To the same period belong other parables that contain larger ideas than the Jewish Messiah of the first generation could entertain. Such are the story of the net cast into the sea and gathering in of every kind, that is, "Greeks and Romans, barbarians, Scythians, bond and free," not Hebrews only,--the miscellaneous haul being impartially examined--sweetness of quality, not forms of scale being made the condition of acceptance;--the story of the good Samaritan, designed to place people reckoned idolators and miscreants on a higher spiritual level than anointed priests of whatever order, who postponed mercy to sacrifice. Could the Jewish Messiah attribute to Samaritans a grace that was the highest adornment of faithful Jews? The story of the prodigal son belongs to the same category. The elder brother, who has always been at home, dutiful but ungracious niggardly and covetous, is the Jew who has never left the homestead of faith, but has stayed there, confidently expecting the Messianic inheritance as the reward of his conventional orthodoxy. The younger brother is the Gentile, the infidel, the pagan apostate, who throws off the parental authority and reduces himself to spiritual beggary. He spends all; he contents himself with refuse; is more heathenish than the heathen themselves; swinish in his habits. Yet this spiritual reprobate, by his unseemly behavior, forfeits no privilege. The "mansion" of the Father's house is still open to him when he shall choose to return. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob waits and watches for the penitent; sees him a great way off; runs to meet him; throws his arms about his neck; reinstates him in his place; celebrates his arrival by feasting, and puts him above the elder brother who had been working in the field while the prodigal had been rioting in the city. Such a lesson from the lips of the Jewish Messiah would have been astonishing indeed. It would have gone far towards overturning his claim. We know that some years later the lesson was inculcated as a cardinal doctrine by Paul and regarded as a heresy by the Christ's personal disciples, and it is in accordance with literary laws to refer to this later period the ideas that were native to it.