Our Lord subsequently takes occasion to exalt the blessing of forgiveness and to teach that overmuch must not be expected or demanded from men. He gives the parables of the Prodigal Son and of the unjust Steward, of which last I shall speak in the next chapter. Peter saw that when our Lord said, “Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching,” He had His eye upon the future rulers of His community. “And Peter said, Lord, speakest thou this parable unto us, or even unto all? And the Lord said, Who then is the faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall set over his household, to give them their portion of food in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Of a truth I say unto you, that he will set him over all that he hath. But if that servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the men-servants and the maidservants, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken; the lord of that servant shall come in a day when he expecteth not, and in an hour when he knoweth not, and shall cut him asunder, and appoint his portion with the unfaithful.”(277) There is a hint of possible priestly oppression in the mention of the ill-treatment of inferiors by those upper servants, who, forgetting that their master might at any moment return, deal with the possessions as their own. I said a little while ago that in this matter the “Sons of thunder” justified their name. If we had not this passage, critics would wonder how such a surname could have been chosen; St John, it is true, forbade the working of cures by one who “followed not with them,” still we regard him as the Apostle of Love, and in the Gospels we hear nothing of St James. This coincidence, though in a small matter, is worth noting. This incident preserved by St Luke shews that there was at the bottom of the natures of these two, loving though they were, a fund of impetuousness and wrath, and that they could break out into a storm of indignation, bearing out the name imposed. It is worth mentioning that this falls in with what we read in the Acts, viz. that when “Herod the king put forth his hands to afflict certain of the church” the first on whom he seized was “James the brother of John;”(278) this shews that James was a vehement, energetic character standing in the front, who to the political authorities was a marked man. For this was a political execution; if the priests had dealt with him for blasphemy he would have been stoned, not “slain with the sword.” Our Lord gathered round Him men of very various temperaments; it is not only one type of man, but those of all types, the impetuous as well as the gentle, for whom Christ finds place in the realm of action.