text:
A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 7

 * He went on to tell the people this parable: 'A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed. He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out.
 * 'Then the owner of the vineyard said, "What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him."
 * 'But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. “This is the heir," they said. “Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours." So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
 * 'What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.’ When the people heard this, they said, “May this, never be!" Jesus looked directly at them and asked, 'Then what is the meaning of that which is written:
 * '"The stone the builders rejected
 * has become the capstone"?
 * Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.'
 * The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people.
 * Luke 20:9-19
 * The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people.
 * Luke 20:9-19

Most people find Mondays depressing. In fact, a team of European doctors and psychiatrists recently completed a study on the subject. They found that there is a higher chance of having a heart attack on Monday than on any other day of the week. That is not merely the result of overindulgence during the weekend, for the incidence of every other kind of stress-related illness and condition is increased on Mondays too. Your blood pressure is elevated on Mondays, meaning that you have a higher risk of a stroke. Your stomach acidity will be higher, which means that you face a higher risk of having an ulcer. You will be glad to know, also, that you are twice as likely to commit suicide on a Monday as on any other day.

That Monday-morning feeling is no myth, but a medical fact. There can be only one explanation: a great many of us find the very idea of work depressing. It is easy to think that the reason for this is the pressure we are put under at work, the expectation to perform. For some high-flyers, I suppose, that is a contributory factor. It is not easy to keep your balance when you are surrounded by a workaholic culture. I remember a friend of mine telling me that he had only ever met three people who were absolutely obsessed with work. Unfortunately they happened to be the other three men in his office!

The Monday-morning syndrome, interestingly, is even more evident in the lives of low-flyers than it is in the lives of high-flyers. People with mundane, undemanding jobs display the same stress symptoms as people who have far more demanding occupations. Pressure therefore cannot be the whole story. Is the reason for that Monday morning feeling, then, rather that our personal relationships at work generate anxiety? Maybe it's the cattiness among the girls in the typing-pool, or competitiveness among the men in the sales team. Could it be physical working conditions that are to blame? Would we be less vulnerable to stress if relaxing music was piped across the factory floor, or if the management invested in more comfortable office furniture?

There's no denying that social and environmental factors make a big difference to job satisfaction. Interestingly again, however, research shows that negative Monday morning feelings are not necessarily reduced in companies which try very hard to create a pleasant working atmosphere. No, there's no escaping the conclusion of such findings, I'm afraid. No matter how good the job, how considerate your employer, how nice the people you work with, for a great many of us it is the very idea of work that is unpalatable. We do not want to do it. The thought of having to do it, which Monday morning forces upon us, is quite enough to plunge us into an emotional abyss.

Is our problem, then, mere laziness? Perhaps we are all congenitally idle. But surely the reason cannot be that simple either. Many studies have shown that redundancy and retirement are stress-inducing too, sometimes far more stress-inducing than the job we used to do. No doubt there are a few idle jacks in this world whose idea of bliss is a life of uninterrupted leisure, but actually the vast majority of us need work in order to feel fulfilled. In his book Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome writes, 'I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.' He was being deliberately humorous, but there is a kind of deeper truth hidden in his wit. It is impossible, actually, to enjoy idleness unless you know there is work you could be doing. To be totally idle is not a recipe for bliss at all, but for despair. If you don't believe me, you ask the men and women in the Job Centre queue. That Monday-morning feeling does not reflect laziness.

I suggest it is rather hopelessness, a hopelessness that has plenty to do but no satisfying reason for doing it. It is not possible to live a meaningful human life unless you believe something about the future. Alexander Pope was getting at it in his famous lines:

 * Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
 * Man never Is, but always To be blest.

To try to live without hope is like trying to play football without goalposts. You may dribble the ball with great skill, execute some fine passes, even enjoy the game to an extent. But what's the point of it all? Unless there's some purpose, some objective, some goal for human existence, the whole show is a monstrous farce. Stephen Crane's poem in The Black Riders expresses this point well:

 * I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
 * Round and round they sped.
 * I was disturbed at this;
 * I accosted the man.
 * 'It is futile,' I said, 'You can never—'
 * 'You lie,' he cried,
 * And ran on.

That surely is the absurdity of much which we today so optimistically call 'progress'. You can talk about advancing only when you have a clear idea of where you are supposed to be going.

The dilemma of modem secular men and women is that we no longer possess such a sense of direction. It is like the counsel of despair adopted by the British government when it ruled Ireland during the potato blight. In order to sustain the morale of the people by providing employment, the British ordered the construction of unnecessary roads, roads that went nowhere.

Humanity at the end of the twentieth century is beginning to wonder if we haven't been unwittingly committing our energies to such a pointless enterprise for years. Woody Allen truthfully quipped, 'The future isn't what it used to be.' Optimism about the destiny of the human race has all but collapsed today. True, you still hear a few people mouthing the old utopian dreams about a future technological paradise on earth, but those who know most are not so stupid any longer. Such dreams lie buried under the carnage of two world wars and the Hiroshima cloud. Humanism has been discredited, and confidence in a future brought about by human science has died as a result.

Yet we human beings must have hope. We can't live without it. Children count the days till Christmas. Teenagers look forward to the next date with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Grown-ups revel in their holiday brochures. We have to have hope. Mere survival isn't enough for us. If we are going to endure the tedium and the fatigue of everyday life, we must have light on the horizon to steer by. A person without anything to look forward to is a person of utter despair.

Tony Hancock was a very fine comedian in the 1950s and 1960s. In his last TV monologue in 1964 he performed a piece which proved ironic.

 * What have you achieved? What have you achieved? You lost your chance, me old son.
 * You contributed absolutely nothing to this life.
 * A waste of time you being here at all. No place for you in Westminster Abbey. The best you can expect is a few daffodils in a jam jar and a black stone bearing the legend, 'He came, and he went.' And in between? Nothing. Nobody will even notice you're not here. After about a year somebody might say down the pub, 'Where's old Hancock? I haven't seen him around lately.'
 * 'Oh, he's dead, you know.'
 * 'Is he?'
 * A right raison d'être, that is.

Poignantly, a couple of years after that final TV show, Tony Hancock himself committed suicide. The despair that he was articulating was evidently too close to the truth for comfort. Hope springs eternal? No, Mr Pope, I'm afraid it doesn't always. Sometimes hope dries up. When it does, it isn't just hope that's extinguished. A person, bereft of purpose, dies too. 'I have nothing to live for,' says the suicide note. Dante, in his The Divine Comedy, makes the inscription over the gate of hell read, 'All hope abandon, you who enter here!' There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so appalling and dreadful to the human spirit as to be irremediably hopeless.

What are you looking forward to? What is the point of your life? A lot of us manage to put on a façade of ambition and direction in life. We tell people we're happy and well adjusted, and that we know where we are going. But is it not the truth that the Monday-morning feeling gets us too? And if we really plumb those inner depths of personal honesty, the reason it gets us is that there is a vacuum inside us. We do not know where we are going. We do not have anything important or big enough to live for, nothing bigger than the next party, the next disco, or the next date.

In the 1960s and 1970s, quite a lot of young people dropped out of careers and study, part in protest, and part in despair at this sense of hopelessness. The rat-race, they said, was an exercise in futility. The 1980s witnessed a revived commitment to competing in the rat-race. But the fundamental question those earlier drop-outs asked was never really answered. What is the point of slogging your guts out for forty-two and a half hours a week, forty-nine weeks a year? Whether the job is demanding or boring, whether the atmosphere is friendly or hostile, whether the salary is high or low, surely the truth is, as Tony Hancock so sadly said, that it is all a monumental waste of time. Shakespeare expressed it eloquently when he said:

 * Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
 * That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
 * And then is heard no more; it is a tale
 * Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
 * Signifying nothing.

The operative word is that final 'nothing'. The Monday-morning feeling is the stress, anxiety, and depression we feel when we are confronted with that nothingness. It is not the prospect of hard labour that moves us to bury our heads under the bedclothes, and to roll ourselves up into a secure foetal position, praying for the night to return. Rather, it is the prospect of futility. And if that analysis is correct, there is only one way to escape those Monday-morning blues. That is to discover some meaning to life. If we can find some context of hope, then not only our daily work, but every aspect of our human existence, can find meaning and direction.

It is this quest which makes the parable of the ten minas so interesting and important. In it Jesus provides us with that vital future perspective which we need to give our work significance. His tale tells us that history is going somewhere; you and I are going somewhere. Life is not just a labyrinth without an exit. There is a goal to existence. And because there is, Monday morning need never depress us again. There is something worth living for, and therefore something worth working for.

Luke sets the scene for us in the earlier part of chapter 19. Jesus tells the parable 'because he was near Jerusalem and the people thought that the kingdom of God was going to appear at once' (verse 11).

Jesus had been travelling slowly and deliberately towards the capital city of Jerusalem for some months. Luke structures the whole of his gospel from 9:51 onwards around that journey. Among Jesus' companions there have been signs of escalating anticipation. They all sense that Jesus' life is moving towards a crisis. Everyone feels that when they get to Jerusalem something absolutely dramatic is going to happen. Here in Luke 19, they have reached Jericho, less than 20 miles from the capital, and it is clear that by now the atmosphere of expectancy has intensified to fever pitch. The people thought the kingdom of God was going to appear at any moment.

