We pass on to the second period of the history of God’s treatment of a sinner.  It is the period of his coming to himself, or what we call repentance.  The first fact of religious experience which this parable suggests to us is that common truth—­men desert the world when the world deserts them.  The renegade came to himself when there were no more husks to eat.  He would have remained away if he could have got them, but it is written, “no man gave unto him.”  And this, brethren, is the record of our shame.  Invitation is not enough; we must be driven to God.  And the famine comes not by chance.  God sends the famine into the soul—­the hunger, and thirst, and the disappointment—­to bring back his erring child again.

Now the world fastens upon that truth, and gets out of it a triumphant sarcasm against religion.  They tell us that just as the caterpillar passes into the chrysalis, and the chrysalis into the butterfly, so profligacy passes into disgust, and disgust passes into religion.  To use their own phraseology, when people become disappointed with the world, it is the last resource they say, to turn saint.  So the men of the world speak, and they think they are profoundly philosophical and concise in the account they give.  The world is welcome to its very small sneer.  It is the glory of our Master’s gospel that it is the refuge of the broken-hearted.  It is the strange mercy of our God that he does not reject the writhings of a jaded heart.  Let the world curl its lip if it will, when it sees through the causes of the prodigal’s return.  And if the sinner does not come to God taught by this disappointment, what then?  If affections crushed in early life have driven one man to God; if wrecked and ruined hopes have made another man religious; if want of success in a profession has broken the spirit; if the human life lived out too passionately, has left a surfeit and a craving behind which end in seriousness; if one is brought by the sadness of widowed life, and another by the forced desolation of involuntary single life; if when the mighty famine comes into the heart, and not a husk is left, not a pleasure untried, then, and not till then, the remorseful resolve is made, “I will arise and go to my Father:”—­Well, brethren, what then?  Why this, that the history of penitence, produced as it so often is by mere disappointment, sheds only a brighter lustre round the Love of Christ, who rejoices to receive such wanderers, worthless as they are, back into His bosom.  Thank God the world’s sneer is true.  It is the last resource to turn saint.  Thanks to our God that when this gaudy world has ceased to charm, when the heart begins to feel its hollowness, and the world has lost its satisfying power, still all is not yet lost if penitence and Christ remain, to still, to humble, and to soothe a heart which sin