heat of the day.

II. The reason of the idleness of the husbandmen who at the eleventh
hour were called to the work.

III. The Lord's justification of His ways.

I. The work of the vineyard.

I believe that there is nothing very definite in detail here set before
our minds, and that we shall get into dire confusion if we inquire about
the class or classes of members of the Church which may be signified by
the husbandmen. There is no question of classes of Christian labourers,
or kinds of Christian work, in the narrative. It is God's work, and
these are God's workmen in the field of His visible Church, in the
broadest sense which those words may bear. The vineyard is the visible
field of God's tillage. The vast invisible field we are not called to
consider; except to assure ourselves that one grand principle rules,
explains, and justifies God's methods with the whole. The visible field,
up to the day of Pentecost, was the Jewish commonwealth, which was about
to expand into the Christian commonwealth when our Lord delivered the
discourses which contain our text. In the Jewish commonwealth, not
priest and prophet only, but every child of Abraham was a called
husbandman; just as every Christian disciple, as much as apostle,
bishop, evangelist, or deacon, is a called labourer in the wider
vineyard of the Christian Church. The broad feature of the work of the
vineyard is, that it is man's true, noble, God-ordained work.

It is the work for which all his organs and powers were fashioned, and
in which his whole being was made to rejoice. Why were these men
standing in the market-place? What took them there? Why were they not
lounging idly about the fields, or sleeping at home? Clearly because
some divine instinct within them moved them thither, that they might be
in the way of being hired for a day's toil. A divine instinct, I say. He
little understands humanity, who imagines that the great bread and
cheese question is at the bottom of even a tithe of the daily labour of
mankind. It would be hard to find a man who just works enough to provide
the bread and cheese and beer which he needs to sustain his animal
nature, and then folds his arms and takes his ease until new hunger
compels new toil. There are such men about the world, no doubt; but it
is a hard matter to find them. And when they are found, men attach to
such a bestial idea of life the epithet "unmanly" with a bitter
emphasis, which reveals how deeply there is inw