The prophets in the Old Testament had told the Jewish people about this 'kingdom' to come. It would mean that the world would be ruled not simply by God's sovereign providence the way it is now. In the kingdom of God, the world would be ruled by God's direct, theocratic command through his chosen Messiah. Some of Jesus' followers, however, were convinced that he was the Messiah. 'You've seen what miraculous signs he's been doing,' they whispered to one another. 'It can only be a few days now before he sets up the kingdom of God we've all been waiting for. I can't wait to see the look on the faces of those Roman tyrants, can you? It's nearly here!'

To give him his due, Jesus had tried on a number of occasions to put an end to such hysteria. Repeatedly he had warned his disciples that it was death that awaited him in Jerusalem, not political triumph. In fact, he had said as much just before they arrived in Jericho. But the disciples, it seems, couldn't take it in. They didn't want to accept such uncongenial words. So they did nothing to quench the rising tide of popular euphoria.

Jesus, sensing that things were getting a bit out of control, decided that he must take some action. As so often in previous situations, what he did was to tell a story, one of his matchless 'Stealth bomber' parables. In the past, he has launched these secret weapons of his in order to explode the complacency and the self-righteousness of the religious Establishment. This time, however, the target audience is different. This tale belongs to a family of parables which Jesus told, not with the purpose of challenging the Pharisees and the scribes, but rather with the purpose of instructing his own followers about the nature of the kingdom of God. As we said in chapter 1, the Jews of Jesus' day expected the kingdom of God to come in a single shattering moment, like a thunderbolt from heaven. Jesus, in his parables of the kingdom, makes it clear that God's strategy is actually going to be rather different from that popular expectation. The kingdom of God was going to come in a way unforeseen by the Jewish people: in three phases rather than in a single apocalyptic crisis.

It is this phased strategy that Jesus is hying once again to get across in the opening of this parable.

The point of the metaphor is that Jesus, heir of the world though he is, will not claim the kingdom immediately. He has a long journey to travel before he can enjoy his coronation. He must leave this world altogether. Only on his return will he be publicly enthroned. In the meantime, during the period of his absence, he is leaving those who count themselves as his servants a task.

 * He called ten of his servants and gave them ten minas. 'Put this money to work,' he said, 'until I come back' (Luke 19:13).

If the disciples were expecting victory the moment they set foot in Jerusalem, they would be disappointed, then. Soon after they arrived there, Jesus would be leaving them. But they were not to be disheartened about that. He had a farewell endowment for them, modest by comparison with the vast wealth that he would have at his disposal when he returned in glory, but substantial enough to test the faithfulness of his servants and their sense of responsibility. In the short term, that is what the future holds for them. He is not offering them immediate access to messianic power and glory. What he is offering them is an opportunity for service.

Here then is Jesus' answer to the dreaded Monday morning feeling. Put this money to work until I come back.' This, if you like, is the Bible's work ethic. Notice, it is grounded not in mere moral duty, but in future hope. We are to put his money to work until he comes back. The final phrase is desperately important.

The world is going somewhere, the king is returning. Make the most, then, of the opportunities and the resources you have to invest in his kingdom by working hard for him. That is Jesus' message.

People divide themselves into three broad categories, depending on how they respond to that challenge. At one extreme are those who identify themselves as rebels; his subjects hated him and sent a delegation after him to say, 'We don't want this man to be our king' (Luke 19:14). Jesus' fellow countrymen would relate very easily to this scenario, because just a few years before, after the death of Herod the Great, his son Archelaus went to Rome to ask Augustus Caesar to make him king over Judea. But Herod the Great's dynasty was very unpopular among many of the Jews. The Jews therefore sent a delegation of fifty senior men to oppose the appointment. It may very well be that this rebellion in the story resonated with the Herod affair in the memories of many Jews at that time. Jesus is saying that people would reject God's Messiah too, resenting his interference in their affairs.

Some of them might cloak their rebellion in the guise of doubt or ignorance. But Jesus is adamant that the root of this resistance to his rule is not intellectual but moral. It lies not in the mind, but in the will. 'We don't want this man to be our king.' That's what they would say. Such rebels wave their impudent fists in vain. For as the story recounts, 'He was made king, however, and returned home.' Jesus' point is that nothing can stop his final triumph. Indeed, at the very end of the parable, he tells us what fate befell these rebels as a result of their unwillingness to accept the king: Those enemies of mine who did not want me to be a king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me' (Luke 19:27).

Like me, I expect you find that a very harsh ending, an ending in some ways we would rather Jesus had left out. The fact is, however, that there can be no room in the kingdom of heaven for rebels. It was rebellion against God that ruined this world in the first place. We human beings arrogantly thought that we could defy God's commandment with impunity. And look what a mess we have made of the world as a result!

God is determined that his new world is not going to suffer the same fate. It is going to be populated only by those who acknowledge, desire and appreciate his sovereign rule. The very foundation of that new age to come will be the prayer, 'Your kingdom come, your will be done' (Matthew 6:10). Those who are not willing to pray such a prayer exclude themselves from it. They make it clear that they would not be happy in his kingdom. Why, if God let them in they would ruin it within twenty-four hours! Sure, it is a harsh verdict: 'Bring them here and kill them in front of me.' But by it Jesus conveys the hard truth that if we do not want this king, then we cannot have a role in his kingdom.

A second category of people, at the other extreme, are those whom Jesus called in his parable 'the good servants'.

 * He sent for the servants to whom he had given the money, in order to find out what they had gained with it.
 * The first one came and said, 'Sir, your mina has earned ten more.'
 * 'Well done, my good servant!’ his master replied.
 * 'Because you have been trustworthy in a very small matter, take charge often cities.'
 * The second came and said, 'Sir, your mina has earned five more.'
 * His master answered, ‘You take charge of five cities' (Luke 19:15-19).

Again, this is an important element of the story. For there are two mistakes people habitually make about going to heaven. The first mistake is to think that you can get to heaven by good works. The second is to think you can get to heaven without good works. There are few tensions in the Bible more important to grasp than that which holds this apparent contradiction together.

On the one hand, the Bible insists that we cannot earn our salvation. This was demonstrated in Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax man in the temple. The only way any of us can be acquitted is on the basis of God's grace. Forgiveness is a gift he bestows out of all proportion to any merit we could possibly claim. On the other hand, the Bible insists also that our actions are relevant to our eternal destiny. Though we can't earn God's grace, we can and we ought to give evidence of it in our lives.

Part of the purpose of this parable in Luke 19 is to draw to our attention the importance of that practical evidence. Clearly, Jesus thinks it will not be enough on the last day simply to put our hands up and say, 'I'm here, Lord!' Rather, when the Book of Life is opened there must be something to show, some evidence of our commitment, of our faith, of our response, as in the case of this first man who comes in. 'Sir, your mina has earned ten more.'

Notice the king's response. 'Well done... good servant... you have been trustworthy.' There is ambiguity in that word translated 'trustworthy'. It can mean either 'reliable' or 'believing'. Those two meanings are of course not disconnected, for we show that we are believers by. the obedience of our lives. The two qualities hang together. In vain do we pretend that we 'trust', if we are not trustworthy servants.

Jesus, of course, is using a financial metaphor to describe the trustworthiness for which God is looking. What precisely does he mean by this 'mina' which the Master has given to his servants? Some suggest it is a symbol for the Holy Spirit, others that it symbolizes the gospel message. Still others suggest that it stands for any sort of talent, gift, or endowment that an individual might possess and hold in trust for God.

The answer is, I suppose, that it can be all of those things. The mina is what Jesus has left us with in his absence—the resources, the endowments, the charge, the mandate, which he has given us to be getting on with now that he has returned to heaven.

By the same token, the cities which are placed under the servants' jurisdiction as a reward for their faithfulness are also clearly symbolic. Jesus is not suggesting here that heaven will be territorially parcelled out as if he were Henry VIII awarding political patronage to his favourites. The cities in the story stand for the fact that the use we make of our resources and opportunities, here, in this period of time, while we're waiting for his return, can have and will have eternal consequences. It is possible, he's saying, to live here and now in such a way that heaven will be enriched for us.

How can that be? What is the nature of this reward which he pictures in the gift of cities? The Bible does not spell that out very clearly. Jesus elsewhere talks about 'laying up treasure in heaven', but never completely explains just what that celestial treasure is. What he is clear about is that it is possible to live our lives now directed in such a way that what we achieve lasts. It is not all thrown away. The mark of good servants is that they do make a wise, long-term investment.

That is good news in a world that is full of Monday morning depression. It is good news that we can work our guts out in the service of Jesus Christ, and know that this counts. As Jesus said on one occasion, 'If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones... he will certainly not lose his reward' (Matthew 10:42). Paul develops this thought in his letter to the Colossians. He says it doesn't matter what your job is, or what role you fulfil in society. You might be a slave or a master, you might be a husband or a wife, you might be a parent or a child. Every Christian can dedicate his or her role or job to Christ, and should do so. Whatever you do, he urges, do it from the heart as working for the Lord. It makes sense, he insists, because it is from the Lord that ultimately we expect our reward (Colossians 3:18—4:1).

The Christian is going somewhere, with a goal, with a hope. That means that our work has significance even though it may be mundane—even though, as in the case of a slave in the Roman Empire, it could be positively degrading.

There is a story of three workmen on a building site. A TV interviewer asks them what they are doing. The first man replies, rather unimaginatively, 'Oh, I'm breaking rock.' The second replies, somewhat more thoughtfully, 'I'm earning money to feed my wife and kids.' Then he asks the third man. 'Oh,' he says, 'I'm building a cathedral.' It makes all the difference, you see, to have a goal, to see your life in an eternal perspective, to have hope.

