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from Christ, while this is spoken to the disciples generally, whose faculties were comparatively fewer. How remarkable is this still ministry, these occupations of peace in which the servants of the future king should be engaged, and that too while a rebellion was going on. A caviller remarkably enough asks, "Why did he not distribute weapons to his servants? Such would have been under present circumstances the most natural thing to have done." Doubtless the most natural, as Peter felt when he cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest, as all have felt, who have sought to fight the world with its own weapons, and by the wrath of man to work the righteousness of God. Such identifying of the Church with a worldly kingdom has been the idea of the Papacy, such of the Anabaptists. Men in either case feeling strongly that there must be a kingdom of God, have supposed that it was immediately to appear (ver. 11), and that they, and not Christ himself, were to bring it into this outward form and subsistence-instead of seeing that their part was, with the still and silent occupation of their talent, to lay the rudiments of that kingdom, and so to prepare the world for its outbreaking, -which outbreaking should yet not actually come to pass, till the King returned in his glory.

The Jews were especially Christ's fellow-"citizens," for, according to the flesh, he was of the seed of Abraham, a Jew and a member of the Jewish polity;-and they hated him not merely in his life, and until his departure out of this world, but every persecution of his servants-the stoning of Stephen-the beheading of James-the persecutions of Paul, and all the wrongs which they did to his people for his name's sake, and because they were his, were each and all messages of defiance sent after him, implicit declarations upon their part, "We will not have this man to reign over us." And Theophylact well observes, how twice this very declaration found formal utterance from their lips,-once when they cried to Pilate, "We have no king but Cæsar;" and again, when they said, "Write not, The King of the Jews." When we give this parable a wider range, and find the full accomplishment of all which it contains, not at the destruction of Jerusalem, but at the day of judgment,—and it is equally capable of the narrower and the wider interpretation, then these rebellious citizens will no longer be merely the Jews, but all such evil men, as by word or deed openly deny their relation and subjection to Jesus, as their Lord and King (in this different from the unfaithful servant, for he allows the relation, and does not openly throw off the subjection, but yet evades the obligation by the false glosses of his own heart), and their message will have its full and final fulfilment in the great apostasy of the last days, which shall be even as this is, not an evading merely of the subjection due unto Christ, but a speaking of

great things against him (Rev. xiii. 5, 6; Dan. vii. 25), not merely diso bedience, but defiance, even such as shall not be content with resisting his decrees, but shall anticipate and challenge him to the conflict: "The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."

On the following verses (15-23) there is little to say which has not been said in another place. At his return, the nobleman distributes praise and rewards to them that have been faithful to him while he was away, punishments, more or less severe, to them who have abused the opportunity, and taken advantage of his absence.* The rewards which he imparts to his faithful servants, are royal, and this consistently with the royal dignity, with which he is now invested; he sets them over cities while the rewards imparted were quite different in the other parable (Matt xxv. 14-30)—for there the master being but a private man would have no such power of setting his servants in high places of authority. This is worthy of notice, as an example of the manner in which each parable is in perfect keeping and harmony with itself through all its minor details, which is another reason for believing them originally distinct from one another. The rewards too, as they are kingly, so are they also proportioned to the fidelity of the servants: he whose pound had made five pounds was set over five cities,-he whose

* This, of course, is borrowed from the life, and is what often must have happened. We may compare the conduct of Alexander, rewarding and punishing after his return from his long Indian expedition, from which so many in Western Asia had believed that he never would come back. (See the Bishop of St. David's Hist. of Greece, v. 7, p. 62, seq.)

+ Such a method of showing grace to servants was not uncommon in the East. Barhebraus (quoted by HAVERNICK, Comm. üb. Dan., p. 87) tells of a slave, who, giving proofs of his prudence and dexterity in business, his master, the Sultan Zangi, exclaimed, It is fit to give such a man as this, command over a city," and at once he made him governor of the Kurisch, and sent him thither.-I cannot find the force in these words, “Have thou authority over ten cities, &c.," which Mr. Greswell does, when they supply him with a convincing argument in favor of the millennial views (Exp. of the Par., v. 4, p. 501), for why should this image of ruling over cities be interpreted literally? nay, being found in a parable, must it not be accepted as an image only, which we are not to hold fast in the letter, but, on the contrary, must seek to exchange for the truth which underlies it? That truth certainly is, that he who is faithful in a little here (and all here is little compared to what is coming), to him much will be intrusted in a future age. But more than this, or what that much will be, is in no wise defined, though this, which Bengel notes on these "ten cities," is doubtless true: Magna rerum amplitudo ac varietas in regno Dei, quamvis nondum nobis cognita. We only know, in Calvin's words: Nunc tanquam absentis negotia laboriosè curamus: tunc verò ampla et multiplex honorum copia ei ad manum suppetet, quâ magnificè nos exornet.

