grace of God which had found him in that mean employment, and out of that had raised him to so great a dignity; as in like manner we have Zenas the lawyer (Tit. iii. 13); Rahab the harlot (Heb. xi. 31); Simon the leper (Matt. xxvi. 6); not that such they were now, but that such they once had been. But there is nothing in the man's counsels with himself that marks the least change of mind, the slightest repentanceno recognition of guilt, no acknowledgment of a trust abused, no desire expressed henceforward to be found faithful, but only an utterance of selfish anxiety concerning his future lot, of fear lest poverty and distress may come upon him; and the explanation, however ingenious, of his being still characterized (ver. 8) as the "unjust" steward, is quite unsatisfactory.

But now follow his counsels with himself, and first his expression of utter inability any where to find help: his past softness of life has unfitted him for labor: his pride forbids his begging. Yet this helplessness endures not long. He knows what he will do; and has rapidly conceived a plan whereby to make provision against that time of need and destitution which is now so near at hand. If his determination is not honest, it is at any rate promptly taken; and this is part, no doubt, of the skill for which he gets credit,-that he was not brought to a nonplus, but quickly found a way of escape from his distresses. "I am resolved what to do, that when I am put out of the stewardship they may receive me into their houses," as one from whom they have received kindnesses, and who, therefore, may trust to find hospitable entertainment among them, a miserable prospect, as the son of Sirach declares (xxix. 22-28), yet better than utter destitution and want. Hereupon follows the collusion between him and his lord's debtors. They owed, it seems, to the householder, at least the two whose cases are instanced, and who are evidently brought forward as representatives of many more,-just as but three servants are named out of the ten (Luke xix. 13), to whom pounds had been intrusted, the one a hundred measures of oil, and the other a hundred measures of wheat. It is not likely that they were tenants of his, who paid their rents in kind, which rents were now by the steward lowered, and the leases tampered with; the name "debtor" seems not to point that way. Again, the enormous amount of the Church, not every man to whom a dispensation has been committed, which he has been abusing; he says: Laudari à Domino meruit; et nos ergo laudemus eum,... nec eum in aliquo, priusquam correctus est, audeamus reprehendere, ut hæc putemus in his quæ erga debitores egit domino fraudem fecisse, sed potius credamus eum in his lucra Domini sui prudenti consilio quæsisse, et ejus voluntatem implêsse.

* In the Vulgate: Amotus à villicatione; but Tertullian in far happier Latin: ab actu summotus.

†The word "measure" in our translation, which may be a small or a large

oil and wheat, both of them costly articles (see Prov. xxi. 17), which is due, makes it equally unlikely that these "debtors" were poorer neighbors or dependents, whom the rich householder had supplied with means of living in the shape of food,-not however as a gift, but as a loan, taking from them an acknowledgment, and meaning to be repaid, when they had ability. Rather we might assume the foregoing transactions, by which these men came into the relation of debtors to the rich man, to have been of this kind,-that he, having large possessions, and therefore large incomings from the fruits of the earth, had sold, through his steward, a portion of such upon credit to these debtors, merchants, or other factors, and they had not as yet made their payments. They had given, however, their bills, or notes of hand, acknowledging the amount which they had received, in which amount they owned themselves to stand indebted to him. These, which had remained in the steward's keeping, he now returns to them,-“ Take thy bill," or "Take back thy bill"-bidding them to alter them, or substitute others in their room, in which they confess themselves to have received much smaller amounts of oil and wheat than was actually the case, and consequently to be so much less in the rich man's debt than they truly To one debtor he remits half, to another the fifth of his debt; by these different proportions teaching us, say many, that charity is not to be a blind profuseness, exhibited without respect of the needs, greater or smaller, of those who are its objects, but ever to be exercised with consideration and discretiont-that the hand is to be opened to some more widely than to others.

were.

In this lowering of the bills, Vitringat finds the key of the parable, and proposes the following interpretation, which deserves to be recorded, if for nothing else, yet for its exceeding ingenuity. The rich man is God, the steward the Pharisees, or rather all the ecclesiastical leaders of the people, to whom was committed the administration of the kingdom of God, who were stewards of its mysteries. But they were accused by

quantity, fails to intimate this. Better Tyndal and Cranmer, who give it, "tuns of oil" (the Rhemish, pipes), and "quarters of wheat." It is exactly this quantity, one hundred cors of wheat, which in one of the apocryphal gospels, where every thing is on a gigantic scale, as with those whose only notion of greatness is size, we are told that the child Jesus received in return for a single grain of wheat which he had planted in the ground. (THILO's Cod. Apocryph., p. 302.)