There is a third category of response to the challenge of the coming kingdom, however: that of the wicked servant.

 * Then another servant came and said, ‘Sir, here is your mina; I have kept it laid away in a piece of cloth.
 * I was afraid of you, because you are a hard man. You take out what you did not put in and reap what you did not sow.'
 * His master replied, 'I will judge you by your own words, you wicked servant!' (Luke 19:20-22).

The first thing to say about this servant is that his characterization of the master is grossly unfair. He is trying to make out that the master is some kind of vicious exploiter of the working classes, always looking to make a fast buck. But it's quite clear that he's nothing of the kind. He has entrusted ten servants with the equivalent of £50,000 or more. Remember, these were slaves—they didn't even have the status of an employee in the ancient world. Yet he commits to them this considerable wealth, putting it at their disposal to use while he's away. What's more, the reward which he grants to the first two servants on his return makes it quite clear that, far from being exploitative and ruthless, this man is a benefactor. He is only too willing to share with these slaves not just the management of his estate while it is convenient to him, but the enjoyment of his estate now that he has come into his full inheritance.

The third servant, in his acrimonious slander of the master's character, is simply projecting on to him his own mean-minded and mercenary disposition, it seems to me. He is embittered by something, perhaps his status as a slave. Maybe he feels some deep resentment at being given only £5,000 to play with, believing he could have done with more. Perhaps he is conscious that the other slaves have made rather better use of their money than he has, and feels somewhat peeved. Whatever the reason, the result is that he can't bring himself to believe in the kindness and generosity of the master. His behaviour is sulky. He wraps the money up in a handkerchief; 'I was afraid' is the excuse he offers. In a sense he was, I suppose, afraid that he might not be successful, afraid he would fail.

A traveller in the southern states of the USA once stopped in a small township. He paused to talk to one of the farmers sitting at the entrance of his home. 'How's your cotton coming along?' said the traveller.
 * 'Ain't got none,' was the reply.
 * 'Didn't you plant any?'
 * 'No,' he said. 'Afraid of the boll-weevil.'
 * 'How's your corn, then?'
 * 'Didn't plant none. 'Fraid there weren't going to be no rain.'
 * 'How about your potatoes?'
 * 'Ain't got none. 'Fraid of the potato blight.'
 * 'Well, what did you plant, then?'
 * 'Nothin'. This year I figured I'd just play safe.'

This was the third servant's policy. He figured that he would just play safe. The irony was that he was playing very dangerously indeed. In trying to avoid the wrath of his master, which he said he feared so much, he was actually incurring that wrath to a far greater degree.

'I will judge you by your own words, you wicked servant! You knew, did you, that I am a hard man, taking out what I did not put in, and reaping what I did not sow? Why then didn't you put my money on deposit, so that when I came back, I could have collected it with interest?' (Luke 19:22-23).

The master responds that even if he was the cruel tyrant the servant wanted to make him out to be, he had not acted accordingly. The servant had not even lived by that partial and distorted knowledge of his master that he had. His problem was not that he feared the master too much, but that he did not fear him half enough. If he had, he would have done something with that mina he had given him, even if it was only putting it in the bank. The truth was that he was a wicked servant, looking for an excuse for his sloth, negligence and irresponsibility.

What did Jesus mean when he said that the servant could have gone to the bankers with the money? Some, no doubt, will see this statement as New Testament approval for the stock market and for finance houses. That, however, would be a most precarious conclusion to draw. If anything, in fact, this part of the story implies that taking money at interest is the action typical of an opportunist entrepreneur—the hard man who likes to gather what he has not sown, or, as we would say, get something for nothing. He is the sort of person who is interested in putting money out for interest. In Jesus' day, usury (that is, taking interest on loans) was regarded as immoral among the Jewish community. There's little doubt, therefore, that Jesus' hearers would have perceived this reference to money-lenders as pejorative.

Some have suggested therefore that in the story's original setting, the 'bankers' represent the Pharisees. It stands for those who wanted to keep the truth of God within the bounds of Israel and not share it with the world. Because a Jew couldn't lend money at interest, the only way you could have dealings with a banker was if you mixed with Gentiles. So, they suggest, what Jesus means when he says 'Go to the bankers' is 'Go to the Gentiles'. He is alluding to the responsibility the Jews bore to represent the truth of God to the pagan world, and this wicked and lazy servant hadn't done it.

There may be an element of truth in this theory, but I suspect that, certainly for us who are not first-century Jews, Jesus' teaching has a wider application than that. What he is saying, surely, is simply that there is a need for enterprise and energy in our use of the resources God has entrusted to us. By the example of his wicked servant, Jesus is warning us against insularity, parochialism, laziness, and passivity. He's telling us that we must work for his kingdom with vision and vigour. He's encouraging us to have enough confidence in God to believe that he will not treat us badly if 'in good faith' we make a mistake in our investment. God will recognize that there are risks in any enterprise. Only by taking such risks can you prosper in God's service. We mustn't allow fear to make us withdraw tortoise-like into the security of our shell. We must be prepared to commit ourselves in bold initiatives for the kingdom of God. If you like, Jesus is warning us here against an excessive conservatism. We are not, of course, rashly to throw our master's money around. That is not what he wanted from this servant. But Jesus is saying that we have a responsibility to make courageous decisions for the furthering of Christ's rule.

Some of us who are conservative theologically also tend to be conservative in every other way. We are happy to attend church every week, and to feel secure and cosy in the company of our Christian friends. Any exposure to the world, that nasty, wicked world, makes us feel decidedly uneasy. So we stay on the side-lines as spectators of the enterprise of others.

But in this tale, Jesus is surely warning us that it is only participants who win the prize. The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass has a relevant section in this connection:

 * Sunday January 12th. Six-fruit-gum talk on witnessing by Edwin this morning. Very good. Made you want to go straight out and witness to somebody. Drifted off into a pleasant daydream in which I began to preach in the street and ended up with a huge crowd of people all repenting in tears and being healed of their sickness just by the touch of my hand. Very near to tears myself during the chorus that followed, as I pictured myself addressing vast assemblies of needy people throughout the world. Came to with a shock as I realised that Edwin was asking for people to volunteer to do some actual street evangelism next Friday. Sat as low down in my seat as I could, trying to look like someone whose earnest desire to evangelize was thwarted by a previous appointment.

We all know that feeling. Perhaps the servant felt irritated because he hadn't been given enough resources. If only he'd been given £50,000 instead of just £5,000, he could have made a real killing on the market. But what could he do with such a measly sum? It wasn't worth even trying.

Some of us, perhaps, would say something similar of our opportunity for Christian service. 'If I could preach like Billy Graham I'd be an evangelist. If I was any good at languages I'd be a missionary. If I was musical I'd join the choir or play in a band. If I was academic I'd go to theological college. If I wasn't so shy I'd start a Bible study group in my house. But God has given me so little, it's not worth trying.'

There is a story of the two little Cockney boys who were protesting their life-long devotion to each other. The first little boy said to the other, 'Hey, Bobby, if you 'ad a million pounds, would you give me 'alf?'
 * ''Course I would,' he said.
 * 'What about if you 'ad a fousand pounds?'
 * 'I'd give you 'alf just the same.'
 * 'What about if you 'ad a fousand marbles?'
 * 'I'd give you 'alf of 'em,' he replied.
 * 'What about if you 'ad two marbles?'
 * (Pause.) 'That's jolly well not fair. You know I've got two marbles.'

God wants our two marbles. He is not interested in the hypothetical devotion which we would exercise if only we had got masses of resources, endowments and spiritual gifts at our disposal. He wants our two marbles dedicated in his service. Only thus will we have something to show, he says, on the last day, as evidence that we are men and women of faith, and trustworthy, good servants.

 * Then he said to those standing by, 'Take his mina away from him and give it to the one who has ten minus.'
 * 'Sir,' they said, 'he already has ten!'
 * He replied, 'I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what he has will be taken away' (Luke 19:24-26).

This is surely unfair. Why should his mina be given to the one who has already got plenty? The servant must have meant well.

Jesus, however, illustrates a spiritual principle here which he repeats many times: that you cannot find eternal life by trying to hang on to what you've got. The only people who are going to discover real life as God intends us to live it are those who are willing to throw their lives away. People who hang on to their lives, greedily hoarding what God has given them, are going to finish up losing it altogether. The people who are going to receive, paradoxically, are the people who are willing to let go, to put at risk themselves and what God has given them. There is no special half-way house on the day of judgment for those who meant well.

Luke's account of the story actually leaves the final destiny of this man in some doubt. He does seem to draw a line between the fate of the wicked servant who forfeits his reward and the fate of the rebels who forfeit their lives, but it may not be wise to pin too much hope on that distinction. For in Matthew's version of this same story, there is a far less optimistic end. 'Throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth' (Matthew 25:30).

The irony of this faithless servant is that in trying to avoid taking risks, he was in fact taking the biggest gamble of all—gambling with his soul.

It will soon be Monday again! We could wake up depressed and miserable as people who are going nowhere, or motivated and ambitious as people who know we're going somewhere. The choice is ours.

title: A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 7


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A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 8

 * He went on to tell the people this parable: 'A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time. At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed. He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out.
 * 'Then the owner of the vineyard said, "What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him."
 * 'But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. “This is the heir," they said. “Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours." So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.
 * 'What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.’ When the people heard this, they said, “May this never be!" Jesus looked directly at them and asked, 'Then what is the meaning of that which is written:
 * '"The stone the builders rejected
 * has become the capstone"?
 * Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.'
 * The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people.

