The Parable of the Lost Piece of Money

Luke xv. 8 — 10.

It is a grand sight, lion-hunters tell us, to see the forest-king at bay. Driven from his bloody lair, and pursued by men and dogs till further flight is useless, he turns round to face his foes; and when he confronts them, — lashing his sides with his tail, his shaggy mane bristling all erect, fire flashing from his terrible eyes, and thunder roaring from his throat, — the coward crowd fall back; there is death in the spring for which he is bending, and only the bravest stand. Here the Lion of the tribe of Judah is brought to bay. Jesus stands face to face with his enemies; but how different the spectacle, and the passions which it expresses! For the purpose of blackening his reputation, the Scribes and Pharisees, his malignant and implacable foes, resort to the basest insinuations; and the Son of God has to stand on his defence. He might have said, and with more reason than Jonah, ‘“‘I do well to be angry, and, turning with indignation on His accusers, covered these whited sepulchres with confusion and with shame. But how meek and gentle his bearing,

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and how triumphant his defence! When one reads

in these beautiful stories of the poor wandering sheep,

of the lost money, and of the erring but repentant and

forgiven prodigal, how does this apology, this justification of himself for associating with sinners, recall to our recollection the words, —

“Not to condemn the sons of men,
The Son of God appeared;

No weapons in His hand are seen,
Nor voice of terror heard!”

When suffering from calumny, it is usually the wisest plan to follow John Wesley’s practice, and, without reply from either tongue or pen, to let our life refute it, as he said, ‘‘to live it down.’’ ‘The lie, the foul and false insinuation, which bad men use to destroy the reputation of the good, is like mud. While it is wet, it sticks; but, since to attempt to wash it out often only spreads the stain, it is best to leave it alone; and drying, in a short while it falls off of itself. It is not uncommon for those who cannot refute, to revile; but a man who has confidence in the goodness of his cause, and walking in his integrity, is conscious of the purity of his motives, is a polished mirror, from whose face, though awhile obscured, the breath of scandal shall vanish, nor leave a stain behind.

When the interests of a great cause, however, are at stake, and attempts are made to stab it through the sides of its advocate, to destroy it by destroying his reputation, he may find it necessary, much as he might prefer quietly to bear wrcng, to act in self-defence.

Such, in his judgment, appear to have been the circumstances in which our Lord was placed. His enemies, for the purpose of bringing discredit on his cause, had attempted to injure his character; and that by the most insidious of all ways; by insinuation, - more than by a bold and open attack. ‘This man,” said they, ‘‘receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”’ Looking at that remark in the light of the adage, ‘ell me your company, and I will tell you your character,’ it is easy to see what they meant. It was Saying, in other words, He keeps low company; if like draws to like, and birds of a feather flock together, this Jesus is no better than he should be; if he were a man of pure mind and virtuous life, would he accept invitations to the tables of people of infamous character ? — would he outrage public decency and obliterate the difference between. good and bad men, virtue and vice, by eating and drinking with publicans and sinners? I can fancy them using even Scripture to feather the poisoned arrow; and, as they pointed to Jesus breathing words of hope into the ear of some poor fallen woman, or kindly trying to raise a publican from his degradation, I can imagine them asking, with the sneer of a fiend and the tongue of a serpent, Can that be David’s son? — the son of him who said, Blessed is the man that standeth not in the way of sinners! I am a companion of all them that fear Thee. I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with dissemblers; I have hated the congregation of evil-doers, and will not sit with the wicked?

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Ay LY wd It was the purest love which drew our Lord to sinners. He was among them, but holy, harmless, and undefiled — separate, as oil among the water it swims in, or as the sunbeam which, lighting up the dun and dusty air, passes through it without contracting

the slightest stain. Yet with such vile aspersions was

Jesus rewarded for leaving the bosom of his Father, and the society of angels, to save the lost! A physician, suddenly summoned to the bed of poverty and disease, leaves his home to face the pelting, midnight storm, and spend the hours others give to rest endeavoring, with all tenderness and highest skill, to alleviate the agony and save the life of some miserable wretch who, as she quaffed the cup of vice, has reached its lowest, bitterest dregs; and foul-tongued slanderers take occasion, from this act of pure, self-denying, and unrewarded benevolence, to cast reflections on his habits or his heart. ‘Though nothing is more painful than to have kind and good and noble and generous actions imputed to the basest motives, yet the followers of Christ need not wonder, or be deterred from doing good by having that wrong to suffer. As this case shows, their Lord himself was not exempt from it. He was tried in all points like as we are; and when his people find, by a similar experience, that the servant

