reconcile with the possession of reason, and of whom, in the height of their irrational perfidy, there can be but few examples. There are the modified hypocrites, whose hypocrisy is, according to the original meaning of the term, a secret reservation; who profess to obey God's commandments, but cunningly substitute commandments of their own, which, at length, they cheat themselves into accepting as true religion. But we may be sure our Lord did not design to omit another large and miserable class, whose profession has no positive hypocrisy in it, but who let irresolution and criminal indolence postpone for ever the performance of their vows. These are they who are always ready with their I go, Sir; but who never really enter the kingdom, or work in the vineyard, or do the will of God.

The examples furnished by our Lord's generation are fair representatives of this class with its several varieties. Some perfect hypocrites there were, who accepted both John the Baptist and Jesus with every semblance of loyal submission to the will of God, while their hearts were full of the deadliest rancour against both. These went out to the Baptist's mission, but were not baptized of him; these had Rabbi ever ready for Jesus, but were always plotting against His life. We cannot understand some passages in the evangelical narrative save on this supposition; and this only will explain the awful severity of some of our Saviour's woes. But there were still greater numbers of those less malignant hypocrites whose guilt consisted in this, that they allowed their prejudices to get the better of their honesty, and failed to redeem their pledges because they found the new Teacher too severe. They said I go, Sir, to the Baptist, because he came as a new Elias to herald the Messiah; but when his doctrine in its spirit and letter condemned themselves, they cunningly evaded its force, and went their way to forget their vows. They said I go, Sir, to Christ, so long as He came fascinating their carnal expectations by His miraculous works; but when, in process of time, He began to pour His too searching light into the recesses of their own iniquity, they turned away from Him with the hatred of fear, and sought out many inventions to excuse their sin. But we find traces also of that other variety; of those, namely, who were during the whole course of the Lord's ministry striving, but striving as it seemed in vain, to surrender themselves to His service, and to embrace His high and holy rule. No view of the great ministry is complete which omits this class; a class profoundly interesting in themselves, and still more so as representing many in every age whose I go, Sir, pays its tribute to the Redeemer's sacred attraction, but whose aspirations remain for ever unrealized, little more than a beautiful but empty dream.

All, however, are united in one point: the day is spent and they are not in the vineyard. Their representative in the parable neither went at the first, nor did he repent afterwards of his not having gone, He neglected his own promise, and he was not moved by the conduct

of his brother. Such is our Lord's comment upon His own parable. The abandoned reprobates of the law had become the converts of the Gospel; their characters were changed by what none could deny to be the finger of God. But the hypocritical and self-righteous men of the generation had failed to learn the lesson which the Saviour thus strove to teach them: they had added to their original guilt that of resisting all the evidences of His power and goodness, as seen in the redemption of the most abject slaves of sin. Thus there remained no more that He could do for them. He had spent upon them all His resources of mercy. He had pursued their souls with an ardour infinitely more fervent even than that with which they had persecuted Him. And now He intimates to them that their day was gone. Their representative in the parable was not found in the vineyard at the close of the day. His early I go, Sir, his subsequent vacillations, his sighs after an obedience that he had not the heart to render, his long day of unattained aspirations, all end in one sad statement, He went not a sentence much to be pondered by all who are self-convicted of resemblance to this most pitiable character.

III. This leads us to some reflections upon the Afterward, as looked back upon when all is over. The Redeemer affectingly speaks in the parable of the day as ended and spent. In His application to His hearers He continues the same strain; and His question, What think ye? might seem only to make them pronounce their own condemnation. But we must leave them to their righteous Judge; and consider the one lesson which our Lord commends finally to our thought. Which did the will? They answered, The former. This our Lord confirms, and thereby teaches us that on the right use of the Afterward the day really depends. But obviously such a doctrine as this demands to be very carefully stated and discreetly guarded. The day in each case was decided by the aftertime. The early rebellion was never reckoned against the penitent: it was as if he had never refused: he did the will of his father. His day, whenever his true repentance began, was retrieved: it was a new day to him, in which he became an obedient son. On the other hand, it was the neglect to repent of the hypocrisy that condemned the other. Ye repented not afterward, our Saviour says: that is, Ye have failed. to correct the early error by a subsequent repentance. The tone of the whole discourse gives us to understand that even then, at that last hour, the unhappy men on whose countenances were falling the shadows of eternal doom, might have repented of their long rebellion, and by the right use of the last remaining moments of the day redeemed the whole.

