These words imply—
1. That there is infinite grace, through which a certain equity shines, in the things which God has provided for all who have wrought, even though feebly and tardily, at His work. The work is honour and happiness; the want of it is shame and pain. The early labourers are the enviable; the late labourers are the pitiable. But God in His boundless grace adds a boundless gift to all: “the gift of God,” which “is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” But through the grace a certain equity shines. Man was made for Life, he was born for it. To miss the glorious boon which God has the power to bestow on him through Christ, were to miss the very end and issue to which God touched his spirit. A well-nigh infinite capacity of being, loving, and enjoying, is in him, which God only can satisfy and eternity only can complete. And God in His boundless love and mercy meets him in his idleness and degradation, and proposes to him a work which His grace will crown with glorious, everlasting joy.
2. None shall miss the blessing through the order of the dispensations.
If the Jews were called, and the Pagans were left sad and idle in the streets, the evenfall shall adjust the balance, the evening of earth’s life, the morning of the everlasting day. Idle and sad, I say. When you are next at South Kensington Museum, place yourself before the cartoon of “Paul preaching at Athens.” Mark the foremost in the group of pagan hearers; he bears in his sad wistful countenance the whole tale of Gentile waiting, longing, hoping, disappointment, despondency, and despair. Few preachers can preach such a sermon as utters itself mutely from that man’s eyes and lips. This parable is Christ’s answer to the mute appeal: “No man hath hired thee, poor outcast! the day spent, the soul lost! Come in, at the last hour, come in. These have wrought in a noble service the long day through. The sweat of manly toil is on their brow, the joy of a work well done is in their hearts. Come in; the sun still lacks some hours of setting. Bend thy soul to the task, put thy heart into the labour of the hour, and the same meed shall be thine. Even as unto this first, will I give unto thee; come in.”
9. On a wider scale the parable is Christ’s assurance, that through all outward inequalities of gift, endowment, opportunity, position, prospect, which jar this jangled world, there is a sublime equity ruling which will right all wrongs, adjust all balances, and square all issues with pure celestial justice at last. “No man hath hired us.” How much does this explain of the bitterness and misery with which the world is filled! Cross purposes, cross callings, cross relationships, cross necessities, cross issues of life! Men with power in them for a service which is never asked of them; tied down to a desk or a counter, it may be, while they feel within them the stirrings of a power to guide the coursers of the sun. Men bound in a home which has no beauty for them, no love; while beyond there is a vision of the Eden which might be, if bonds could be unbound and bound afresh. Some overflowing with fatherly or motherly tenderness, in a barren home. Some shrinking from the prattle of infant voices, yet with stuff in them of noble texture, shut up to a nursery through the prime of their days. Some longing, pining, panting for a work they love, bound to a work they loathe. Some with a genial, generous, royal nature, wrestling with the serpents of care and penury their long life through. “This is a mad world, my masters;” “the times are out of joint;” it is all out of joint everywhen and everywhere! “No man hath hired us” to the work which we are fit for; a glorious wealth of being, of power, is left to “fust in us unused.”
Patience, brothers, patience! One grand work, the grandest, spreads broad and fair before you; “in your patience possess ye your souls.” The hiring is in higher, wiser hands; the patience, the hope, are in yours, with all their glorious eternal fruit. None of the sighing, none of the groaning, none of the desire and yearning of your spirit, is hidden from Him who made you, and who in His own good time will call you to your God-ordained work. “Unto this last will I give, even as unto thee” reveals the sublime equity of His dealings. Await with strong patience, with steadfast hope, the things and the times of His sovereign appointment; till you find with profound and wondering joy, that your patience has won a prize whose splendour outshines the constellations, and whose bliss shall outlast eternity.
IV.
LAW AND LIFE.
“In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.”—Eccles. xi. 3.
There are few passages in the word of God which are more constantly misapplied than this. It is systematically wrested to the establishment of doctrines with which it has nothing whatever to do. The popular interpretation of the text treats it as equivalent to the assertion, that the condition of the human soul through its long eternity is settled absolutely and irrevocably by death. We believe that nine out of ten, of those who hold this doctrine would quote this passage if they were suddenly asked to sustain their belief out of the word of God. With the truth of the doctrine in question we are not dealing in the present discourse; there are passages in the word of God which bear on it with most unquestionable cogency. But this is not one of them. Our present purpose is to show what it does mean, and that its reference is to a subject which is well-nigh as far removed from that on which it is supposed to bear as the poles.