The Parable of the Prodigal Son

A certain man had two sons.” — Luke xv. 2.

Our cords are clumsy. Strand by strand, and rope by rope, we twist our cables; yet we dare not lengthen them too far, for fear their own weight break them, and in the strain of the tempest the strongest fly asunder like flax in flame. God spins his cords so fine that, except in diffracted light, you cannot see them; but these cords of His are seldom broken. You befriend a youth or relieve a stranger, and you think no more about it; till on a distant day, perhaps in a foreign land, in some hour of need, help is raised up, and in your deliverer you recognise the object of your former bounty. And just as in such an instance, held by a mystic clue, the little seed which you cast on the waters comes back into your bosom a loaf of bread; so the old saying also holds true, and “curses come home, to roost.” A crime is committed, and all trace is obliterated, every token buried; but now that the head which holds the/fatal secret is laid on a dying pillow, the leash is pulled, and dark and croaking descends the bird of evil omen, or with fiery eye and crimson beak the vulture of despair, and with fear of coming judgment scares the guilty conscience.

Of all God’s cords the finest, and perhaps the strongest, is the cord of love. Quitting his native chimney, among the canals and grassy fields of Holland, the stork pursues the retiring summer, and soon overtakes it in Nubia or Morocco. There, quite unconscious of the fetter beneath his wing, he revels on the snakes of Taurus or the frogs of Nile: till at last, on a brilliant May morning, there is a sharp tug, and then a long steady pull, and high overhead float the broad pinions, and presently in the streets of Haarlem the boys look up, and shout their welcome, as, with eager haste and noisy outcry, an old acquaintance drops down upon the gable, and, drawn back to the old anchorage by a hawser of a thousand miles, the feathery sails are once more furled. Like instinct over a generation s interval brings back the exile to his Highland glen. It matters not that in the soft Bermudas life is luxury; it is of no avail that in this Canadian clearing a rosy household has sprung up and in proud affection clings around him; towards the haunts of his childhood there is a strange deep-hidden yearning, which often sends absent looks towards northern stars, and ends at last in the actual pilgrimage. And although by the time of his return he finds that no money can buy back the ancestral abode; althougrv as he crosses the familiar hill and opens the sunny strath, strange solitude meets him; although when he comes up, the hamlet is roofless and silent, and the bonny beild, the nest of his boyhood, a ruin; although behind the cold hearth rank nettles wave, and from the cairn covering the spot where in the mornings of another world he waked up so cosily, young weasels peep forth; although the plane is cut down, or the bourtree, under whose sabbatic shadow his father used at eventide to meditate; although where the vision dissolves a pang must remain, there is no need that he should go back, bleak and embittered, as to a disenchanted world. This glut of reality was wanted to quench a long fever: but even here, if his own heart is true, he will find that God’s cord is not broken. Cottages dissolve and family circles scatter, but piety and love cannot perish. The cord is not broken; it is only the mooringpost which a friendly hand has moved farther inland, and fixed sure and stedfast within the veil; and as the strain which used to pull along the level is now drawing upward, the home which memory used to picture in the Highlands, faith learns to seek in Heaven.

We too were once at home. As even pagan Cleanthes and Aratus sang —

“We too are God’s offspring.”*

The race opened its existence under the eye of God, made after his image; and whether he exercised his

* The well-known expression quoted and endorsed by St. Paul in his address to the Athenians, Acts xvii. 28, 29. Like Paul, Aratus, who flourished about 270 B.C., was a native of Cilicia. His poem, the Fhceno7nena, opens with an acknowledgment of Zeus, and our dependence upon him, and derivation from him:

TidvT’q hk Albs Kexp’fjfJ-^da wavres’
Toil yap /cat yvos iafiv.

gentle dominion, or was occupied among the trees of the garden, or walked with his heavenly Father, listening to His voice in the cool of the day, nothing could be nobler or more blessed than that imperial infancy. Nor have we quite forgotten it. Betwixt what the Book has told us, and what is recalled by a dim mysterious memory, we feel that times are changed with us. We once were better off A love smiled over us, a glory shone around us, which never meets us now; and many of our dearest words — Love, Joy, Innocence — seem to be so much a reminiscence of a far-off, long-faded time, that we may be excused for standing still and asking in bewilderment —

“Have we been all at fault? Are we the sons

Of pilgrim sires who left their lovelier land %

And do we call inhospitable climes

By names they brought from home?”*

The true home of humanity is God, — God trusted, communed with, beloved, obeyed; and

“Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,”

do we come “from God, who is our home,” but “trailing clouds of glory with us.”t Alloyed and interrupted by much that is base and wicked, there are in human nature still touches of tenderness, gleams of good feeling, noble impulses, momentary visitations of a natural piety,

* Balder p. 18i.
t Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.”

brought away from that better time and Its blest abode, and which may be regarded as electric thrills along the line which connects with its Creator a fallen but redeemed humanity: as so many gentle checks of that golden chain which will one day bring back God’s banished, and see the world “all righteous.”

Far from home, humanity is still in the hand of God. Not only is it subject to His righteous and irresistible sovereignty, but it has a place in his deep and desirous compassion. And for every one of us it is a solemn and affecting thought, that before he can be finally and for ever lost, he must “break the band and cast away the cord” by which forgiving mercy would draw him to itself. We know that it too often happens. Too often do we see men turn the back to God and not the face; and the last glance we get of them they are still departing. Still averse from God, and still departing, the cord of love and life’s brittle thread snap together; and passing the bourne beyond which is “• outer darkness,” there is nothing which we are allowed to hope for them in that world where no gospel follows and no Holy Spirit strives. But, on the other hand, where there is any relenting towards the Ever-blessed, what can be more encouraging than the assurance that in the case of our fallen family, much as sin abounds, grace much more abounds? and that, notwithstanding all we have done to forfeit the filial position, there is on God’s side so much of fatherly affection as not only to desire our return, but to devise methods unprecedented and costly for bringing us back?

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