is no better off than his Master, nor the disciple than

his Lord, would God they were able to copy his pattern — to copy it as faithfully as a warrior did on a late battle-field! Riding over the ground when the fight was done, he came, as he picked his steps among the dead, to a body which, stirring, showed some signs of life. The bleeding form wore the dress of a foe. Regardless of that, he said to his attendant, ‘Give him a draught of wine;” and, as the officer stooped down to do so, the wounded soldier, discovering, through the mists that were gathering on his dying eye, in this good Samaritan the general of the troops against which he had been fighting, raised himself on his elbow, drew a pistol, and with deadly hate, fired it at his benefactor’s head. Happily, the bullet missed its mark; and the general, so soon as he recovered from his surprise, with a forgiveness truly magnanimous said, ‘“‘Give it him all the same!’’ But the attack made on our Lord’s character under cover of the remark, This man receiveth sinners, did more than present Him with an opportunity of patiently bearing wrong, and generously forgiving the wrong-doer. Though we have not to thank his enemies for the vile aspersion, we have to thank God that he permitted it. In the words of Joseph, God meant it unto good. To this attack we owe our Lord’s noble and unanswerable defence, — those three beautiful and blessed parables which, explaining why he did not shun but rather sought the company of sinners, have kindled hope in the bosom of despair, and encouraged thousands, like the poor prodigal, to return to their Father’s house and cast themselves on his boundless mercy. To crush some plants, is to bring out their poisonous juices and their offensive odors; but Jesus — and, to some extent, all true Christians resemble him — resembled the sweetbrier and rosemary, the lowly thyme and the evergreen myrtle, which smell the sweetest when they are hardest crushed, — bathing with fragrance the hands that bruise them.

Before directing our attention specially to the parable before us, and the woman who, with lighted candle and broom in hand, is sweeping her dusty floor, I may — remark —

First, that all these three parables are told for the same purpose; and that, though to cursory readers they may appear the same in their matter as in their object, they are not so. They are not, like the reverberations of thunder, mere echoes of one peal; nor, in following up the first parable with the second and the second with the third, is our Lord, to borrow a figure from his old trade, like a carpenter who seeks by repeated blows of the same hammer to drive a nail in to the head. These parables were all told to show why Christ sought sinners, and to encourage sinners to seek Him. But there are sinners of different shades of character; and these, that none might despair, are described under three different figures: — that stupid, senseless wanderer, the lost sheep; that piece of money which, devoid of sensibility and unconscious of its fall, lies in the dust, and feels no desire whatever to be otherwise; and that wretched prodigal — born in happy circumstances, well and kindly and piously reared — who acts from his own bad will, with wicked determination resists a father’s authority, and, sinning against light and conscience, leaves home to plunge overhead into the foulest depths of vice.

Secondly, I remark, in regard to these parables, that by itself nome of the three gives a complete picture of the method of salvation. To see God aright as saving man, and man as saved by God, we must, if I may say so, dovetail them into each other, and make one picture of the three. Jor example, beautiful, touching, and instructive as is the story of the prodigal, still it gives no adequate idea of the part which God acts in our salvation. No doubt the father, so soon as he catches sight of the penitent yet a great way off, runs to meet him, and, ere the words of confession have left his lips, folds him to his bosom in the embraces of a free, full, flowing, overflowing forgiveness. But he does not send for him. No kind letters full of tender entreaties, no servant from the father’s house, ever reaches the miserable swineherd; far less are the household amazed to see the father himself, or by his other and elder son, go forth, leaving home and. its pleasures all behind, to seek the poor prodigal in the far country to which his steps have carried him, and amid the misery in which his sins have plunged him. There is an elder brother here; but how unlike ours! Careless of a brother’s fate, he stays at home at ease; nor thinks’of seeking him whose infant steps he had guided, and with whom, when the day’s play was over, he had slept on one couch, the arms of the two boys entwined around each other’s necks. He neither regrets his absence, nor rejoices at his return. Selfish and sulky, angry and jealous, that elder brother is a foil to ours. Instructive picture as this is of a sinner’s misery and a penitent’s heart, and of the joyous welcome given to the worst who repent and return, it is the other parables more than this that present a Wis picture of God, — how he feels toward sinners, and what he does to save them. In these we see God seeking our salvation; not waiting till we go to him, but coming to us — to seek and to save the lost. The heart of man beats in the story of the prodigal; but in this the heart of God. There we see man saved; here we see God saving. Such is the meaning of the parable, where a woman, having ten pieces of silver and losing one of them, lights a candle, sweeps the house, and seeks diligently till she find it.