G. K. Chesterton once commented that it's always easier to forgive an accidental injury than a deliberate insult. Some people do just seem to have the knack of opening their mouth and putting their foot in it. Everywhere they go they quite unintentionally make offensive and tactless remarks. But usually it's not too difficult to laugh off such clumsy insensitivity, precisely because we know they don't really mean it.

On the other hand, some insults are deliberate, premeditated and calculated to hurt, and they can deliver devastating emotional wounds especially if those who deliver them are people close to us. I remember some years ago being shown a letter written by a daughter to her mother. It was the most concentrated verbal vitriol I have ever read, and it broke that poor mother's heart. If her daughter had publicly spat in her face she could not have felt more profoundly humiliated.

'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' That was the standard playground retort for such oral malice when I was at school. But the bluff is as poor as the rhyme, for names do hurt. Words have a capacity to draw tears and prey upon our minds, to sting our feelings in a way that no physical blow ever could.

Chesterton then is surely right. Perhaps a memory of some such slap in the face haunts you. If so, you'll be able to empathize profoundly with this final parable. In Luke 20 Jesus is telling us the story of what I reckon can justly be called the most shameless, the most cruel insult ever administered in the history of the world. I've called it 'the ultimate insult'. No other insult has demonstrated more brazen impertinence, left such permanent scars or been so totally undeserved. For this insult was delivered not against a human being but against the loving heart of God himself.

And Jesus tells us about it in the last of his parables which Luke records and which I think may well have been tire last parable that Jesus ever told.

Some have argued that 'parable' is a misnomer for this story, for it comes closer to being a true allegory than any of the other stories that we've studied. It's also considerably less cryptic. You don't have to struggle to interpret this one. Perhaps it is because Jesus is now only a matter of days from the end of his life that he feels that he can speak with more transparency than he's done before. So obvious is the meaning of this story that even unsympathetic listeners are in no doubt about what Jesus is getting at. I want us to examine it in three stages.

1. How Jesus understood the human condition

 * A man planted a vineyard... (Luke 20:9).

Jesus told this parable in the context of another inquisition being conducted against him by the chief priests and the teachers of the law. His journey to Jerusalem, which Luke has been narrating since chapter 9, is at last complete. He has now entered the city amid a triumphant procession of his followers. And no sooner has he arrived than he causes a minor sensation by throwing the merchants out of the temple. Not surprisingly, the Jewish Establishment feel that some kind of official enquiry into this hothead's dubious credentials is required. Hence their loaded question, recorded by Luke earlier in the chapter:

 * 'Tell us by what authority you are doing these things... Who gave you this authority?' (Luke 20:2).

Jesus, however, demonstrates once again his consummate skill in parrying this kind of hostile interrogation. He asks a loaded question of his own, refusing to answer theirs directly.

 * 'Tell me, John's baptism—was it from heaven, or from men?’ (20:4).

While they are fumbling to find a diplomatic answer which will not in some way incriminate or embarrass them, he goes straight on to tell his story.

It's a story which, we are told, his inquisitors were convinced was directed against them personally. I'm sure they weren't victim to any irrational paranoia in entertaining that suspicion. Anyone familiar with the Old Testament knew that the imagery of the vineyard which Jesus uses was not original. He had borrowed it. The prophet Isaiah, 800 years earlier, composed an allegorical song along very similar lines to Jesus' parable here. And the relationship between the two is unmistakable.

 * My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside.
 * He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest :vines.
 * He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well.
 * Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.
 * (Isaiah 5:1-5)

Isaiah, however, interprets his allegory:

 * The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the garden of his delight.
 * (Isaiah 5:7)

Isaiah's song was far too famous, and the parallels with Jesus' parable far too obvious, for the implication to be lost on these Jewish Bible scholars. The vineyard of which Jesus' parable speaks was the same as Isaiah's. It was Israel, the people of God. The one who planted this vineyard had to be God himself. The servants he had sent as emissaries were dearly the prophets of the Old. Testament. And the wicked tenants to whom Jesus attributes the blame for the vineyard's unproductiveness: who are they? Well, one did not need to use much imagination to realize that they represent Israel's leaders, the very chief priests and teachers of the law who were trying to discredit Jesus at that moment. They were fully justified in thinking it was preached against them.

It wasn't the first time that Jesus had publicly denounced the hierarchy of his nation in this way. Back in Luke 11 there is a pungent attack, including one comment that you could almost regard as a commentary on this parable:

 * Woe to you [experts in the law], because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your forefathers who killed them. So you testify that you approve of what your forefathers did; they killed the prophets and you build their tombs. Because of this, God in his wisdom said, I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and others they will persecute' (Luke 11:47-49).

It is that strange divine strategy of sending his servants to a rejecting people that Jesus is allegorizing here in his story. The people of God refused to yield the fruit of righteousness which he requires of them. Instead they cruelly reject his servants the prophets whenever he sends them.

The danger for us, of course, is that in recognizing that the immediate reference of this parable was to Israel and to its leaders, we may evade its applications for us. We may say to ourselves perhaps, just as we did with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax man: 'Ah, those hypocritical high priests and scribes! We all know what wicked people they were. Thank God we are not among the wicked tenants he speaks about.' And once again, the shock and the rebuke of the parable is lost on us. We do not feel its stinging force.

That would be a disastrous mistake. For this parable of Jesus is no more limited in its relevance to the Israel of the first century ad than the song of Isaiah, which Jesus is expounding, was limited to the Israel of the eighth century bc. No, this is a story of privilege abused, generosity despised and responsibility shirked. And as such, I suggest, it speaks to the human condition generally. Luke certainly doesn't include it in his gospel to foster anti-Semitic prejudice among his Gentile readers. He included it because it was relevant to them.

I suggest to you that Jesus is not just describing Israel when he speaks of this vineyard. He is describing for us any and every situation on this fallen and rebellious planet where divine blessing is answered by human contempt. As such his words are of relevance to the visible church, a church which possesses the revelation of the Word of God in a way far beyond anything Israel ever knew, but which again and again grieves the heart of God with its apostasy.

These words are relevant to this land of Britain, a land which has experienced the influence of God in a way far beyond the majority of the nations, but which today is almost as secularized and pagan as some which have never heard the gospel.

It's relevant to some of us too as individuals. For we have been blessed personally through the ministry of the Word of God, far beyond many of our neighbours. Yet like that seed which was sown in thorny ground, it has produced so little fruit of obedience in our lives. Indeed, I don't think it's an overstatement to say that Jesus is describing for us here in this parable the tragic condition of the whole world. This is a world which was originally created by God, full of productive potential; it is like a farm prepared with everything needed for prosperity, planted and equipped, needing only to be worked. God put Adam in the garden to till it and keep it for him, we are told in Genesis 2.

So what's gone wrong with our world? Why have things turned sour and all our hopes foundered? Why do those optimistic dreams of a better society prove again and again to be elusive fantasies, like mirages in the desert?

A hundred years ago, at the very end of the nineteenth century, humanist intellectuals spoke with Promethean confidence about the glorious future that awaited the human race in the twentieth century: freedom from illness, war, poverty. The human race, guided by science and technology, they said, was on a route to a new golden age. They were sure of it. Everybody believed it. But instead, of course, these last hundred years have seen military conflict on an unprecedented global scale. They have witnessed famines of unparalleled dimensions. And as for freedom from illness, the medical science which has conquered smallpox and tuberculosis finds itself in the 1990s helpless before the pandemic scourge of the AIDS virus.

Now in the 1990s, just as in the 1890s, there are those who, encouraged by the arrival not just of a new century but of a new millennium, speak once more in utopian terms about the dawn of a 'New Age'. Strange, isn't it, how that row of noughts on the end of the year 2000 is invested with almost mystical significance?

I wonder under what twenty-first century horrors that optimism is going to be buried in our children's lifetimes. It doesn't bear thinking about. The idyllic dream of the Garden of Eden keeps returning to haunt the human race, but it is nothing but a dream, a tantalizing, unrealisable dream of paradise lost. Why is it, Jesus, that we human beings are forever more insecure and violent, the further we advance? What's gone wrong in the vineyard, Jesus?

Is it that these tenant farmers have not yet evolved sufficiently from their animal origins to cooperate harmoniously in tending the vines? Is that the problem? Is it that their science is too primitive; do they need to update their productive efficiency with mechanization and fertilizers? Is it the vicious socio-economic system to which they are victim, with its oppressive absentee landlords and exploited labourers, seething with class antagonism?

No. According to Jesus it's none of these things. The problem is simple, he says. These people were placed in the vineyard as tenants, but they want to be owners.

 * 'This is the heir,' they said. 'Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours’ (Luke 20:14).

A tenant, of course, is accountable to somebody. He pays the rent. And Jesus is saying here that the same is true of human beings. We are accountable too. We owe a debt of moral obedience to the God who gave us this beautiful world to live in. That's why the word 'ought' features so prominently in our vocabulary. Originally the word 'ought' was part of the verb 'to owe'. It is the word of moral duty, of moral debt. Intuitively, all human beings recognize its authority over them. We can distinguish quite easily in our decision-making between what we want to do, what's easiest to do or what others are forcing us to do and what we ought to do.