* Γράμμα = χειρόγραφον (Col. ii. 14) = γραμματεῖον χρέους ὁμολογητικόν, by the Vulgate happily translated, cautio. See the Dict. of Gr. and Rom. Antt., s. v. Interest of money, p. 524.

†Thus Gregory the Great, who quotes from Gen. iv.: Si rectè offeras, et non rectè dividas, peccâsti.

Erklär. d. Parab., p. 921, seq. This seems to have been the standing interpretation of the Cocceian school, for see DEYLING's Obss. Sac., v. 5, p. 335.

the prophets (see for instance Ezek. xxxiv. 2; Mal. ii. 8), and lastly by Christ himself, that they neglected their stewardship, used the power committed to them, not for the glory of God, but for purposes of selfhonor that they scattered his goods. They feel the justice of this accusation, and that they are not in the grace of their Lord, and only outwardly belong to his kingdom. Therefore they now seek to make themselves friends of others, of the debtors of their Lord, of sinful men,—and this they do, acting as though they still possessed authority in the things of his kingdom. And the way by which they seek to make these friends is, by lowering the standard of righteousness and obedience, inventing convenient glosses for the evading of the strictness of God's law, allowing men to say, "It is a gift" (Matt. xv. 5), suffering them to put away their wives on any slight excuse (Luke xvi. 18), and by various devices making slack the law of God (Matt. xxiii. 16);-thus obtaining for themselves favor and an interest with men, and so enabling themselves, although God's grace was withdrawn from them, still to keep their hold on men, and to retain their advantages, their honors, and their peculiar privileges. This interpretation has one attraction, that it gives a distinct meaning to the lowering of the bills,-" Write fifty," " Write fourscore;"-which very few others do. The moral will then be no other than is commonly and rightly drawn from the parable; Be prudent as they, as these children of the present world, but provide for yourselves not temporary friends, but everlasting habitations: they use heavenly things for earthly objects; but do you reverse the case, and show how earthly things may be used for heavenly.*

* With the interpretation of these words as being a lowering the standard of obedience very nearly agrees the use of the parable which is made in the Liber S. Joannis Apocryphus, a religious book of the Albigenses, republished in THILO's Codex Apocryphus, p. 884, seq. It is with the very question which the steward here puts to the debtors, "How much owest thou unto my lord?" and with the bidding "Write fifty," "Write fourscore," that Satan is introduced as tempting and seducing the inferior angels (blandiendo angelos invisibilis Patris). The very ingenious exposition of the parable by Gaudentius, bishop of Brescia, a cotemporary of St. Ambrose, is in the same line. He says, Villicus iniquitatis Diabolus intelligendus est, qui in seculo relictus est, ut immunitatem [immanitatem?] ejus villici fugientes ad pietatem Dei suppliciter curramus. Hic dissipat facultates Domini, quando in nos grassatur, qui portio Domini sumus. Hic excogitat quomodo valeat debitores Domini, h. e., peccatis involutos non solùm aperto prælio persequi, sed sub obtentu fallacis benevolentiæ, blandà fraude decipere, quò magis eum in domos suas falsâ benignitate seducti recipiant, cum ipso in æternum judicandi ... Hic debita conservorum suorum relaxare se falsò promittit, dum vel in fide vel in opere peccantibus variam pollicetur indulgentiam. . . . Laudat [Salvator] astutiam villici minaciter simul et providenter. Minaciter quidem, cùm vocabulo iniquitatis pessimam Diaboli prudentiam condemnat: providenter autem, dum contra argumentorum ejus consilia discipulos audientes confirmat, ut omni cautela atque prudentia tam callido atque prudenti inimico repugnent.

Connected with this view is that of the writer of an elaborate article in a modern German Review. He conceives the parable was meant for the scribes and Pharisees-only that he makes it to contain counsel for them,—the unjust steward is set forth for them to copy; while Vitringa made it to contain a condemnation of them. They were the stewards and administrators in a dispensation which was now coming to a close; and when in its room the kingdom of Christ was set up, then their much abused stewardship would be taken away from them. The writer finds in the parable an exhortation to them, that in the little while that should intervene between the announcement and actual execution of this purpose of God's, they should cultivate that spirit which alone would give them an entrance "into everlasting habitations," into the kingdom not to be moved, the spirit, that is, which they so much lacked, of mildness and love and meekness toward all men, their fellow sinners. This spirit and the works which it would prompt, he affirms, are justly set forth under the image of the remission of debts †-and those, debts due to another, since it is against God that primarily every sin is committed. Such a spirit as this, of love and gentleness toward all men, flows out of the recognition of our own guilt, which recognition the writer finds in the absence on the steward's part of all attempts to justify or excuse himself. The same temper which would prompt them to these works of love and grace, would fit them also for an entrance into the everlasting habitations, the coming kingdom, which, unlike that dispensation now ready to vanish away, should endure for ever. But how shall this interpretation be reconciled with the words, "He said also unto his disciples," with which the Evangelist introduced the parable?‡

