their
faithful countrymen. In his parable of the Supper, describing how
a king, on occasion of the marriage of his son, made a feast and
sent out generous invitations to it, Jesus works up this imagery
still more elaborately. What did he really mean to teach by it? Is
it not clearly apparent from the whole context that he intended it
as an illustration of the fact that the Jews, to whom he first
announced his gospel, and offered all its privileges, having
rejected it, its blessings would be freely thrown open to the
Gentiles, and that they would crowd in to occupy the place of joy
and honor, which the chosen people of Jehovah had refused to
accept? It is by a pure effect of fancy and doctrinal bias that
the parable has been perverted into a description of the Last
Judgment. The reference plainly indicates admission to or
exclusion from the privileges of the new dispensation, a matter of
personal experience in the heart of the disciple and in the
society of the church on this earth. The wedding garment, without
which no one can come to the royal table, is a holy, humble, and
loving character. In consequence of his destitution of this,
Judas, although seated at the table, with the most honored guests,
in the very presence of his Lord, was proved to have no right
there, and was thrust into the outer darkness. His bad spirit, his
inability to appreciate and enjoy the pure truths of the kingdom,
constituted his expulsion. That such was the idea in the mind of
Jesus, something to be experienced personally and spiritually in
the present, and not something to be shown collectively and
materially at the end of the world, appears from the great number
of different forms in which he reiterates his doctrine. Had he
meant to teach literally that he was to come in person at the last
day, and sit in judgment on all men, would he not have had a
distinct conception of the method, and have always drawn one and
the same consistent picture of it? But if he meant to teach that
all who were fitted by their spirit, character and conduct to
assimilate the living substance of his kingdom were thereby made
members of it, while all others were, by their own intrinsic
unfitness, excluded, then it was perfectly natural that his
fertile mind would on a hundred different occasions convey this
one truth in a hundred different figures of speech. That in which
the images all differ is unessential: that in which they all agree
must be the essential th