First, have you observed that all Christ's main teach ings, by direct order, by earnest parable, and by his own permanent emotion, regard the use and misuse of money? We e might have thought, if we had been asked what a divine teacher was most likely to teach, that he would have left inferior persons to give directions about money; and himself spoken only concerning faith and love, and the discipline of the passions, and the guilt of the crimes of soul against soul. But not so. He speaks in general terms of these. But he does not speak parables about them for all men's memory, nor permit himself fierce indignation against them, in all men's sight. The Pharisees bring Him an adulteress. He writes her forgiveness on the dust of which He had formed her. Another, despised of all for known sin, He recognized as a giver of unknown love. But he acknowledges no love in buyers and sellers in His house. One should have thought there were people in that house twenty times worse than they; -Caiaphas and his like-false priests, false prayermakers, false leaders of the people who needed putting to silence, or to flight, with darkest wrath. But the scourge is only against the traffickers and thieves. The two most intense of all the parables: the two which lead the rest in love and in terror (this of the Prodigal, and of Dives) relate, both of them, to management of riches.

The practical order given to the only seeker of advice, of whom it is recorded that Christ "loved him," is briefly about his property. "Sell that thou hast."

And the arbitrament of the day of Last Judgment is made to rest wholly, neither on belief in God, nor in any spiritual virtue in man, nor on freedom from stress of stormy crime, but on this only, "I was an hungered and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me; sick, and ye came unto me."

Well, then, the first thing I want you to notice in the parable of the Prodigal Son (and the last thing which people usually do notice in it), is-that it is about a Prodigal! He begins by asking for his share of his father's goods; he gets it, carries it off, and wastes it. It is true that he wastes it in riotous living, but you are not asked to notice in what kind of riot: He spends it with harlots-but it is not the harlotry which his elder brother accuses him of mainly, but of having devoured his father's living. Nay, it is not the sensual life which he accuses himself of-or which the manner of his punishment accuses him of. But the wasteful life. It is not said that he had become debauched in soul, or diseased in body, by his vice; but that at last he would fain have filled his belly with husks, and could not. It is not said that he was struck with remorse for the conse

quences of his evil passions, but only that he remembered there was bread enough and to spare, even for the servants, at home.

Now, my friend, do not think I want to extenuate sins of passion (though, in very truth, the sin of Magdalene is a light one compared to that of Judas); but observe, sins of passion, if of real passion, are often the errors and back-falls of noble souls; but prodigality is mere and pure selfishness, and essentially the sin of an ignoble or undeveloped creature; and I would rather, ten times rather, hear of a youth that (certain degrees of temptation and conditions of resistance being understood) he had fallen into any sin you chose to name, of all the mortal ones, than that he was in the habit of running bills which he could not pay.

Farther, though I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it regards the betrayal of women, and brutality with which it suffers the neglect of children, both these head and chief crimes, and all others, are rooted first in abuse of the laws, and neglect of the duties, concerning wealth. And thus the love of money, with the parallel (and, observe, mathematically commensurate looseness in management of it), the "mal tener," followed necessarily by the "mal dare," is, indeed, the root of all evil.

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Then, secondly, I want you to note that when the prodigal comes to his senses, he complains of nobody but himself, and speaks of no unworthiness but his own. says nothing against any of the women who tempted him. -nothing against the citizen who left him to feed on husks--nothing of the false friends of whom "no man gave unto him"-above all, nothing of the "corruption of human nature," or the corruption of things in general. He says that he himself is unworthy, as distinguished from honourable persons, and that he himself has sinned, as distinguished from righteous persons. And that is the hard lesson to learn, and the beginning of faithful lessons. All right and fruitful humility, and purging of Heart, and seeing of God, is in that. It is easy to call yourself the chief of sinners, expecting every sinner round you to decline or return-the compliment; but learn to measure the real degrees of your own relative baseness, and to be ashamed, not in heaven's sight, but in man's sight; and redemption is indeed begun. Observe the phrase, I have sinned "against heaven," against the great law of that, and before thee, visibly degraded before my human sire and guide, unworthy any more of being esteemed of his blood, and desirous only of taking the place I deserve among his servants.

Now, I do not doubt but that I shall set many a

reader's teeth on edge by what he will think my carnal and material rendering of this "beautiful" parable. But I am just as ready to spiritualize it as he is, provided I am sure first that we understand it. If we want tc understand the parable of the sower, we must first think of it as of literal husbandry; if we want to understand the parable of the prodigal, we must first understand it as of literal prodigality. And the story has also for us a precious lesson in this literal sense of it, namely this, which I have been urging upon you throughout these letters, that all redemption must begin in subjection, and in the recovery of the sense of Fatherhood and authority, as all ruin and desolation begin in the loss of that sense. The lost son began by claiming his rights. He is found when he resigns them. He is lost by flying from his father, when his father's authority was only paternal. He is found by returning to his father, and desiring that his authority may be absolute, as over a hired stranger.

And this is the practical lesson I want to leave with you, and all other working men.

You are on the eve of a great political crisis; and every rascal with a tongue in his head will try to make his own stock cut of you. Now this is the test you must try them with. Those that say to you, "Stand up for your