This immense disproportion between the work and its reward, and the consequent grace-character of the latter, is driven home with a purposely paradoxical, provocative pointedness, in the two Parables of the Wedding Garment and of the Equal Payment of the Unequal Labourers, both of which are in St. Matthew alone. The former concerns the soul’s call to the kingdom, and that soul’s response. The King here, after having formally invited a certain select number of previously warned relatives and nobles, who all, as such, had a _claim_ upon him, Matt, xxii, 3, sends out invitations with absolute indiscrimination,--to men with no claims or with less than none; to “bad” as well as “good.” And it is the King, again, who gratuitously supplies them each with the appropriate white wedding-feast garment. He has thus a double right to expect all his guests to be thus clothed, and to punish instantly, not the mere negligence, but the active rejection implied on the part of the man clothed in his ordinary clothing (vv. 11, 12). Both call and investiture have been here throughout pure graces, which rendered possible, and which invited but did not force, an acceptance.[149] The second Parable describes the “Householder” who hired labourers for his vineyard at the first, third, sixth, ninth, and even eleventh hour,--each and all of them for a penny a day; who actually pays out to them, at the end of the day, this one identical pay; and who, to the labourer of the first shift who complains, “These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day,” declares, “Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take thine own and go thy way: I will give to this last even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil (art thou envious) because I am good” (because I choose to be bountiful)? Matt. xx, 1-15. Here again the overflowing generosity of God’s grace is brought home to us, as operating according to other standards than those of ordinary daily life: nor is this operation unjust, for the Householder paid their due to the first set of workers, whilst rewarding, far above their worth, those poor labourers of the last hour. But, as Jülicher well points out, “we should not pedantically insist upon finding here a doctrine of the strict equality of souls in the Beyond--a doctrine contradicted by other declarations of Jesus. Only the _claim_ of single groups of souls to preferential treatment is combated here …: a certain fundamental religious disposition is to be awakened.” And, as Bugge rightly notes, “the great supreme conception which lies at the bottom of the parable has, parablewise, remained here unnamed: Paul has found the expressive term for it,--‘Grace.’”[150]