A king one day wanted a reckoning with his servants and one by one he called them before him. Among the first was one who owed him ten thousand talents, but as he had not anything to pay this, the king commanded that he should be sold and his wife and his children and all that he had, in payment of a part of the debt. The servant in despair threw himself at the feet of the king. He seemed a mere bundle of garments crying out sobs and promises. “Have patience with me, wait a little longer and I will pay you all, but do not have my wife and my children separated from me, sent away like cattle, no one knows where.” The king was moved with compassion—he also had little children—and he sent him away free and forgave him that great debt. The servant went out and seemed another man; but his heart, even after so much mercy shown to him, was the same as before. And he met one of his fellow-servants who owed him a hundred pence, a small thing compared with ten thousand talents, and he sprang on him and took him by the throat. “Pay me what thou owest and at once, or I will have thee bound by the guards.” The unlucky man assaulted in this way did what his persecutor had done a little while before in the presence of the king. He fell down at his feet and besought him and wept and swore that he would pay him in a few days and kissed the hem of his garment, and recalled to him their old comradeship and begged him to wait in the name of the children who were waiting for him in his home. But the oaf, who was a servant and not a king, had no compassion. He took his debtor by the arm and had him cast into prison. The news spread abroad among the other servants of the palace. They were full of compassion, and it came quickly to the ears of the king, who called that pitiless man and delivered him to the tormentors: “I forgave you that great debt, shouldst thou not have had compassion on thy brother, for his debt was so much smaller? I had pity on thee, oughtest thou not to have had pity on him?” Sinners when they recognize the evil which is in their hearts and abjure it with true humility are nearer to the Kingdom than pious men who daub themselves with the praise of their own piety. Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, the other a Publican. The Pharisee, with his phylacteries hanging upon his forehead and on his left arm, with the long, glittering fringes on his cloak, erect like a man who feels himself in his own house, prayed thus: “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this Publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.” But the Publican did not have the courage even to lift his eyes and seemed ashamed to appear before his Lord. He sighed and smote on his breast and said only these words: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”