And we instinctively feel that final constraint upon our choices has an unquestionable priority over all others. No matter how painful or inconvenient it may be, no matter how many people are trying to make me do the opposite, if something is what I ought to do then I ought to do it. I'm obliged by an imperative taking precedence over every other consideration. We all understand that word 'ought', for it is the word of our tenancy, the word of our obligation.

The question that has occupied the minds of philosophers for thousands of years, of course, is: where does this extraordinary sense of obligation come from? Increasingly, people want to relate it to social conditioning. 'Morality?' they say. 'Oh, that's just a social convention. We're taught certain things in our infancy, and we internalize them in the form of a conscience as we grow up.' But the trouble is that once you really believe that that's all morality is, it immediately loses its cogency and has no power over you. If right and wrong are just human inventions, then why shouldn't we disregard them if we want to?

Modem sociological analysis of the word 'ought' doesn't so much explain our sense of moral obligation as explain it away. Increasingly in our western world we are experiencing the anarchy and the permissiveness that irresistibly result from that sort of corrosive scepticism. For the distinctive thing about the word 'ought' is that it has to come from outside us, from some higher authority. And the problem with the humanistic philosophy that has dominated our culture for the last two centuries is that it has no access to such a higher authority. Its followers want a moral law but without a moral law-giver. They want personal values without a personal God. And you can't have them.

Responsibility by definition involves two parties. You have to be able to answer the question, 'Responsibility to whom?' Humanism can't answer that. That's why it's been such a disastrous interlude in our intellectual history.

But Jesus can answer the question. He understands where the word 'ought' comes from. It's from the owner of the vineyard, he says. Our moral nature just reflects the fact that we were put on this earth as tenants, not as owners. We owe something to our Creator. There is an inescapable 'ought' in the very nature of our human existence. The fundamental reason the vineyard is in a mess, he says, is that men and women, Jews, Gentiles or whoever they may be, habitually run away from that accountability. 'You can be a god too,' the devil told Eve.

And in our arrogance we believe the lie and choose the path of moral defiance rather than moral obedience (see Genesis 3:1—6).

In this respect the Jews' rejection of the prophets is not essentially different from our human rejection of God generally. Paul argues that very point in his letter to the Romans. Deep down, he says, we all know enough of our responsibility to God to submit our lives to his rule. The Jew has the Bible, the Gentile has his conscience. We are all without excuse. We are all sinners. We are all tenants in arrears with the rent (see Romans 1—3). And that's why the owner intervenes in our lives. And when he does, that's why our immediate reaction, like the tenants in the parable, is not one of surprise but of resistance.

Jesus would surely have us realize that in our twentieth century, exactly the same kind of illegitimate bid for moral autonomy that led to the failure of Israel is leading to the failure of our secular vision for a better world.

Here's the root of those ecological disasters of which ecologists are constantly reminding us. Having thrown off our proper sense of stewardship for this world God has given us, we think we can do what we like with his creation, abusing it in any way with impunity.

Here is the cause of all those failed socialist dreams, of which the collapse of the Communist bloc is the most recent and tragic example. We human beings are just too greedy, too selfish, too lazy, too corrupt to make such utopian dreams of economic cooperation come true. Here is the spark from which the fire of revolutionary violence spreads its cruel terrorism around our world today, the anarchism which is convinced that somehow it's nobler and more dignified to blow up representatives of authority than to submit to them.

Here too is the soil from which the awful spectre of tyranny continues to haunt the human race, armed now with all the weaponry of psychological manipulation and computerized surveillance with which modem science has endowed it. We human beings have a power complex. Like an incompetent actor determined to play Hamlet, so puny man has ambitions to play God. And he is congenitally incapable of realizing that the role is too big for him. So instead of giving power to humble men and women who might lead nations along the path of moderation and peace, again and again we invest power in the megalomaniacs—the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Saddam Husseins—and then whinge at the leviathan of control and intimidation with which they encircle us and destroy our freedom.

It all comes down to the same thing. We are not content to be tenants of the vineyard. We insist on being owners. The ingratitude of it is bad enough: that God should bestow such privilege and dignity on the human race, such potential for creative endeavour, and that we should be so little prepared to render anything back to God. But it is the futility of it which is so pathetic. For it's a rebellion doomed to failure. The insane insolence of it, that puny creatures should wave their fists at omnipotence, rejecting anything and everybody that God sends to remind us of the debt that we owe him, and think that we'll get away with it! Surely he won't tolerate it! Will he?

The extraordinary thing about Jesus' story is that he tolerates it for so long.

2. How Jesus understood his own mission

 * 'What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him' (Luke 20:13).

I find a pathos in this verse which is intensely moving. Jesus portrays here the patience of God, who has provided rebel human beings with one opportunity after another for repentance, only to find himself slapped in the face every time. Yet still he desires to show his mercy; still he restrains his righteous indignation and turns the other cheek. He will offer one last chance, even if it means gambling with the most precious thing he has: 'My son, whom I love.'

But we must not allow the emotional power of those words to obscure their vital theological significance. I want you to remember again the demand that provoked this parable in the first place. Tell us by what authority are you doing these things. Who gave you this authority?' (Luke 20:2).

It's hard to escape the conclusion that here in the story Jesus is giving a straight answer to that question. 'I will send my son, whom I love.' In a remarkable way Jesus has introduced himself as a character in his own story. If we have any doubts, they are surely dispelled by the addition of that qualifying phrase, 'whom I love', because that's the very same word that came from heaven when Jesus was baptized by John back in Luke 3:21-22. 'You are my Son, whom I love,' said the voice from heaven. The coincidence is just too great, especially when you recall that Jesus had just made a direct reference to the baptism of John shortly before.

There is no missing Jesus' implied assertion, then. The prophets who came before were servants of God. 'But I am different,' he says. 'I am special. I am the beloved Son.' I don't believe that the importance of that self-identification by Jesus can be exaggerated.

This is especially so in our day. Let me tell you why. In the last thirty years or so, liberal theology in this country and indeed around the world has been conducting a relentless public campaign to discredit the doctrine of the deity of Christ. The whole idea of God having a Son who comes to earth in the shape of a man, they argue, is a fantastic fairy tale which no modem person can be expected to entertain any longer. John Robinson launched the first public salvo back in 1963 with the notorious Honest to God. Then came a Baptist, Michael Taylor, with a similar public statement in 1971. In 1977 we had the Anglican symposium entitled The Myth of God Incarnate. In 1984 one of the contributors, Don Cupitt, pushed the matter even more firmly into the public eye with his TV series The Sea of Faith. Most recently, of course, David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, has kept the pot boiling with his newspaper interviews.

The reason for this academic conspiracy is not hard to discern. It is the doctrine of the deity of Christ which more than anything else obstructs dialogue between Christianity and other faiths. And such dialogue comes close to becoming an obsession with many of our contemporary theologians and churchmen. Do you want to be rejected as a candidate for the Christian ministry in any of the mainstream denominations today? Tell the candidates' panel that you want to see Muslims in this country converted to Christ. That's all they need to hear.

If only they can rob Christ of his divinity, so that he becomes one among many servants of God rather than the 'only begotten Son' of the church's Creed, then the way is wide open for major rapprochement between Christianity and Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, Christianity and just about anything else. The ecumenical dream of a single world religion can dawn.

They insist that such a reinterpretation of the person of Christ is possible, even desirable. Why? 'Because,' say these scholars, 'Jesus would never have claimed deity. An alien God-incarnate identity has been superimposed upon Jesus of Nazareth by the Christians who came after him. He would be highly embarrassed to hear us calling him Lord and God.' The deity of Christ, they maintain, is an invention of the early church. It was never part of Jesus' own teaching. So, at least, liberal scholarship asserts.

But that, I suggest to you, is most certainly not the implication of this parable. On the contrary, Jesus here displays a clear sense of his own uniqueness. 'I am the Son', he says, quite distinct from the servants, the prophets who came before.

For the Son bears not just the divine Word, but the divine likeness. The Son comes not merely to represent the King, but to be the King. Jesus sees himself as no accident of history. He comes with the most specific purpose of asserting the Father's territorial rights over his rebellious vineyard. He comes, in a word, as the Messiah, to inaugurate the long-heralded kingdom of God of which those prophets had spoken.

There's only one way to avoid the conclusion that Jesus entertained such an understanding of himself. That is, to discard this parable as pure invention. And that, of course, is what the scholars do. They can't bear the thought that Jesus would have incorporated himself into a parable in this way as the Son, so they insist that the story has been worked over by later Christians to such an extent that its original form is now totally lost to us. But, frankly, there are no grounds at all for such a dismissal of Luke's record. Only prejudice of a most gross and blinkered kind could persuade anyone to deny that Jesus is here confessing a most remarkable filial consciousness. 'I am the Son,' he says, 'not merely a rabbi, not even a prophet. I am the Son of God and it is by virtue of that divine sonship that I exercise the authority in the temple of which you complain.'

Notice again the wistfulness of that divine soliloquy as the story continues: 'Perhaps they will respect him.' God surely says the same today, as he looks upon the church and upon the world. I know it is irritating to the modem liberal mindset to say that one religion is better than the other. In our pluralist generation all the pressures are upon us to paint Jesus in non-exclusive colours; a prophet, a philosopher, a gum, anything will do.

But flattering though such titles are, there's nothing unique about them. You can admire such people without following them. You can ignore them, if you wish, without cost. But Jesus will hot allow us to damn him with faint praise in that way. He claims to be God's last resort, his final Word, his beloved Son.

