, remember, safe possession of their farm, and safe transit for their merchandise, to the king, who governs and guards the land. But they forget that, and refuse his invitation. Some of them, seemingly out of mere insolence, and the spirit of rebellion against authority, just because it is authority, go a step too far. To show that they are their own masters, and intend to do what they like, they take the king's messengers, and treat them spitefully, and kill them.

Then there arises in that king a noble indignation. We do not read that the king sentimentalised over these rebels, and said,--"After all, their evil, like all evil, is only a lower form of good. They had a fine instinct of freedom and independence latent in them, only it was in this case somewhat perverted. They are really only to be pitied for knowing no better; but I trust, by careful education, to bring them to a clearer sense of their own interests. I shall therefore send them to a reformatory, where, in consideration of the depressing circumstances of their imprisonment, they will be better looked after, and have lighter work, than the average of my honest and peaceable subjects." If the king had spoken thus, he would have won high applause in these days; at least till the farms and the merchandise, the property and the profits of the rest of his subjects, were endangered by these favoured objects of his philanthropy; who, having found that rebellion and even murder was pardonable in one case, would naturally try whether it was not