rewarded with more happiness than a saint, it appears as if good and evil were alike undistinguished in God’s dealings.  It seems like putting a reconciled enemy over the head of a tried servant.  It looks as if it were a kind of encouragement held out to sin, and a man begins to feel, Well if this is to be the caprice of my father’s dealing; if this rich feast of gladness be the reward of a licentious life, “Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency.”  This is natural surprise.

But besides this there is a jealousy in these sensations of ours which God sees fit to rebuke.  You have been trying to serve God all your life, and find it struggle, and heaviness, and dulness still.  You see another who has outraged every obligation of life, and he is not tried by the deep prostration you think he ought to have, but bright with happiness at once.  You have been making sacrifices all your life, and your worst trials come out of your most generous sacrifices.  Your errors in judgment have been followed by sufferings sharper than those which crime itself could have brought.  And you see men who never made a sacrifice unexposed to trial—­men whose life has been rapture purchased by the ruin of others’ innocence—­tasting first the pleasures of sin, and then the banquet of religion.  You have been a moral man from childhood, and yet with all your efforts you feel the crushing conviction that it has never once been granted you to win a soul to God.  And you see another man marked by inconsistency and impetuosity, banqueting every day upon the blest success of impressing and saving souls.  All that is startling.  And then comes sadness and despondency; then come all those feelings which are so graphically depicted here:  irritation—­“he was angry;” swelling pride—­“he would not go in;” jealousy, which required soothing—­“his father went out and entreated him.”

And now brethren, mark the father’s answer.  It does not account for this strange dealing by God’s sovereignty.  It does not cut the knot of the difficulty, instead of untying it, by saying, God has a right to do what He will.  He does not urge, God has a right to act on favouritism if He please.  But it assigns two reasons.  The first reason is, “It was meet, right that we should make merry.”  It is meet that God should be glad on the reclamation of a sinner.  It is meet that that sinner, looking down into the dreadful chasm over which he had been tottering, should feel a shudder of delight through all his frame on thinking of his escape.  And it is meet that religious men should not feel jealous of one another, but freely and generously join in thanking God that others have got happiness, even if they have not.  The spirit of religious exclusiveness, which looks down contemptuously instead of tenderly on worldly men, and banishes a man for ever from the circle of its joys because he has sinned notoriously, is a bad spirit.