There will be no dissidents in heaven. There will be nobody saying, 'Three cheers for Muhammad.' If Jesus is right, heaven is united by a single unanimous verdict: 'Jesus is Lord.' And if that's so, we've got to listen to him. We've got to respect his authority. We have no choice.

But the awful truth is, we didn't. And the extraordinary truth is, he knew we wouldn't.

 * But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. 'This is the heir,' they said. 'Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.' So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him (Luke 20: 14-15). ’

There are so many dimensions to the significance of the cross that we couldn't possibly encapsulate its full meaning in a few words. Perhaps that's why we have to make it into a visual symbol. But in this parable, Jesus is focusing down on one element that perhaps we often miss in our theologizing about its significance. The cross, he says, is the ultimate insult. The cross is the supreme gesture of human contempt for the rule of God. The cross is the final snub that puts the lid on centuries of snubs that God has received from the human race. We could not appreciate or even tolerate anyone who challenges us to admit the debt we owe, who calls us to recognize our accountability to our Maker. So we crucified him.

At that point, it's all too easy for you and me once again to shelter behind the fact that Jesus was directly addressing first-century Jews in this parable. 'Oh yes,' we can say. 'It was their fault. The Jews, the Romans, we all know how barbaric they were. The crucifixion was an appalling judicial murder; of course it was. Why, when I watched Ben Hur last Christmas, my eyes were wet with tears at the injustice of it all.'

But no, we cannot isolate ourselves from blame in that way. To do so is not to engage with this parable as Jesus wants us to engage with it, but to run away from it. The whole point of what Jesus is saying is that we are tenants too. We were there when they crucified the Lord.

Some of us were with those Roman bureaucrats, some with those violent soldiers. Some of us were among the Pharisees, smug in our biblical orthodoxy. But where were most of us? Statistics dictate that we were in that mindless crowd shouting, 'Crucify him! Crucify him!'

Our hands were not the actual hands that drove the nails through Jesus' hands. But our hearts are wicked, rebellious and irresponsible enough to have done it. I suppose we can plead ignorance. Indeed, Jesus pleaded it for us. 'Father, forgive them,' he said, 'for they do not know what they are doing' (Luke 23:34).

But this parable surely exposes the generosity of that prayer, and the shallowness of such an excuse. For if we crucified him in ignorance, it was nevertheless culpable ignorance. Jesus insists that these tenants knew only too well who it was they were murdering. That's why they were doing it. This is the heir,' they said. 'Let's kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.'

So Jesus would have us realize that deep down at the most profound levels of our personal honesty, we too know who he is and we too know why we don't want him in our lives. It is that obsessive desire for independence, that lunatic ambition to play god. 'I don't want any patronizing deity interfering in my life. I want to do my own thing, thank you very much. I want to be my own master. This is the heir; let's kill him and the inheritance will be ours.' We've all said it. And every time we say it we add our personal nail to those that held Christ to his cross.

3. How Jesus understood the future

 * What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? (Luke 20:15).

Once again, in its initial reference, this verse predicts the way in which the Jews, by their rejection of the. Messiah, forfeited their spiritual privileges to the Gentiles. Matthew puts it clearly in his vision of this parable. 'The kingdom of God will be taken away from you', he says, 'and given to a people who will produce its fruit' (Matthew 21:43). It's understandable that the Jewish audience were offended, for such a prospect tore the stuffing out of all those messianic dreams of theirs. As patriots, they were looking forward to the kingdom of God. It would be a day of triumph for the Jewish nation. 'No,' says Jesus, 'not at all. The kingdom of God spells a day of national catastrophe for the Jewish nation.'

But just as it would be foolish of us to think that the only wicked tenants in this world are Jews, so it would be an even greater folly to assume that they are the only people God is angry with in this world. No, it is with the solemn prospect of judgment to come that Jesus confronts all of us at the end of his story.

He confronts the visible church with that prospect, for if the leaders of Jerusalem forfeited the spiritual privilege of Israel to the Gentiles because they failed to honour and respect God's Son as they should, what will God do to those so-called theologians and clerics who in their zeal for interfaith dialogue deny the uniqueness of Christ? Is it any surprise that the mainstream denominations of our nation are declining in membership and influence today? Is it any surprise that new Christian groups who are not embarrassed to own a divine Christ as their Lord are capturing the initiative in our land today?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, is right when he talks of the next few years as critical for the Church of England. There are clear signs that God is giving the vineyard to others under the very noses of the bishops. I'm just hoping that George Carey is courageous enough and honest enough to admit that it is the defection from the apostolic faith of the New Testament on the part of some of those bishops which is largely responsible. The glory is departing from some of our mainstream denominations, because of undisciplined error in the most fundamental matter of the lordship of Christ.

Jesus confronts the nation of Britain, too, with this prospect of final judgment. For if Israel had known blessing from God's help over the centuries, so has this land of ours. For a thousand years Christianity has been the official faith of this land. We were delivered from paganism in the distant past, from Islam in the Middle Ages, from apostate Catholicism in the sixteenth century, and from Fascist and Marxist dictatorship in this twentieth century. God has spared this country politically in most remarkable ways, time and time again.

More than that, he has blessed this nation with preachers of extraordinary power and influence: godly men who have called us as a nation to place ourselves under the authority of God; martyrs who have died to bring us the Bible; evangelists who have spent their lives promoting revival. There are churches and chapels in every town and village testifying to God's signal goodness to this land.

What then will God do to us if, in the face of all that blessing, this land today turns its back on its Christian heritage and embraces a secularism as godless in its immorality and pagan in its superstition as many nations that have enjoyed not a fraction of its privileges?

Is it any wonder that economic prosperity is drying up, that the crime rate soars, that our international influence declines? Our world is littered with wrecks of great empires and nations of the past. There is nothing immortal about Great Britain.

But perhaps supremely we have to face the fact that Jesus confronts each of us as individuals with the prospect of final judgment, in these sobering and solemn words at the end of his story.

To us, Jesus' comments after the story, in verses 17-18, may seem difficult. But to Luke's readers they made eminent sense. For Jesus is fusing together here three verses with which they were very familiar. The New Testament quotes them often. Perhaps they come to Jesus' mind here because they are all about stones. And in the Aramaic language that he spoke, the word for 'stone' and the word for 'son' sound almost identical.

The first quotation is from Psalm 118, and speaks metaphorically of the construction of a house. The masons building the house discover an oddly shaped stone that won't fit in the wall. At first they discard it, but then when they get to the very top of the building they realize that this is just the piece of rock they need to complete the supporting arch, the brick without which the whole edifice would otherwise collapse—the chief cornerstone.

In its original setting this psalm applied the metaphor to the king of Israel on his return to Jerusalem after a successful military campaign. The pagan nations had treated the king of Israel with contempt, and they discarded him like a worthless pebble. But now God has vindicated his anointed one and exalted him over his enemies. So the stone the builders had rejected has become the capstone. 'It's the Lord's doing and it's marvellous in our eyes,' they sang.

But to the Jews of Jesus' day this entire psalm was interpreted messianically. Indeed, we encounter a chorus of it on the lips of the crowd as they welcome Jesus triumphantly into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: 'Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord' (Luke 19:38).

So Jesus is pointing out the full implications of Psalm 118 to these so-called Bible students who were challenging him. 'If, as you believe, this is a messianic prophecy, then don't you see what it implies? It implies that the powerful men of this world will repudiate the Messiah just as those pagan nations repudiated the king of Israel of old. But then God will lift him to his rightful place of exaltation. My story of the rejected son is confirmed in that scripture you know so well, the scripture of the rejected stone.'

And before they can recover from this startling expository insight, with a stroke of genius Jesus welds on two more verses from Isaiah 8 and Daniel 2 which also speak about stones. The Isaiah text cautions that if Israel does not trust the Lord, then the Lord himself will become like a stone over which they stumble. The quotation from Daniel speaks of a stone or a rock symbolizing the kingdom of God, which will be used at the end of the age as a hammer in God's hands to destroy all the opposing kingdoms of the earth and smash them to smithereens.

And by fusing all these scriptures together, Jesus is issuing a solemn warning. The stone the builders discarded, he says, now lies on the ground. You are plotting to murder God's Son. Careless people stumble over him to their destruction, as Isaiah said they would. But one day soon he will be raised up to the top of the arch. And for people who are foolish enough still to reject him then, it will no longer be they who fall over him, but rather he who falls on them, as Daniel predicted. 'It is a dangerous thing', he says, 'to reject me. You are playing with fire. Put yourself in the owner's place in my story and you will realize why. Do you really think God is going to tolerate the preposterous insolence of the human race for ever? Do you think he will stand idly by and grant his beloved Son no vindication in the face of his enemies?'

No, a day of accounting is coming. 'What you do with me,' he says, 'the Son, the Stone, will determine your final destiny on that day. You must choose either to be broken voluntarily by me, your rebellious pride humbled and chastened by recognition of who I am; or you must choose to be finally crushed by me, judged, condemned for your complicity in this rebel world.' This is a solemn message. But I fear it's one that, as churches and preachers, we are growing reluctant to be frank about.

It's a great mistake to confuse divine patience with divine indifference. According to this story, God is being patient with us human beings, sending one servant after another and finally sending his own Son. The danger is, we could be deceived into thinking that his patience is infinite. But Jesus says it is not. The heart of God is unbearably provoked. You must not mistake his patience for indifference.

