If the Apostles, feeling that they formed the personal staff of a King endowed with all power from on high, had _not_ been lifted up and shewn some touch of imperious and exclusive spirit, they must indeed have been more or less than men. That symptoms of such a spirit had appeared and caused our Lord concern may be gathered, not only from the positive instances, such as, the forbidding one who followed not with them to cast out devils in the Lord’s name; the demand to be allowed to call down fire from heaven; and the rebuking of those who brought to Christ “their babes that He might touch them;” but, even more certainly, from the repeated animadversions, in the later teaching of our Lord, on personal ambition and the over-straining of authority. Moderation, as to what may be expected from human nature, though not enforced by positive injunctions, is commended to us, after our Lord’s way, by a gentle influence everywhere present, and by a current in the teaching setting steadily towards the point in view. Our Lord had been speaking to the people in a series of parables—the lost sheep, the lost piece of silver, the Prodigal Son,—all set in one key, all bearing on the “joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth,”(295) and He then turned to the disciples, with, as I believe, the same thought still uppermost in His mind, and urges them as the “pastors and masters” of the future, not, by insisting on the utmost, to make reformation too hard. The parable of the unjust Steward was addressed, we are told, to the disciples, and as the disciples had no worldly goods at all, it cannot be the main drift of the parable, as has been sometimes maintained, to inculcate Christian prudence in the use of these. I find in this parable a closing comment in a very terse form; this leads me to suspect that the key to the main purport lies therein. The verse is this, “For the sons of this world are for their own generation wiser than the sons of the light.”(296) The drift of the parable is, indeed, to teach a kind of prudence, but not one in which _money_ is concerned. The administration of property is only the vehicle in which the lesson is conveyed. What I take to be inculcated here is true Christian wisdom as to the exercise of authority—spiritual authority above all. The moral that I discern is this; that the Apostles and their successors may do more good by shewing a little indulgence—by conceding something to weak human nature, not enforcing Jewish formalities, and not insisting too inflexibly upon every point which they think may touch the honour or the privileges of Christ’s Church—than by adhering to the strictest regard for observances, and imposing rules for sanctity of thought and conduct with which only a chosen few would be able to comply. How many have been repelled from religion by the rigour, which Priests or Puritans fancied themselves under compulsion to employ, and how has this fretful anxiety for discipline