does the man of the world reveal himself with more
strangely comical effect under the gown of the divine than in the
sermon on "The Prodigal Son." The repentant spendthrift has returned
to his father's house, and is about to confess his follies. But--

"Alas! How shall he tell his story?

"Ye who have trod this round, tell me in what words he shall give
in to his father the sad items of his extravagance and folly: the
feasts and banquets which he gave to whole cities in the East; the
costs of Asiatic rarities, and of Asiatic cooks to dress them; the
expenses of singing men and singing women; the flute, the harp, the
sackbut, and all kinds of music; the dress of the Persian Court how
magnificent! their slaves how numerous! their chariots, their homes,
their pictures, their furniture, what immense sums they had devoured!
what expectations from strangers of condition! what exactions!
How shall the youth make his father comprehend that he was cheated
at Damascus by one of the best men in the world; that he had
lent a part of his substance to a friend at Nineveh, who had fled off
with it to the Ganges; that a whore of Babylon had swallowed his
best pearl, and anointed the whole city with his balm of Gilead; that
he had been sold by a man of honour for twenty shekels of silver to
a worker in graven images; that the images he had purchased produced
him nothing, that they could not be transported across the
wilderness, and had been burnt with fire at Shusan; that the apes
and peacocks which he had sent for from Tharsis lay dead upon his
hands; that the mummies had not been dead long enough which he
had brought from Egypt; that all had gone wrong from the day he
forsook his father's house?"

All this, it must be admitted, is pretty lively for a sermon. But hear
the reverend gentleman once more, in the same discourse, and observe
the characteristic coolness with which he touches, only to drop, what
may be called the "professional" moral of the parable, and glides
off into a train of interesting, but thoroughly mundane, reflections,
suggested--or rather, supposed in courtesy to have been suggested--by
the text. "I know not," he says, "whether it would be a subject
of much edification to convince you here that our Saviour, by the
Prodigal Son, particularly pointed out those who were sinners of the
Gentiles, and were recovered by divine grace to repentance; and that
by the elder brot