It's popular to speak of God as a kindly old fellow, all love, who would never harm a fly. But where have we got the idea from? It certainly wasn't from Jesus. It is God's moral indignation against evil that prevents his love from degenerating into mere sentimentality. We don't really admire people who are never angry. There are times when righteousness demands anger—at cruelty, at prejudice, for example. We can't respect a person who remains in some kind of insulated benignity when confronted by real wickedness.

If there are times when people ought to be angry, how much more, then, will there be a time when God will be angry! Do not mistake patience for indifference. He's patient with us men and women, but not indifferent towards our sins. We are accountable; and ultimately we shall give account of that missing rent, account for those injured servants, account for that murdered Son.

How does Jesus see the future? He sees it as a day of accounting, a day of judgment. Samuel Johnson remarked, 'I remember that my Maker has said that he will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. That is a solemn truth which this frivolous age needs to hear.' The frivolous age he was talking about was the eighteenth century, but there's plenty of frivolity still around.

It disturbs me most profoundly that so few people today take hell seriously. Many of those theologians I mentioned earlier are universalists, insisting that hell is a

sub-Christian superstition. 'Who can possibly imagine a loving God tolerating such an obscenity?'

More popularly, people joke about it. 'Well, if I go to hell there'll be plenty of people who'll go with me' - as if hell were going to be some jolly party for the society of the free spirits. I do not deny that the language of judgment the Bible sometimes uses is difficult. I sympathize with some who find the doctrine of hell confusing and unpalatable. I would agree that Jesus uses symbolical language when he speaks of 'hell fire'. But I cannot believe he would use such language unless he wanted to warn us of something real and dreadful. And I cannot believe that the Son of God would have hung on the cross amid such agony if he did not want to spare us something even worse. Of course judgment is real. It's because judgment is real that we need rescue. The very word 'salvation' would be meaningless if there was nothing to be saved from.

Here is a God, I say, who sees us as individuals walking into misery, determined to be what by very nature we cannot be; independent of him. He puts up signposts in our path to warn us; he sends messengers to try and persuade us; but we despise and ignore them. He even sends his own Son, and he watches as we murder him. Yet still he persists in urging us to come to our senses. Still he persists in urging us to discover our true human destiny in fellowship with him as tenants of his world, not as usurpers of it.

But if we insist upon our autonomy, he will give it to us. In that sense he doesn't have to send any of us to hell. Our tragedy is that we are already walking there. The one principle of hell is, 'I am on my own.' If we tell God to leave us alone, Jesus says, then at the end of the day that's just what he will do: leave us alone permanently. The Bible says it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, but I'll tell you something that scares me even more. And that's falling out of his hands.

 * 'What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.'

When the people heard this, they said, 'May this never be!' (Luke 20:15-16).

Should not those words generate a great concern for holiness in us? Should they not generate a great passion for evangelism in us? Should they not generate in us a great seriousness about this Christian faith? If we are backsliding from a faith in Christ we once professed, or if we are uncommitted to Christ altogether, should those Words not generate in us a great concern for our eternal destiny? What will he do with you?

Do you notice that phrase with which Luke introduces the finale to Jesus' story? 'Jesus looked directly at them,' it says. There's a strange intensity about that, isn't there? He fixed his eyes upon these people. What was in that look as he issued this solemn final warning to them? Urgency, pity, appeal, love? Yes, love surely more than anything. For these were the eyes which, just a few hours before, had been weeping for Jerusalem.

Can we not then sense that Christ looks directly at us? He looks at us with that same intensity, that same urgency. All the love of God for us stupid, sinful, wayward men and women is concentrated in that gaze. For we were there, with all the other rebellious tenants; we were there when they crucified the Lord.

We have insulted God. We have presumed upon his patience too long. We have despised his generosity too long. We have treated his Son as a second-class feature in our lives too long. He waits now, patiently, but not indifferently, for our apology, and for the payment of that long-overdue debt of moral obedience we owe him. He is not going to wait for ever.

title: A Sting in the Tale/Chapter 8


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 rious Cabinet, or two, of Ivory cups brought out of Germany by Prince Matthias. In the same Cabinet I saw the picture of Cardinal Bembo in a neat Mosaick work; and an other piece of divers Birds in Mosaick also, rarely done by Marcellus Provincialis. I saw also there divers little old Pagan Idols in Iron and Brass, a design of Raphaels own hand; and some good Pictures.

In the second Cabinet I saw two great Globes, which were made in this roome, being too great ever to be carryed out, or brought into it by the doore. I saw also here a curious Table of polished stones representing a Town in Bohemia, with divers pictures of Men, Horses, and Landskips: where there is a Tree represented most naturally, because it is represented by the very wood of a tree Petrifyed into stone, and looking like wood as it was; and shining like polish'd stone, as it now is. The statues, or busto's of three or four of the Great Dukes, in Porphyry. A curious looking glass over the inside of the door, which


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 bequeathed to the Museum of Practical Geology, London, It contains 246 specimens of vertebrate remains. A very perfect lower jaw of the beaver (Castor Eurapæns), with some well preserved banes of the Elephas primigenius, the Rhinoceros leptorhinus, and the Bos primigenius, are among the gems of this valuable collection.

.—An interesting boring for coal is now going on close to the eastern suburbs of the town of Leicester. In 1876 bore-hole at this spot reached a depth of 750ft., entirely in the Keuper marls and sandstones, but stepped at this point in consequence of the boring rods breaking and stopping up the hole. The Diamond Rock Boring Company have now contracted to go down to a depth of 1,200ft., but, in our opinion, the question will be settled at a less depth than this. The proximity of the ridge of Palæozoic Rocks, which runs southwards from Charnwood Forest by Enderby, Sapcote, &c. is an important factor in the question. Desford marks its western edge, so that if the ridge, or the rocks (inferior to the coal-measures) which rest upon it, extends eastwards beneath the Trias for eight miles, it will be an effectual bar to the finding of workable coal seams in this locality.

.—Mr. , of the Crystal Palace Aquarium, is engaged in writing a practical book on Aquaria, for which he has long been collecting materials. Writing on the subject, he says—"My illustrations will be numerous, original, and unusual, consisting mainly of views, plans, and sections of many aquaria, and of the various Kinds of machinery employed in them toe circulate the water, and will include also all the portraits I can find of those who did early and good aquaria work. Among these I should like to have a portrait of Mrs., who, in London, in the year 1816, maintained the earliest known marine aquarium on the compensating principle, with plants and animals balancing each other. Any hints or references to early books, or pamphlets, of prints, or pictures, or photographs, will be very acceptable. Among other things, I much want access, temporary OF otherwise, to two aquarium guide books to the now non-existing aquaria, one in Vienna, dated about 1860, and one in Copenhagen, about 1873-74. I shall be very grateful for any properly-authenticated details in MS., or any references to such as have been published, on the maintenance of any animals, ranging from sponges to fishes, both marine and fresh water, under the conditions proper to aquaria. Any loans made to me will be punctually and thankfully returned."

, U.S.—The annual report for 1876 has lately been issued. It contains a statement by the director, Professor J. Henry, on the work and progress of the Institution, and a report from Prof. S. F. Baird on the Centennial Exhibition. Then follow biographies of Guy-Lussac, and that scientific monarch, the present Emperor of Brazil; articles on the Kinetic Theories of Gravitation; Revolutions of the Crust of the Earth; Asteroids between Mars and Jupiter; and several ethnological articles, altogether forming a handsome volume of some 500 pages. The report and other publications of the Institute are, we believe, presented to Societies who send copies of their reports and transactions to the agent for the Smithsonian Institute, Mr. W. Wesley, 28, Essex Street, Strand. Another important feature in the work of this valuable Institution is that it undertakes to receive books, specimens, &c., from wary part of the world for American Societies and Museums, and transmits in return any exchanges which may be desired. During the year 1876 no fewer than 4,853 packages were received from abroad, and some 13,000 parcels sent out. These have been carried free of cost by the various Atlantic Steamship Companies, and thus carriage from any part of the United Kingdom need only be paid as far as


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 placed directly over the picture of a man, contracts into it the picture of a woman (that mans wife) which you see plainly in it: drawing thus Eve out of Adam again by a curious reflexion.

In the third Cabinet I was shown a curious table of polish'd stones representing perfectly the Town and Haven of Ligorne. A great Cabinet of Ebony beset with precious stones on the outside, and with the History of the holy Scriptures curiously expressed in miniature in several little squares of rich stones set here and there. In the top of it there is a German Clock, now out of order, and no man dare mend it. Within this great Cabinet I saw the passion of our Saviour curiously cut by Michael Angelo in Ivory (say they) but I believe its in white Waxe. There is also in it the figures of our Saviour and his twelve Apostles in yellow amber, with their heads in white amber: All these several Pieces are not seen at once, but come up into sight one after another, as the man turns them.


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 I have a collection of trade English letters and documents, for it is a language that I regard as exceedingly charming, and it really requires study, as you will see by reading Crashey Jane's epistle without the aid of a dictionary. It is, moreover, a language that will take you unexpectedly far in Africa, and if you do not understand it, land you in some pretty situations. One important point that you must remember is that the African is logically right in his answer to such a question as "You have not cleaned this lamp?"—he says, "Yes, sah"—which means, "yes, I have not cleaned the lamp." It does not mean a denial to your accusation; he always uses this form, and it is liable to confuse you at first, as are many other of the phrases, such as "I look him, I no see him"; this means "I have been searching for the thing but have not found it"; if he really meant he had looked upon the object but had been unable to get to it, he would say: "I look him, I no catch him," &c.

