It is the instinct which we have from childhood that gives us the feeling of another world.  And mark, brethren, if the child is not at home in the thought of that world of God’s, the deep of darkness and eternity is, around him—­God’s home, but not his home, for his flesh creeps.  And that feeling grows through life; not the fear—­when the child becomes a man he gets over fear—­but the dislike.  The man feels as much aversion as the child for the world of spirits.

Sunday comes.  It breaks across the current of his worldliness.  It suggests thoughts of death and judgment and everlasting existence.  Is that home?  Can the worldly man feel Sunday like a foretaste of his Father’s mansion?  If we could but know how many have come here to-day, not to have their souls lifted up heavenwards, but from curiosity, or idleness, or criticism, it would give us an appalling estimate of the number who are living in a far country, “having no hope and without God in the world.”

The second truth conveyed to us in this parable is the unsatisfying nature of worldly happiness.  The outcast son tried to satiate his appetite with husks.  A husk is an empty thing; it is a thing which looks extremely like food, and promises as much as food; but it is not food.  It is a thing which when chewed will stay the appetite, but leaves the emaciated body without nourishment.  Earthly happiness is a husk.  We say not that there is no satisfaction in the pleasures of a worldly life.  That would be an overstatement of the truth.  Something there is, or else why should men persist in living for them?  The cravings of man’s appetite may be stayed by things which cannot satisfy him.  Every new pursuit contains in it a new hope; and it is long before hope is bankrupt.  But my brethren, it is strange if a man has not found out long before he has reached the age of thirty, that everything here is empty and disappointing.  The nobler his heart and the more unquenchable his hunger for the high and the good, the sooner will he find that out.  Bubble after bubble bursts, each bubble tinted with the celestial colours of the rainbow, and each leaving in the hand which crushes it a cold damp drop of disappointment.  All that is described in Scripture by the emphatic metaphor of “sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind,” the whirlwind of blighted hopes and unreturned feelings and crushed expectations—­that is the harvest which the world gives you to reap.

And now is the question asked, Why is this world unsatisfying?  Brethren, it is the grandeur of the soul which God has given us, which makes it insatiable in its desires—­with an infinite void which cannot be filled up.  A soul which was made for God, how can the world fill it?  If the ocean can be still with miles of unstable waters beneath it, then the soul of man, rocking itself upon its own deep longings, with the Infinite beneath it, may rest.  We were created once in majesty,