into a greenhouse to be forwarded.
Diversity of treatment, even when it amounts to opposition of treatment,
comes from the same single purpose. And so here the spur is applied,
whilst in the former incident it was the rein that was needed.

I. Note, then, first of all, this apparently most laudable and
reasonable request.

'Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.' Nature says 'Go,' and
religion enjoins it, and everything seems to say that it is the right
thing for a man to do. The man was perfectly sincere in his petition,
and perfectly sincere in the implied promise that, as soon as the
funeral was over, he would come back. He meant it, out and out. If he
had not, he would have received different treatment; and if he had not,
he would have ceased to be the valuable example and lesson that he is to
us. So we have here a disciple quite sincere, who believes himself to
have already obeyed in spirit and only to be hindered from obeying in
outward act by an imperative duty that even a barbarian would know to be
imperative.

And yet Jesus Christ read him better than he read himself; and by His
answer lets us see that the tone of mind into which we are all tempted
to drop, and which is the characteristic natural tendency of some of us,
that of being hindered from doing the plain thing that lies before us,
because something else crops up, which we also think is imperative upon
us, is full of danger, and may be the cover of a great deal of
self-deception; and, at any rate, is not in consonance with Christ's
supreme and pressing and immediate claims.

The temper which says, 'Suffer me first to go and bury my father,' is
full of danger. One never knows but that, after he has got his father
buried, there will be something else turning up equally important.
There was the will to be read afterwards, and if he was, as probably he
was, the eldest son, he would most likely be the executor. There would
be all sorts of affairs to settle up before he might feel that it was
his duty to leave everything and follow the Master.

And so it always is. 'Suffer me _first_, and when we get to the top of
that hill, there is another one beyond. And so we go on from step to
step, getting ready to do the duties that we know are most imperative
upon us, by sweeping preliminaries out of the way, and so we go on until
our dying day, when somebody else buries us. Like some backwoodsman in
the American forests who should say to himself, 'Now,