WHAT BEFELL THIS WOMAN?

She had ten pieces of silver, and of these she lost one. But one out of the ten coins was lost; but one out of the hundred sheep went astray; but one member of the “certain man’s’ family became a prodigal; although the numbers of those not lost in these parables differ, only one in each case was lost. Are we to infer from that circumstance, that ours is the only world which has been cursed by sin? We are certain that there are many worlds besides our own; and that — with all the twinkling stars we see, and millions we do not see, suns around which there probably roll worlds corresponding to the planets of our solar system — this earth bears no more proportion to creation than one quivering leaf to the foliage of a giant tree, it may be to all the leaves of a boundless forest; than a single grain of sand to all the sands that form the shores or strew the bed of ocean. Why should not we hope that Satan has never winged his way to those bright realms, nor set foot on them; and that, like the one lost sheep of the flock, the one lost piece of money, the one prodigal of the family, ours is the only world that, leaving its orbit, has wandered into darkness and away from God? It adds much to the glory of the starry firmament, to look up and believe

that those spheres are the abodes of innocence ; — not*

prisons of suffering, but palaces of pure delights, with virtues brilliant as their light, and inhabitants, whatever be their form, as loyal to their God as are the worlds they inhabit to the suns round which they roll; and that, had we ears as we have eyes to reach them, from those beautiful stars we should hear as they rolled nightly over us, when the lark has dropped into her dewy nest and the busy city has sunk to slumber, and the din of the world is hushed, voices in the sky, such as John heard like the sound of many waters, or the shepherds when they listened to the angels singing.

But, whoever may be meant by the nine pieces of silver which were not lost, it is man’s soul which is certainly meant by the one which was; nor, in some respects, could any figure so well express our naturally depraved, degraded, and undone condition. We were not always, not once, not at first, what we are now. Qn its issue from the mint, this foul, defaced, dusty, and dishonored coin was bright; stamped with the image and superscription of a king. Even so man was originally made in the likeness of God: on the pure, untarnished metal of his soul God impressed his own holy image. And still in reason, in conscience, in a sense of right and wrong, in noble aspirations

Pe - after immortality and in many things else which distinguish him from the brutes that perish, there remain such traces of his original state as we see of its ancient glory in the hoary battlements of an old ruin; or, according to the figure of this parable, as we see in a foul, worn, rusted coin, with here a letter, and there a mutilated feature of its original image and superscription. But sin, deforming man’s soul more than death his body, has defaced this likeness, and, till God seeks and his Spirit renews us, has left us buried amid the foulness and dust of corruption; so that one might fancy that it was over not Abraham’s, but all. Adam’s race, the bearded prophet stood, and raised, as he contemplated their miserable ruin, this lamentable cry, ‘‘ How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! the stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every street. The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter!”’

