For religion is holiness, and holiness is health. When some one whom we love is cross or irritable, we say of him, " He's not himself to-day." When one whom we have known for years does something unworthy, we say, "Ah, that's not himself at all.'* And what is that but our instinctive certainty that a man is more than his vices or his failures, and that if we want to know him as he is, we must take him at the level of his best? It was always thus that Jesus judged humanity. He was a magnificent and a consistent optimist. He never made light of sin, never condoned it. To Him it was always terrible and tragic. But then the sinner was not the real man ; sin was a bondage, a tyranny, a madness; and it was when the tyranny of sin was broken that a man came to his true self.
ST. LUKE XV. 17-20 291
1. The prodigal's repentance began in a self -colloquy — an interior conversation, an examination of his conscience by himself : it is a confession to himself. Eepentance always begins in thoughtful interior soliloquy; and all soliloquy, as Shaftesbury has said in his Characteristics, is an inward dialogue, is really a colloquy. The profoundest and the purest thinking of individual men has not only been in this form, but it has been communicated to their fellow-men, and handed over to our use in the shape of dialogue. The work of Socrates was done by dialogue. The written works of Plato are cast in the form of conversations, in which it is plain that he has made himself the thinker in each converser. It is enough to say that Shakespeare is a dramatist, and that Faust is a play. The most universally used and the most helpful of all ascetical treatises, The Imitation of Christ, is given for our use in the form of interior colloquies. The younger brother of God's household, the Gentile Humanity, summed up in the famous words, " Know thyself," the conclusion of his search for the right end of human thinking. The elder brother, Circum- cised Humanity, utters the same conclusion in the words of his own Psalmist, " Commune with thine own heart." " 0 what heaps of filth," cries one who has entered as deeply into the Gentile spirit as into the Jewish spirit, " and what foul disorder there must necessarily be in a breast which is never looked into!"i
■[J There is hope for the worst of men if they begin to reflect. Keflection is the first step on the ladder which leads a sinner up to God — the first step on the bridge which he crosses over to return to God. The Scripture bids us "consider our ways." This is what the prodigal did, and it ended in his return to his father.
A famous Bishop once made this appeal to a wild young man : " Promise me that you will do this one thing to oblige me. Go and shut yourself up in an empty room for the whole of one day." He did so to please the Bishop. Having nothing whatever in the room to take his attention, it forced him to reflect, and in the end to repent and to reform.^
2. What did the prodigal reflect on ?
(1) He reflected on his 'present miserable condition. — He stood there solitary in the field. His clothes were torn into rags, his 1 T. Hancock. " H. G. Youard.
292 THE RETURN TO THE FATHER
eyes were sunken in their sockets, his cheeks were hollow, his lips were parched and cracked ; he looked the very effigy of famine itself. The swine were feeding around him : he was gnawing at the husks which the swine had tossed out of the troughs with their snouts. " And no man gave unto him."
We can hardly enter into the shudder of horror which passed through the listening group when they heard Jesus declare that the starving young Jew joined himself to a rich Gentile swine farmer, that he forced himself a willing bondsman upon the foreigner, that he stuck to him, that he would not be denied. He who began by asking his father to give him everything, now prays to his enemy to allow him anything. The proud child of Abraham receives an insult, and grasps at it thankfully. He is sent, as if he were a slave, into the alien's fields to feed swine.
^ How admirably has Watts represented the " Prodigal Son " as an example of the larger liberty which sin offers to the deluded soul, and which ends in destitution and in the company of the swine. He is resting at the foot of a huge fig-tree whose leaves overshadow his nakedness from the scorching sun, in a woe- begone attitude, feeling to the full the wretchedness of his position, with a most expressive countenance full of sadness and remorse, bethinking himself of the bread enough in his father's house and to spare, while he perishes for lack of food, and there is no one to pity or help him. His forlorn, destitute look shows the ruin of a nature so noble that it cannot be content with its circum- stances, but recalls a happier and worthier condition. The con- trast between the two natures, the human and the swinish, is brought out with subtle power. The swine lying in indolent sensual enjoyment on the ground show the satisfaction of creatures that are at home in their circumstances, whose wants are bounded by their nature, and supplied in the wilderness where man finds nothing suitable for him. Man has a larger nature than any husks of the world's good things can feed — which nothing that God can give — no creature good — nothing but God Himself can satisfy. And therefore he is miserable even when worldly things are most favourable to him, until he has come to himself, and resolved that he will arise and go to his Father, and to the true home of his spirit.^