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So rooted is the heart's enmity to God, that man must often be driven, as by the blast of a tempest, to submission and to duty. The prodigal must suffer beneath want, and shame, and abandonment before he thinks on his ways, and turns longingly to the house of his Father. How often is it that the consequences of crime — the disease, the misery, the remorsefulness which wait upon the track of sin, though in themselves sequences of a purely natural law, are used of God as means to impression and salvation! You must not suppose that the mind of the prodigal came at once, in sudden revulsion, from heedlessness to serious thought, and from obduracy to tender and softened feeling. There would be, in all probability, in accordance with the laws of mental working, several preliminary stages. The earliest feelings would still partake of the character of resistance and rebellion. An awakened conscience, that is not pacified, only exasperates into more audacious rebellion. Many a man, whom shame has only maddened into more frantic resistance, walks the earth to-day a moral Laocoon, stung in a living martyrdom by the serpents which in his bosom ledge. It is hardly credible how much, not only of human sadness, but of human sin, has sprung from the soul's first passionate recoil against detected criminality, or blasted reputation, or enforced penalty, or stained honour. When remorse scourges, it is not, like Solomon, with whips, but, like Rehoboam, with scorpions; and the intolerable anguish of a wounded spirit has prompted to many a deed of violence, from which, before his passions were hounded into madness by a guilty conscience, the man would have shrunk with loathing and with horror. Oh, when evil passions and an evil conscience seethe in the same caldron, who can imagine or create a deeper hell? The sullen despondency with which the prodigal would strive to reconcile himself to his fate would mingle with oft-repeated curses pronounced upon his adverse destiny, rather than his own folly. But all this was but the swathing grave-cloth out of whose folds the new man was to rise — the gathering of the dark and angry cloud which was soon to be dissolved in showers, and on whose bosom the triumphant sun would paint the iris by and by. That ever-present Spirit who strives with men to bring them to the knowledge of the truth was doubtless all the while at work up-n the prodigal's heart; and when He works, out of the brooding storm come the calm and the zephyr of the summer-tide — out of the death of enjoyment the rare blessedness which is the highest good — out of the death-working sorrow of the world the repentance which is unto life eternal. We know not precisely how the change was effected from the hardness of heart, and contempt of God's word and commandment, to the softening of thought and contrition. Perhaps the Divine Spirit, wrought by the power of memory, thawed the ice away from the frosted spirit by sunny pictures of the past — by the vision of the ancestral home — of the guileless childhood — of the father's ceaseless strength of tenderness — of the spell of a living mother's love, or of the holier spell of a dead one.

I. A TRANSITION FROM MADNESS TO REASON. All the habits in which the sinner is wont to indulge answer to the habits and delusions of those who have been bereft of reason, or in whom it has been deposed from its rightful government of the man. Madness is rash and inconsiderate action — action without thought of consequences. The madman's hand is sudden in its violence; the madman's tongue shoots out its barbed arrows; he is reckless of the slain reputation, or of the murdered life; and is not like rashness a characteristic of the sinner? Little recks he of his own dishonour, or of the life that he has wasted in excess of riot. He goes heedlessly on, though his every step were up the crater's steep, and mid the crackling ashes. Madness is mistake of the great purposes of life; the employment of the faculties upon objects that are contemptible and unworthy. Hence you see the lunatic intently gazing into vacancy, or spending hours in the eager chase of insects on the wing, or scribbling, in strange medley of the ribald and the sacred, scraps of verse upon the torn-out pages of a Bible. And are there not greater degradations in the pursuits which engross such multitudes of the unconverted? When a sinner comes to himself he blushes for his former frenzy; he feels himself a child of the Divine; he feels himself an heir of the eternal; and, looking with a strange disdain upon the things which formerly trammelled him, he lifts heavenward his flashing eye, and says, "There is my portion and my home."

II. There is a transition, again, FROM PRIDE TO SUBMISSION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT. In his former mood of mind he only intensified his own rebellion, and was ready, doubtless, to blame circumstances, or companions, or destiny, or anything rather than his own wickedness and folly. "All things have conspired against me; never, surely, bad any one so hard a lot as I. I might not have been exactly prudent now and then, but I have done nothing to merit such punishment as this. I will never confess that I have done wrong; if I were to return to my father, I would not abate a hair's-breadth of my privileges; I would insist — and it is right, for am I not his son? — upon being treated precisely as I was before." So might have thought the prodigal in his pride. But in his penitence no humiliation is too low for him — no concealment nor extenuation is for a moment entertained; with the expectation, not of sonship, but of servitude, and with the frank and sorrowful acknowledgment of sin, he purposes to travel, and to cast himself at the FEET OF HIS FATHER.

III. A TRANSITION FROM DESPONDENCY TO ACTIVE AND HOPEFUL ENDEAVOUR. There is not only the mental process, but the corresponding action — the rousing of the soul from its indolent and tormenting despair. This is one main difference between the godly sorrow and that consuming sadness which preys upon the heart of the worldling: the one disinclines, the other prompts to action; the one broods over its own haplessness until it wastes and dies, the other cries piteously for help, and then exults in deliverance and blessing. There was something more than fable in the old mythology which told of Pandora's box — a very receptacle of ills made tolerable only because there was hope at the bottom. In every true contrition there is hope.

(W. M. Punshon, LL. D.)

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KJV: And he said, A certain man had two sons:

WEB: He said, "A certain man had two sons.