There is another class of letters written by Africans who have had school teaching to a high degree, and these are very fine literature—quite as fine as that of the Indian Baboo and with more ability and go in them. They are usually written in really exquisite handwriting, and abound in grandiloquence. I will not quote any here, save a phrase written in a letter I heard read out before the Court of the Chiefs at Bonny by young George Peppel—anent a quarrel then going on between him and his brother. "The subject," George eloquently stated, "has now become so delicately distended as to require the united wisdom of the wisest heads in Bonny for its solution." I like "delicately distended," much. I know so many subjects in England that are in this condition from the quantity of gas that has been put into them.

The difficulty of the language is, however, far less than the whole set of difficulties with your own mind. Unless you can make it pliant enough to follow the African idea step by step, however much care you may take, you will not bag your game. I heard an account the other day—I have forgotten where—of a representative of her Majesty in Africa who went out for a day's antelope shooting. There were plenty of antelope about, and he stalked them with great care; but always, just before


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.—General Meeting, December 15th, 1877.—Mr. J. F. Goode read a paper on the "Planet Mars," in which he especially alluded the the recent "opposition," as having been of more than ordinary interest from the close proximity of the planet to the earth; the varying distances from which he explained being occasioned by the ellipticity of its orbit. The various features of Mars, as seen through the telescope, were discussed, and a description given of its continents and seas: its snowy poles analogous to those of the earth. its period of rotation on its axis, duration of seasons, and other interesting phenomena, were severally alluded to. Mr. Goode mentioned that the discovery of the satellites by Professor Hall, of the Washington Observatory, had rendered the recent "opposition” particularly interesting. These satellites, he stated, are very small, and are visible only by means of the most powerful instruments, under very favourable circumstances.

CHELTENHAM NATURAL SCIENCE SOCIETY.—On 15th December, 1877, a public meeting was held, at which it was resolved to form a Natural Science Society in Cheltenham. A committee was appointed, and a secretary pro tem. Rules, &c., have since been framed. January 18.—First general meeting, at which it was resolved that the society be called "The Cheltenham Natural Science Society," that Dr. T. Wright, M.D., F.G.S., be president, and Colonel honorary secretary. The report of the committee was unanimously adopted, and the rules as added to and altered passed. The ordinary meetings will be held on the 3rd Thursday of each month, April to October inclusive.

NORTHAMPTON NATURALISTS' SOCIETY.—January 7th. a paper "On Beetles" was read by Mr. E. B. Pressland. January 15th, a paper on "Photography" was read by Mr. H. Manfield.

NOTTINGHAM NATURALISTS' SOCIETY.—January 2nd, Annual General Meeting, when Mr. A. H. Simpson was elected president; Messrs. H. Blandy and J. Morley, vice-presidents; Mr. C. Wheatley, treasurer; Mr. C. T. Musson, hon. secretary; Messrs. W. Foster, W. Morley, R. Wix, R. T. Higham, T. Ball, and J. S. Radford, the committee; and Mr. L. Lee, assistant secretary and librarian.—January 9th was spent as a microscopical evening.—January 16th, the President delivered the Annual Address.

STROUD NATURAL HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.—January 8th, Mr. J. T. Fisher delivered a lecture on "The Spectroscope in relation to Stellar and Solar Physics," illustrating some of his remarks by a number of photographs.—January 24th was an extra meeting, at which Mr. C. Playne read a paper on "Water as a Motive Power."

TAMWORTH NATURAL HISTORY, GEOLOGICAL, AND ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY.—On January 7th, Mr., F.G.S., read a paper entitled, "Geological Notes on the Trip to Clent Hills," which he illustrated by plans and diagrams, showing the various strata between Birmingham and Hales Owen. Mr. Spruce showed that the Clent Hills are composed of new red sandstone, and not trap, as erroneously supposed by Hugh Miller and others. He also compared the trap of the Rowley Hills with that of Dosthill. The formation of the Clent Hills


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 he got within shot of the game, they saw something and bolted. Knowing he and the boy behind him had been making no sound and could not have been seen, he stalked on, but always with the same result; until happening to look round, he saw the boy behind him was supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular, by steadfastly holding aloft the consular flag. Well, if you go hunting the African idea with the flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously over you, you will similarly get a very poor bag.

A few hints as to your mental outfit when starting on this port may be useful. Before starting for West Africa, burn all your notions about sun-myths and worship of the elemental forces. My own opinion is you had better also burn the notion, although it is fashionable, that human beings got their first notion of the origin of the soul from dreams.

I went out with my mind full of the deductions of every book on Ethnology, German or English, that I had read during fifteen years—and being a good Cambridge person, I was particularly confident that from Mr. Frazer's book, The Golden Bough, I had got a semi-universal key to the underlying idea of native custom and belief. But I soon found this was very far from being the case. His idea is a true key to a certain quantity of facts, but in West Africa only to a limited quantity.

I do not say, do not read Ethnology—by all means do so; and above all things read, until you know it by heart, Primitive Culture, by Dr. E. B. Tylor, regarding which book I may say that I have never found a fact that flew in the face of the carefully made, broad-minded deductions of this greatest of Ethnologists. In, addition you must know your Westermarck on Human Marriage, and your Waitz Anthropologie, and your Topinard—not that you need expect to go measuring people's skulls and chests as this last named authority expects you to do, for no self-respecting person black or white likes that sort of thing from the hands of an utter stranger, and if you attempt it you'll get yourself disliked in West Africa. Add to this the knowledge of all A. B. Ellis's works; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; Pliny's Natural History; and


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 And yet, in spite of the killing pace and the stony track, who, but the sluggard or the dolt, can hold aloof from the course? Who—like the belated traveller that stands watching fairy revels till he snatches and drains the goblin cup, and springs into the whirling circle—can view the mad tumult, and not be drawn into its midst? Not I, for one. I confess to the wayside arbour, the pipe of contentment, and the lotus-leaves being altogether unsuitable metaphors. They sounded very nice and philosophical, but I'm afraid I am not the sort of person to sit in arbours, smoking pipes, when there is any fun going on outside. I think I more resemble the Irishman, who, seeing a crowd collecting, sent his little girl out to ask if there was going to be a row—Cos, if so, father would like to be in it."

I love the fierce strife. I like to watch it. I like to hear of people getting on in it—battling their way bravely and fairly—that is, not slipping through by luck or trickery. It stirs one's old Saxon fighting blood, like the tales of "knights who fought 'gainst fearful odds" thrilled us in our schoolboy days.

And fighting the battle of life is fighting against fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons in this nineteenth century, and the golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in the storybooks. There, Algernon takes one long, last look at the ancestral hall, dashes the tear-drop from his eye,


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 as much of Aristotle as possible. If you have a good knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics, I think it would be an immense advantage; an advantage I do not possess, for my classical knowledge is scrappy, and in place of it I have a knowledge of Red Indian dogma: a dogma by the way that seems to me much nearer the African in type than Asiatic forms of dogma.

Armed with these instruments of observation, with a little industry and care you should in the mill of your mind be able to make the varied tangled rag-bag of facts that you will soon become possessed of into a paper. And then I advise you to lay the results of your collection before some great thinker and he will write upon it the opinion that his greater and clearer vision makes him more fit to form.

You may say, Why not bring these home their things in the raw state? And bring them home in a raw state you must, for purposes of reference; but in this state they are of little use to a person unacquainted with the conditions which surround them in their native homes. Also very few African stories bear on one subject alone, and they hardly ever stick to a point. Take this Fernando Po legend. Windwood Reade (Savage Africa, p. 62) gives it, and he says he heard it twice. I have heard it, in variants, four times—once on Fernando Po, once in Calabar and twice in Gaboon. So it is evidently an old story:—

"The first man called all people to one place. His name was Raychow. 'Hear this, my people' said he, 'I am going to give a name to every place, I am King in this River'. One day he came with his people to the Hole of Wonga Wonga, which is a deep pit in the ground from which fire comes at night. Men spoke to them from the Hole, but they could not see them. Raychow said to his son, 'Go down into the Hole'—and his son went. The son of the King of the Hole came to him and defied him to a contest of throwing the spear. If he lost he should be killed, if he won he should go back in safety. He won—then the son of the King of the Hole said, 'It is strange you should have won, for I am a spirit. Ask whatever you wish, and the King's son asked for a remedy for every disease he could remember; and the


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 and goes off—to return in three years' time, rolling in riches. The authors do not tell us "how it's done," which is a pity, for it would surely prove exciting.

But then not one novelist in a thousand ever does tell us the real story of their hero. They linger for a dozen pages over a tea-party, but sum up a life's history with "he had become one of our merchant princes," or, "he was now a great artist, with the world at his feet." Why, there is more real life in one of Gilbert's patter-songs than in half the biographical novels ever written. He relates to us all the various steps by which his office-boy rose to be the "ruler of the Queen's navee," and explains to us how the briefless barrister managed to become a great and good judge, "ready to try this breach of promise of marriage." It is in the petty details, not in the great results, that the interest of existence lies.

What we really want is a novel showing us all the hidden under-current of an ambitious man's career—his struggles, and failures, and hopes, his disappointments, and victories. It would be an immense success. I am sure the wooing of Fortune would prove quite as interesting a tale as the wooing of any flesh and blood maiden, though, by-the-way, it would read extremely similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients painted her, very like a woman—not quite so unreasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so—and the pursuit