That the cruel severity of the servile creditor should touch the hearts of his fellow-servants with sorrow is no matter of wonder. Stern and inexorable as were the laws of the age, no man without grief or anger could witness such inhumanity. In our day the case would have convoked an indignation meeting, if not a mob; with denunciatory resolutions, if not the prompt application of the code of Judge Lynch. The better method, however, is chosen; and the sad matter is prudently reported to the king. The king recalls the late object of his amazing clemency, in a dignified but very pointed speech remonstrates with him, and then delivers him to the tormentors till he shall pay the last farthing of the debt once forgiven. A righteous but terrible punishment! A state criminal, he goes to the public prison, the royal dungeons--perhaps, like the Mammertine and Tullian at Rome, three stories under ground. The debtor's prison, however, was ordinarily in the house of the creditor--often in his cellar; where the prisoner was kept in chains, subject to the creditor's will, to be tortured or slain as he chose. Slaves were there on purpose to torment him, and make his life as wretched as possible. They scourged him, beat him with rods, racked him with engines, pulled out his teeth, plucked out his nails, burned out his eyes, cut off his nose and ears, tore and mangled his flesh with hooks and pincers--to make him disclose his hidden treasures, to induce his friends to pay his debt for him, or simply to gratify a diabolical spirit of revenge. That all this has its counterpart in God's retribution upon the implacable, though almost too terrible for our faith, is the plain teaching of the parable. Men and angels rise up in remonstrance with Heaven against the unforgiving. And when the divine Heart-searcher calls him to judgment, what answer can he make to the dread animadversions of the angry king? Dare he now pray, as he often did on earth, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors!" Will he lift up his voice and sing, as he used to do in the church, "That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me!" It was a mockery then; he will not repeat it now. Speechless as the unrobed intruder at the marriage feast, he stands trembling before his Judge. Angels of justice, take him away! Let us not see his anguish, nor hear his lamentation! Showing no mercy, he has lost all claim upon mercy. Conscience his eternal tormentor, any spot in the universe may be his dungeon of despair. Ask him now the question he has often asked with a sneer--"Is there a hell, and where is it?" He lays his hand upon his heart and answers--"There is, and it is here!" Angels of justice, take him away! "So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses." [1] Preached in St. John's, Buffalo, N.Y., 1869. [2] Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity. XVII. CHRIST WITH HIS MINISTERS.[1]