However obvious to perversion this doctrine may be, it is the very Gospel of our Saviour; and the penitent in the parable was in reality the type, not of one class of men only, but of all. And here we have the real reason why one only is mentioned as having done the will;

all who will ever be saved will be saved as the justified ungodly. This is the faithful saying, that will vindicate its truth for ever,-to save sinners, of whom I am chief. The Gospel shows us how the vilest who repent may retrieve their day. It gives the Redeemer a name that He never disavowed, the Friend of sinners. In this parable, He Himself permits us to interpret His words as meaning that the early subjects of His kingdom, the reclaimed of His own ministry, were almost or altogether of this class; the publicans and the harlots entered in. Here is the precious secret of the atonement: pardon on the ground of Christ's satisfaction for all the past; the beginning of a new day; all earlier rebellion forgotten; the I will not, though uttered ten thousand times, and confirmed by ten thousand forms of wickedness, no more remembered; and the penitent, believing remnant of the day made, in the interpretation of grace, and according to the infinite mercy of God's method of righteousness, worth the whole. Let the question What think ye? be asked in the light of this everblessed doctrine, and what is our response?

Man's foolish heart has always been too ready to abuse this grace unto licentiousness; there is a dark and subtle interpreter always waiting to mislead his thoughts. To that interpreter he is, alas! only too willing to listen, when he would persuade him to sin on during the day, that grace may abound in the evening. How many there are who are deliberately, and of set purpose, risking their eternal state on a repentance which they think will be in their power at any future time when they shall firmly resolve upon it; and who persuade themselves that the gate of the vineyard will stand wide open to receive them at the latest moment! Understanding well that mercy will alone admit to eternal life, and that one equal heaven will receive all who shall leave this life as penitents, they virtually resolve to evade the burden and heat of the day, to enter at last only and literally through grace, without any good works either going before, or accompanying, or following them. Their I will not they will hold fast until it shall be expedient to change it. As the end of the day will decide everything, their only thought is to see to it that it shall be said of them, as well as of earlier penitents, that they afterward repented, and went. This is the extreme type of perversion; the worst thought that can interpret the Saviour's parable. But there is a more refined perversion that acts negatively rather than positively. It is that of which they are the victims who spend their day with an irresolute I go, Sir, always en their lips, but never set themselves with all their hearts to do the will of God. These are generally influenced, much more than they confess, or perhaps know, by a subtle reliance on the mercy that will reign till the last moment of the Afterward, and which they think can never be denied to those who have desired it so much and so long. They do not make the desperate decision at once, because they know that grace is always waiting; or, rather, they would not dare to

leave the great issue undecided a single hour were it not for a secret dependence, so habitual as almost to paralyze their energies, upon a term of grace not yet near its close.