pound had made ten was set over ten. We hear nothing of the other seven servants, but need not therefore conclude that they had wholly lost or wasted the money intrusted to them;* rather that the three who come forward are adduced as specimens of classes, and the rest, while all that we are to learn is learned from the three, for brevity's sake are omitted. Those who stand by, and who are bidden to take his pound from the slothful servant, and give it to him that had shown himself the faithfulest, or, at least, the ablest of all, are clearly the angels, who never fail to appear and take an active part in all scenes descriptive of the final judgment.‡

When the king has thus distributed praise and blame, rewards and penalties, to those who stand in the more immediate relations of servants to him, to those of his own household,-for the Church is the household of God,-he proceeds to execute vengeance on his enemies, -on all who had openly cast off allegiance to him, and denied that they belonged to his house at all. (Prov. xx. 8.) At his command they are brought before him, and slain before his face; as their guilt was greater, so their punishment is more terrible than that of the slothful servant. In the Marriage of the King's Son (Matt. xxii. 1) the vengeance on the open enemies goes before that on the hypocritical friend or servant ;—

* Thus Ambrose (Ep. in Luc., 1. 8, c. 95): De aliis siletur, qui quasi prodigi debitores, quod acceperant, perdiderunt.

It is characteristic that the σovdápiov (sudarium) which, not exerting himself, this idle servant does not need for its proper use (" in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," Gen. iii. 19), he uses for the wrapping up of his pound. That he had it disengaged, and so free to be turned to this purpose, was itself a witness against him.

Dschelaleddin, whom Von Hammer speaks of as the great religious poet of the modern East, has an interesting little poem resting on the same idea as that of the present parable,-namely, that of life with all its powers and faculties, as a sum of money to be laid out for God. As it is brief I will subjoin a translation, made, indeed, through the German. (See RUCKERT's Gedichte, v. 2, p. 451.)

O thou that art arrived in being's land,

Nor knowest how thy coming here was planned;

Prom the Schah's palace to life's city, thou

On his affairs wert sent, at his command.

Thee thy Lord gave, thy faithfulness to prove,

The sum of life, a capital in hand.

Hast thou forgotten thine intrusted pound?

Stunned with the market's hubbub dost thou stand?

Instead of dreaming, up and purchase good;

Buy precious stones, exchange not gold for sand.

Thou at the hour of thy return wilt see

Thy Monarch set, with open book in hand.
What thou from him receivedst, he will bring
To strict account, and reckoning will demand:
And a large blessing, or a curse from him,
Thy faithfulness or sloth will then command.

here it follows after. This slaying of the king's enemies in his presence is not to be in the interpretation mitigated or explained away, as though it belonged merely to the outer shell of the parable, and was only added because such things were done in Eastern courts (1 Sam. x. 27; xi. 12; Jer. liii. 10), and to add an air of truthfulness to the narrative. Rather it belongs also to the innermost kernel of the parable. The words set forth, fearfully indeed, but not in any way in which we need shrink from applying them to the Lord Jesus, his unmitigated wrath against his enemies,—but only his enemies exactly as they are enemies of all righteousness,-which shall be revealed in that day when grace shall have come to an end, and judgment without mercy will have begun.* (Rev. xiv. 10.) All this found its nearest fulfilment in the overthrow of Jerusalem, and in the terrible calamities which went before and followed it: that was, without doubt, a coming of Christ to judgment; but it will find its full accomplishment, when the wickedness of an apostate world, having come to a single head, shall in that single head receive its final doom,-in the final destruction of Antichrist and his armies..

* Augustine often uses this and the parallel passage, Matt. xxii. 13 (as Con. Adv. Leg. et Proph., 1. 1, c. 16; Con. Faust., 1. 22, c. 14, 19), in argument with the Manichæans, who, contrasting the severity of the God of the Old Testament with the lenity of the God of the New, would have proved that they were not, and could not be, one and the same. But, he replies, there is no such contrast. As there is love in the Old Testament, so there is fear, and that which should awaken fear, in the New: and he alleges the terribleness of this doom in proof. The Manichæans could not betake themselves to their ordinary evasion, that the passage was an interpolation or a corruption, as they accepted the parables (see AUGUSTINE, Con. Faust., 1. 32, c. 7) for part of the uncorrupted doctrine of Christ.-We may compare Heb. i. 13, "till I make thine enemies thy footstool," and we learn from Josh. x. 24, what the image is, that lies under these words.

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