Zyro, in the Theol. Stud. u. Kritt. for 1831, p. 776. He had been however, though he seems not to know it, long ago anticipated by Salmeron (Serm. in Evang. Par., p. 231): Quia enim Scribæ et Pharisæi cum lege et sacerdotio in promptu erant, ut deficerent. . hortatur Dominus ut dent operam, ne austerè cum peccatoribus procedant, . . ut ita sibi præparent amicos, qui eos in Evangelium recipiant.

† Weisse (Evang. Gesch., v. 2, p. 162, seq.) brings forward as though it were a great discovery of his own, and all that was wanted for the easy explanation of the parable, this view, that the lowering of the bills is the image here under which, not acts of bounty and love with the temporal mammon, but the spiritual act of the forgiveness of sins, is represented. He owns, however, that he cannot bring this into agreement with ver. 9, "Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness," and the words in Italics he therefore includes in brackets, being "convinced that Jesus never spoke them!"

Not very unlike this, is the explanation given by Tertullian (De Fugâ in Persec., c. 13), only that he makes the exhortation to be addressed to the entire Jewish people, and not to the spiritual chiefs of the nation alone: Facite autem vobis amicos de mammona; quomodo intelligendum sit parabola præmissa doceat, ad populum Judaicum dicta, qui commissam sibi rationem Domini cùm malè

it will then plainly be addressed not to them, but to the scribes and Pharisees.

But to return ;-with these new acts of unrighteousness this child of the present world filled up the short interval between his threatened and his actual destitution of his office. It is not said that he attempted to conceal the fraudulent arrangement which he was making, or that he called his lord's debtors together secretly-whether it was that he trusted that they would keep counsel, being held together by a common interest and by the bands of a common iniquity, or whether he thus falsified the accounts, fearing neither God nor man, careless whether the transaction were blown abroad or not, as being now a desperate man, who had no character to lose, and who was determined to brave the matter, confident that there would be no redress for his lord, when the written documents testified against him. This latter seems to me the most probable supposition that the thing was done openly and in the face of day," and that the arrangement was such as, from some cause or other, being once completed, could not be broken, but must be permitted to stand. Were it meant to have been a secret transaction, the lord's discovery of the fraud would hardly have been passed over, and the steward would scarcely have obtained for a contrivance which proved so clumsy that it was presently seen through and detected, even the limited praise which he does obtain as a skilful adapter of his means to his ends. Least of all would he have obtained such praise, if it had depended merely on the forbearance of his master, in the case of discovery being made, which the event proved must have been regarded as probable from the beginning, whether the arrangement should be allowed to stand good or not. Such forbearance could not have been counted on, even though the wordst of the lord should lead us, in the present instance, to assume that

administrasset, deberet de mammonæ hominibus, quod nos eramus, amicos sibi potius prospicere quàm inimicos, et relevare nos à debitis peccatorum, quibus Deo detinebamur, si nobis de dominicâ ratione conferrent, ut cùm cœpisset ab hujus deficere gratiâ, ad nostram fidem refugientes reciperentur in tabernacula æterna.

* His words to the debtors, "Sit down quickly and write," may appear to some characteristic of a man who wished to huddle over the matter as fast as possible, for fear of discovery;-so Bengel explains them,-Taxéws, raptim, furtim; and Maldonatus: Quod dicit citò, hominis mihi fraudulenti et malè agentis esse videtur, timentis, ne in scelere deprehendatur, ne quis dum adulterantur litteræ, superveniat. But there is another fair explanation, that they are the words of a man who feels that what is to be done, must be done at once-that to-day he has means to help himself, while to-morrow they will have passed from his hands. The transaction was evidently not with the debtors, one by one, apart from and unknown to each other, as is slightly but sufficiently indicated, by the où dé (“And thou"), with which the steward begins his address to the second.

† Jensen, however, who has a very interesting essay on this parable (Theol.