Parable of the unjust Steward. St Luke xv., xvi. More and more, as our Lord’s work draws near the close, do we notice that His eye, somewhat diverted from what is passing about Him, is directed to a condition of things foreseen “being yet far off.” It is to provide for this that He is ever taking thought and imparting lessons; and if no state of things had come about in which these lessons might find a field of exercise, we should be at a loss to understand what they meant or why they were there. The explanation is found in the early history of the Church of Christ. In the parables and discourses of the later ministry there is one image to which our Lord again and again recurs. It is that of men labouring in a Master’s service, and most commonly in that of a Master who is away from home and may at any time come back. It may be that the Master is a great King, in which case the labourers are his ministers, and frequently there is mention made of diversity of office and of some who exercised authority over “men-servants and maid-servants.” In these cases we frequently find, either in the parable itself or in the “hard saying” which commonly closes it, an allusion to some special danger attaching to delegated power. One such moral danger there is besetting those entrusted with any charge, and above all with a spiritual charge, which is very insidious, and more easily corrected by a lesson given in a story than by direct reproof; it is that of the severity and rigour which comes of over-scrupulosity and over-zeal. The trustee of a property will sometimes feel morally or legally bound to exact the very uttermost, and to use a hardness which he would never think of shewing in his own affairs; and by habitually constraining himself to use hardness he may become actually hard of nature himself. When we come to matters spiritual and ecclesiastical all this is true in an intensified degree. The more exalted the priest’s notion of his function and the more genuine his appreciation of the Majesty of God, the more impossible it seems to him to abate one iota of God’s claims. Things sacred, he has been taught to think, differ in kind from things secular, and demand rules of management of their own. He holds it unlawful to make composition with offenders against God; he is the appointed upholder of the rights and dignities of the Almighty and he dares not bate a hair. Honestly awe-stricken at the tremendous responsibility, he flies where he can to a written Law, and, pointing to the letter, he takes refuge in the sacerdotal “non possumus” as an answer to every extenuating plea. I believe that when our Lord delivered the parable of the unjust Steward, He had in view this particular evil which is all the more dangerous because it wears the garb of “jealousy for the Lord God.”