But our Saviour's parable, rightly thought upon, utterly rebukes this and every similar perversion. The more it is pondered the more impressively will it be found to plead against all such ungenerous and ruinous interpretations of His meaning. The penitent whose acceptance it speaks of repented, and went to do the will of his father. He is not represented as seeking and finding mercy because he had not obeyed at all; but as repenting in order that he might obey. We cannot resist the impression that our Lord intended us to regard him as doing the will of his father, although late in beginning to do it. The doctrine that a sinner may enter heaven after a life spent in rebellion, but closed by a death-bed repentance and a final act of faith, may indeed be sought in the infinite mercy of God, and found in some gracious sayings of His word. It was illustrated in the very hour of redemption, and is, therefore, eternally sacred; but it is not taught in this parable. The repentance which the Gospel commands is a repentance that is not only unto life, but unto holiness also; a repentance that seeks mercy for the past and strength for a future obedience, a repentance that longs for life to retrieve the past, and cries, O spare me, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence. Not to speak of the uncertainty of human life, and the solemn argument which that uncertainty enforces, the tone of the parable, rightly read, urges to an instant repentance and to an instant amendment. It speaks of a day through the mercy of God retrieved; of a new obedience animated by gratitude for past mercy; of an ardent desire to repair the errors of the past; and of a zeal that would fain attempt what, alas ! is, in the literal sense, impossible, -to redeem the time.

It is another perversion to read this parable as teaching that, provided the day of probation ends well,—that is, ends in the enjoyment of God's mercy through Christ,-the objects of probation are fully answered, and that eternity will be the same to all alike. There is no passage of Scripture that can without violent perversion be made to teach that doctrine. If the term probation is rightly introduced into the Gospel, and if it has any meaning when introduced, then every penitent believer is forming a new character in Christ for eternity. He is not only working in God's vineyard, he is also cultivating his own; and if by a thorough repentance, a faith unfeigned, and a strong reliance on the Divine Spirit, he seek the glory and honour of religion as well as its shield and security, his eternal character, as well as his eternal safety, will be his appropriate reward. It is true that our Lord-in order to obviate another and an opposite error-has taught us all to expect a penny for the day alike. Most assuredly we shall all be equal debtors to His mercy, and enter life by the same title of

grace; but He who will bring His reward with Him, and give to every man as his work shall be, will not blend His innumerable servants in one indiscriminate mass. There is not so much difference between the penny of the Lord's parable and our modern penny, as there will be between the relative wages that the Lord teaches His reapers to expect. Our parable does not warrant any further digression here; but we cannot leave the subject without remarking, that while eternal security may be attained by the right use of any hour of the day's merciful Afterward, every moment of that aftertime lost is, in a certain sense, lost for ever.

And as a thorough repentance breathes its solemn desire to retrieve the day, hoping and even praying for time to renew the soul's full strength, so a thorough conversion to Christ fills the soul with eagerness to give Him in His vineyard and kingdom the utmost service of gratitude. There after all lies the secret of the difference between a late and an early repentance. It will be boundless bliss to escape from hell, and enter heaven through a gate that was at once that of repentance and of death; to offer to the Redeemer in heaven a gratitude that had no time to speak or act its thankfulness on earth. But Q for the richer bliss of a life spent in the blessed revenge of grateful, self-denying obedience and devotion! Conversion in the early morning; the long midsummer day ploughing or feeding cattle; the tranquil evening spent in waiting girded at the Master's table; and then-eternal rest! This is the perfect Afterward. This is the long life with which it pleases God to satisfy some of His elect. And for such a long life it cannot be sin, though it may be in vain, to pray.

Every one who reads these pages is here brought face to face with the Redeemer. What think ye? He asks us all. Consider what I say! He says to each. And He who asks your reflection will sanctify it to your good. If you are convicted of having the spirit of that elder son in your heart, saying, till this moment, I will not! your Saviour commands you, and gives you grace, to renounce your rebellion at once. Let it be your very next act to go straight to the gate of the vineyard, and knock in the name of Jesus for admission. It cannot be too late now: to-morrow that gate may to your soul be shut for ever, If the spirit of the younger brother has hitherto kept you irresolute, wavering, with an ever-renewed but unreal I go, Sir! on your lips, your Saviour once more commands you to repent of this long trifling with His name. He speaks to you in the tones of the most solemn warning: He charges you not to let another year close upon your barren resolves, lest He should put an end to your life of empty profession, and you perish with the fearful and the unbelievers.

May the Covenant-service of another year find the elder and the younger son-represented by many penitents of both classes-kneeling together at the altar of consecration!

W. B. P.