In dealing with this parable, this is the line which we shall adopt.  We shall look at the picture which it draws of—­1.  God’s treatment of the penitent. 2.  God’s expostulation with the saint.  God’s treatment of the penitent divides itself in this parable into three distinct epochs.  The period of alienation, the period of repentance, and the circumstances of a penitent reception.  We shall consider all these in turn.

The first truth exhibited in this parable is the alienation of man’s heart from God.  Homelessness, distance from our Father—­that is man’s state by nature in this world.  The youngest son gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.  Brethren, this is the history of worldliness.  It is a state far from God; in other words, it is a state of homelessness.  And now let us ask what that means.  To English hearts it is not necessary to expound elaborately the infinite meanings which cluster round that blessed expression “home.”  Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other.  It is the place of confidence.  It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defence, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts.  It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule.  Let a man travel where he will, home is the place to which “his heart untravelled fondly turns.”  He is to double all pleasure there.  He is there to divide all pain.  A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities.

And now my brethren, if that be the description of home, is God’s place of rest your home?  Walk abroad and alone by night.  That awful other world in the stillness and the solemn deep of the eternities above, is it your home?  Those graves that lie beneath you, holding in them the infinite secret, and stamping upon all earthly loveliness the mark of frailty and change and fleetingness—­are those graves the prospect to which in bright days and dark days you can turn without dismay?  God in his splendours,—­dare we feel with Him affectionate and familiar, so that trial comes softened by this feeling—­it is my Father, and enjoyment can be taken with a frank feeling; my Father has given it me, without grudging, to make me happy?  All that is having a home in God.  Are we at home there?  Why there is demonstration in our very childhood that we are not at home with that other world of God’s.  An infant fears to be alone, because he feels he is not alone.  He trembles in the dark, because he is conscious of the presence of the world of spirits.  Long before he has been told tales of terror, there is an instinctive dread of the supernatural in the infant mind.