ished in the judgment seat of the human
conscience; and God never beats down with the bare assertion of an
irresistible Sovereignty the soul that is perplexed about the equity of
His ways. It is equity, pure, celestial equity, which reveals itself to
those who will search for it in this parable; equity to the poor souls
who had been standing all the day idle in the market-place, because no
man had called them to the vineyard; equity to the labourers who had
borne the burden and heat of the day, and had made the dignity and
culture of the Lord's husbandmen their own. It is an equity which
invites the closest criticism from those who will search it thoroughly,
and which reveals to the searchers deep vital truths about man and about
God.

"I will give unto this last, even as unto thee." It is a startling
sentence. This man had been labouring in the vineyard under the burning
heat, through the blazing noon; he had borne and bent under the whole
burden of the work: while this one had been brought in at the eleventh
hour, in the cool evenfall, and by a few minutes of light sweet labour
he had won the equivalent prize. There is something startling here, and
men have felt it; and they have striven in manifold and curious ways to
square the method of the Master with their fundamental notions of the
righteousness of God. There are theologians who feel no need to square
it. According to a theology which has exercised a wide-spread and malign
influence in the past, Sovereignty answers amply every difficulty, and
treats our ideas of equity as a high impertinence, when they claim to
weigh the ways of God. If it pleases God to make some men to be saved
and other men to be damned, who shall question His rights? and if He is
glorified equally by the salvation of the chosen and the damnation of
the reprobate, who dares complain, or to what court can we carry the
appeal? There are theologians who would have us rest calmly on the
conviction that a sovereign and inscrutable will is ruling, and trouble
ourselves in no wise about the equity of the decrees. But one cannot but
reflect that this composed contentment with the doctrine of reprobation
is mainly conspicuous in those who feel themselves safe from its
trenchant stroke. With the exception of Lord Byron--to whose malign and
scornful tone we believe that this was the real key--we hardly discover
the disciples of the doctrine among those who believe that they are
reprobate; and in the cas