Not only this parable but all Scripture represents us as lost. Yet there is hope in the very circumstances in which we are lost. ‘The case is bad, but not so bad as we can imagine it to have been. It is unfortunate to lose a piece of money in the house, but much more so in a field, or on a moor. Lost in the moun-; tain fills a mother with alarm for her child; but lost at sea strikes her down with despair. Be it money or a living man, whatever, falling overboard and disappearing beneath the wave, is borne by its weight down and down to the bottom of the deep, is certainly, for ever, lost; and therefore God employs this figure to set forth his full and everlasting forgiveness of his people’s sins. Enraptured with the thought, ‘‘ Who,” exclaims Micah, “is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not his anger forever, because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again; he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities: and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.’ Sins forgiven are lost in the sea; but souls under condemnation of the law and in danger of hell, are lost in the house. Though deformed by sin and defiled by corruption, yet, being within the house, thank God, they are within the region of hope and the reach of mercy. And with infinite love in Jesus Christ, and infinite mercy in the bosom of God, and infinite grace in the Holy Spirit, I despair of none being redeemed, any more than of the coin being recovered, though it had rolled into the darkest nook of the house, now that the woman has lighted her candle and swept the floor and cleared out every corner with her broom, and, stooping down, is turning the dust-heap over and over — seeking till the lost be found. So Jesus came, and so he comes, to seek and to save the lost.

“WHAT THIS WOMAN DID TO FIND THE MONEY.

$She did everything proper in the circumstances. Indeed she could not do more than she did, — image, though faint, of that work, the wonder of astonished heavens and the highest subject of angels’ praise, of which, pointing to his Son, the bleeding victim of the accursed tree, God asks, ‘‘ What could have been done more for my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” In regard to the steps which she took, we are, in judging of their propriety and necessity, to remember that Bastar houses are not constructed on the style of ours — pierced as they are with many windows to admit the welcome sunlight. In climates where comfort lies rather in excluding than admitting the rays of a burning sun, the houses are built of dead walls; and the rooms in consequence are dark even in the daytime. Therefore this woman lights a candle to see with, and search the house. In point of condition as well as construction, houses in the East differ from ours. The habits of the people are not cleanly; and the floors, being formed of dried mud, are dusty as well as the rooms dark; the fitter emblem such houses of our natural state — a darkened head and a polluted heart. Besides lighting a candle, therefore, the woman seizes a broom, and bending eager to her task, with candle lowered to the ground, she sweeps it; nor, breathing the choking air and moving in a cloud of dust, ceases till the coin, swept up, rings on the floor, or the light flashes on its silver edges; and gladly seizing it, she holds it aloft, and rushing out in the fulness of her joy, calls her neighbors to rejoice in her success.

We might like to know with certainty what char-, acter the woman here represents on the stage. But, though that point were as obscure as was her person amid the cloud of dust her broom had raised in the dark and dirty house, the candle shining in her hand

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Parables. p. 202.

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THE LOST PIECE OF MONEY. 203.

is undoubtedly the Bible, God’s revealed Word. Assuming that she symbolizes the Spirit of God, it is when He takes that heavenly light, and, carrying it into the recesses of a man’s soul, reveals its foulness and danger and misery, that the sinner discovers his loss; and, feeling his need of a Saviour, cries, What shall I do to be saved ? — -Create in me a clean heart, O God! As to the sweeping, which disturbs the house and reveals a foulness that so long as it lay unstirred was perhaps never suspected, that may indicate the convictions, the alarms, the dread discoveries, the searchings and agitations of heart, which not unftequently accompany conversion. It is not till the glassy pool is stirred that the mud at the bottom rises to light; it is when storms sweep the sea that what it hides in its depths is thrown up on the shore; it is when brooms sweep walls and floor that the sunbeams, struggling through a cloud of dust, reveal the foulness of the house; and it is agitations and perturbations of the heart which reveal its corruption, and are preludes to the purity and peace that sooner or later follow on conversion. That money was not recovered without a great disturbance within the house; nor are souls, especially such as have been long and deeply sunk in sin, commonly converted without great trials, agitations, and searchings of heart. But, be their seat a diseased body or a troubled mind, how welcome should we make the sufferings which bring us to Christ, and end in our salvation — humbling us in the dust — weaning our affections from earth and wedding them to heaven!

