e, both of them, to management of
riches. The practical order given to the only seeker of advice, of
whom it is recorded that Christ "loved him," is briefly about his
property. "Sell that thou hast."

And the arbitrament of the day of the Last Judgment is made to rest
wholly, neither on belief in God, nor in any spiritual virtue in man,
nor on freedom from stress of stormy crime, but on this only, "I was
an hungered and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me; sick, and
ye came unto me."

175. Well, then, the first thing I want you to notice in the parable
of the Prodigal Son (and the last thing which people usually _do_
notice in it), is--that it is about a Prodigal! He begins by asking
for his share of his father's goods; he gets it, carries it off, and
wastes it. It is true that he wastes it in riotous living, but you are
not asked to notice in what kind of riot; he spends it with
harlots--but it is not the harlotry which his elder brother accuses
him of mainly, but of having devoured his father's living. Nay, it is
not the sensual life which he accuses himself of--or which the manner
of his punishment accuses him of. But the _wasteful_ life. It is not
said that he had become debauched in soul, or diseased in body, by his
vice; but that at last he would fain have filled his belly with husks,
and could not. It is not said that he was struck with remorse for the
consequences of his evil passions, but only that he remembered there
was bread enough and to spare, even for the servants, at home.

Now, my friend, do not think I want to extenuate sins of passion
(though, in very truth, the sin of Magdalene is a light one compared
to that of Judas); but observe, sins of passion, if of _real_ passion,
are often the errors and backfalls of noble souls; but prodigality is
mere and pure selfishness, and essentially the sin of an ignoble or
undeveloped creature; and I would rather, ten times rather, hear of a
youth that (certain degrees of temptation and conditions of resistance
being understood) he had fallen into any sin you chose to name, of all
the mortal ones, than that he was in the habit of running bills which
he could not pay.

Farther, though I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of
the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it
regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers
the neglect of children, both these head and chief crimes, and all
others, are root