“And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and said unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us.” The true key to the parable lies here. There are many other answers conceivable. They might have said, Because we like to lounge and loaf, work is irksome; or, Because we are over-tired with yesterday’s toil; or, Because the pay does not suit us, we are out on strike. Imagine that any one of these answers had been given; the whole character of the parable would have been changed, and the equity of the ways of God would then have been dark, dark indeed. But no. The men were willing to work; they were waiting to be hired; they made no bargain about their pay. “Go ye into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive,” the Master said; and they went, content to leave their wage to His justice. The men evidently cared more about the work than the pay. In truth the idlers were to be pitied. The Master pitied them, and He gave to their will the wage which lack of opportunity had forbidden them to earn before. And this opens up some serious thoughts about the pagan world, and its relation to the kingdom of God. There is a profound, but not an impenetrable mystery hidden in the words, “the fulness of the time.” Through long ages the pagan world was left groping in the darkness, “_feeling after God if haply it might find Him_,” and moaning as it grasped at phantoms in the gloom, and saw them slip from its empty hand. Looking at the anguish and misery of the world at this moment, one is constrained to confess that the Lord of the world is One who can bring Himself to look upon, and to bear the responsibility of ruling over, a terrible amount of pain. But what shall we say of the long ages of pagan darkness, when men were not _feeling_ after God only, but crying for Him, shrieking to Him, were maiming their quivering flesh and torturing their shuddering hearts, because the void only echoed back their own voices and none could tell them the Divine Name. The time is gone by when it was possible to look upon the history of heathendom as the history of one long stern effort to break away from God, to blot out His name from the universe, and to tear every trace of His image out of the life of the human world. It is now well understood that the deepest thing in heathen life and heathen literature was ever the cry after the living God, and the effort to find Him; the grandest passages in the religious records of heathendom are the words in which the founders of the great pagan systems proclaimed what they believed had been made known to them of His Being and His Will; and the gladdest, in truth the only joyous, passages in pagan history, are the records of the generations in which men persuaded themselves that God had at length visited His world. Soon the gladness vanished, overborne by wrong and lust. But while it lasted it made the solitary gleam of brightness which