This scene, though expressing the general truth that God has done everything to save lost souls which even He could do, conveys no idea whatever of the price of our salvation — at what an incalculable ransom we were redeemed. The curtain rises, and the stage shows us the interior of a house, and a woman, dimly seen through a cloud of dust, who is quietly, though carefully, sweeping the floor. There is no dying, no dreadful deed of violence, no mortal struggle, here; no blood bespatters the walls, or creeps in red stream over the floor; no passer-by starts and listens, and thinks he hears blows and groans issuing from within. There is nothing indicative of Christ having sacrificed his life for ours. ‘The nature of the parable does not admit of it; yet we are never to forget that it was through suffering as well as seeking that we were saved; and that, to redeem us, God spared not even his own Son — commending his love to us in that, while we were sinners, Christ died for us.

THE WOMAN’S JOY AT FINDING THE PIECE OF
SILVER.

There is a peculiar pleasure felt in recovering what we have lost; or in having anything placed beyond the reach of danger which we were afraid of losing. A group of children with health blooming on their rosy ‘cheeks, joy ringing in their merry laughter, vigor bounding in their frames as they chase the butterfly or each other over the flowery lawn, is a sight to gladden any, but especially a parent’s eye; yet it is a deeper joy to look on the pallid face and languid form of the child who, propped up on pillows and an object still of care and trouble never grudged, has been plucked from the jaws of death — brought back from the very gates of the grave. No boat making the harbor over a glassy sea, its snowy canvas filled by the gentle breeze and shining on the blue waters like a sea-bird’s wing, is watched with such interest, or, as with sail flapping on the mast it grates on the shingle, is welcomed with such joy, as one which, leaving the wreck on the thundering reef, comes through the roaring tempest, boldly breasts the billows, and bringing off the half-drowned, half-dead survivors, shoots within the harbor amid flowing tears and cheers that, bursting from the happy crowd, rise above the rage and din of elements. No gathering of an unbroken, happy, prosperous family in their old home on the return of a birthday, or at Christmas time, ever filled a father’s heart with such gratitude and gladness, as was felt in the house where, while the prodigal sat encircled by his father’s arm, each happier than the other, the music that filled the air, the wine that flowed in bowls, the floor that shook to the dancers’ feet, but feebiy expressed the deep though silent joy which welled up in the old man’s heart. By such scenes a gracious God, accommodating his language to our ideas, expresses his joy in saving sinners, and in seeing sinners saved. ‘To entertain any other idea of him is to do injustice to his gracious character and to endanger our own souls. “As I live,” saith the Lord, ‘‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked.’’ — ‘ What,”’ he asks, “could have been done more for my vineyard, that I have not done init?’ To the edge of the grave, to the brink of perdition, I see him following the most obstinate and headstrong and perverse and wretched sinner, with this earnest and most affectionate entreaty, Turn ye, turn ye, why: will ye die? Some wretched and heart-broken creature, the flower which has been trodden on the street where the villain hand that plucked had thrown it when its freshness and bloom were gone — one polluted in body and in mind — one lost to virtue and shunned by decency — one for whom none cared but a mother, who clung to hope, and with love burning in its ashes, wept and prayed in secret for her she never named, is converted; and think of God in heaven feeling more joy than the mother who on a wild winter’s night has opened her door to the wanderer’s moaning ery; and while she hastens to tell the glad tidings to humble and sympathizing neighbors, think of Him telling them to his angels, and calling them to rejoice with him that the dead is alive again and the lost is found; think of the joyful alacrity with which those happy, holy, spirits haste, if so employed, to do the Saviour’s bidding — prepare another mansion and weave another crown.

What value belongs to these souls of ours, when the repentance and salvation even of one sinner is thought worthy of being published in heaven and sung to the music of angels’ harps? We may be assured that it is from a dreadful doom the soul is saved; and that it was over a fearful abyss it hung when Jesus plucked it from the wreck. Angels had not otherwise turned an eager gaze from heaven on earth, and looked down from their lofty realms to watch the issue with breathless interest, and feel such joy at the result; and as I have seen a man when the wave, bearing the boat on its foaming crest, brought it up to the ship’s side, seize the happy moment and with one great bound leap in, so should sinners, perilously hanging on the brink of ruin, over perdition, the hell that yawns below, seize the opportunity to be saved. Willing and eager to save, Christ stretches out his arms to receive us. Let us throw ourselves on his mercy, crying, Save now, Lord — Lord save me, I perish!

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