which the
elder brother gives no sign. The boy loves his father, otherwise he
would not have turned to him in his anguish of distress. The elder
brother's attitude to his father is arrogant and harsh; the younger
brother's is humble and tender. Lastly the father himself is revealed
as the embodiment of love. He asks no questions, utters no reproaches,
imposes no conditions; he simply takes his son back, in the rush of his
affection cutting short the boy's pitiful confession, and calling for
shoes and new robes and festal music, as though his son had returned in
dignity and triumph. In the last scene of all, implied rather than
described, the restored prodigal sits at the feast, leaning on his
father's bosom, but the respectable son stands without in a darkness of
his own creation--the darkness which a harsh spirit and an unlovely
temper never fail to create in men of his unhappy temperament.

It is a very strange story, if we come to think of it; almost an
immoral story, as no doubt it was considered by the Pharisees, and
persons of their cold and mechanical type of virtue. But Jesus
anticipates their criticism with one of the most startling statements
that ever fell from inspired lips, "There is more joy in heaven among
the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and
nine righteous persons who need no repentance." Heaven approves the
story, if they do not. Thus God Himself would act, for God is love.
Thus love must needs act, if it be the kind of love that "suffereth
long and is kind, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own,
is not provoked, taketh not account of evil, beareth all things,
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." And if
we ask what becomes of justice, Jesus assures us that love is the only
real justice. For the main object of justice is not punishment but
reclamation. A truly enlightened justice is less concerned with the
punishment of wrong than its reparation.

The gravest question in the case of this unhappy boy is not what he has
made of himself by sin and folly, but what can yet be made of him by
wise and tender treatment. Had the father coldly dismissed the
prodigal with some bitter verdict on his past folly, he himself would
have been unjust to the boy's possibilities, and thus would have sinned
against his son with a sin much less capable of excuse than the son's
sin against him. The worst sinner in the story is not the son w