a sense, it is primarily intended for priests. The unfaithfulness of the bad steward is described in figurative language, taken from the modes and habits of Oriental life. The punishment of the faithless steward is sudden and severe.

Knabenbauer believes that the force of dixoтoμeiv, as employed by Luke in the forty-sixth verse, is to cut in two, and he believes that the punishment of the bad steward is expressed under the figure of the mode of death inflicted by Oriental masters on unfaithful slaves. This seems to us somewhat crude; and we prefer to understand the verb to mean to cut off from any further participation in the goods of the master. Whenever the Holy Scriptures speak of the lot of the reprobate, its words are terrible. So here the faithless steward is cut off from God, and receives his portion with the unbelievers. St. John in his Apocalypse saw the portion of these unfaithful ones: "But for the cowards, and unbelieving, and abominable and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolators, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death."—Apoc. XXI. 8.

The reward of a faithful priest is greater than the reward of an ordinary man; and the punishment of a faithless priest is greater.

It

In the next proposition, Christ declares that the retribution of God upon the guilty will be graded according to the knowledge which men have of the law of right and wrong. is generally acknowledged that the servant who knew his Lord's will is he to whom God has given a direct revelation; while the servant who is represented as not knowing his Lord's will, is he who has only the law of nature as his norm. Both classes are culpable; "for when Gentiles who have no law do by nature the things of the law, these having no law are a law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts."-Rom. II. 14-15. Therefore, no man is without a moral law which appeals to his conscience. But the law of nature is by no means as clear and explicit as the written law of God. Therefore, with men who have only the dispensation of nature, ignorance enters as a palliating cause. They are punished for the transgression of nature's law; but, other

things being equal, their malice is not as great as the malice of the man who, with full knowledge of God's will, sins.

It is quite certain that Jesus directed this teaching to make known to the Jews that their transgression of Yahveh's law was greater than the sins of the Gentiles. Of course, the truth is universal in its application, and establishes that a sin of malice is worse than a sin of ignorance.

The Lord next proceeds to declare the different degrees of human responsibility from the nature of the interests committed to a man's care. The Lord enunciates this truth in the form of a parallelism in which the same thought is repeated in slightly different terms for the sake of emphasis. The great truth will be more fully expounded later on in the parable of the talents. The truth is self-evident. If a private in an army is recreant, the army loses one man, but the unfaithfulness of a general may wreck an army and a state The truth is applicable to all men in every station of life. God has distributed his gifts according to his own good pleasure; he has given something to every one. He has appointed to every one a work to do. Some are to serve God in lowly places; others in the high places of power and honor. In the judgment, account will be taken of what was given, and of what is received. In the words of the Book of Wisdom: "To him that is little, mercy is granted: but the mighty shall be mightily tormented."-VI. 7.

Though this great truth applies to all men, yet it has a special reference to priests. To them has been given the highest office ever conferred on man; to them have been committed the souls of men as a sacred trust. The heart grows sick, and the brain reels, when the mind contemplates the unfaithfulness of a priest.

Therefore, let every man consider well his proper responsibility, the station which he holds in life, the interests in him centered. Let him study well the way in which he might serve God in his particular station in life, and see if he is doing it. For the Lord will require a strict accounting of the use of our life and of all that has come into it. Our lives are loans from God; our powers of mind and body and our graces are

furnishings with which to work. And in the judgment God makes the reckoning.

At this point the theme changes slightly, and Jesus now discourses of the nature of the New Covenant, and of its effect upon society. In Malachi, the Messiah is spoken of as a fire: "But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fuller's soap: and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver; and they shall offer unto the Lord offerings in righteousness."-III. 2-3. When the Lord declares that he is come to cast fire upon the earth, it is evident that he means that he is come to give the New Testament to men. Therefore, we have only to determine in what sense the New Testament is called a fire. It is called a fire, because it is energized by the power of the Holy Ghost, symbolized by fire. It is called a fire, because it is inevitable, and triumphs over all obstacles, as fire consumes. It is called a fire, because it burns away the dross of the souls of men, and leaves them as metals that have been purified by fire. It is called a fire, because of its power, and the indomitable energy with which it fills the souls of men. It is called a fire, because it will finally consume and destroy all evil, and perfect all the elect in the perfect kingdom of Christ. Christ cast that fire upon the earth by the Redemption, by the salvific teaching of the Gospel, and by the sacraments. Even as he spoke these words, he was kindling that fire. But it could not burst into a full flame until after the Atonement and the Resurrection. Therefore, Christ looked forward with longing to the consummation of his great work.

Christ speaks of his Crucifixion as a baptism with which he is to be baptized. Of course, the language is figurative. The natural basis of the figure is not clear. Bede believes that Jesus alludes to the fact that in his baptism his whole body was baptized with his blood. Again, by Jesus' own appointment, baptism was the means of a new birth, and on the death of Jesus there came a new birth for him, in the sense that from that death he arose glorious and immortal, having redeemed the world. In fact, our own baptism symbolizes that great baptism of Jesus. "Or are ye ignorant that all we who were

baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?"Rom. VI. 3.

The feelings with which Christ looked forward to that great event are expressed by the Greek avvéxoμai. The ordinary signification of this word is, to be constrained, to be distressed. The Lord earnestly longed to finish his work; and yet, being true man, he was distressed by the terrible character of his future sufferings. The feelings of Jesus on the night before the Crucifixion in Gethsemane must have been felt in some measure whenever he contemplated his consummation. Some have likened the state of his mind to that of a childbearing woman. She desires the time of her delivery, that she may bring forth a child into the world, and yet she shudders at the pains of parturition. Of course, every act of the Incarnate Word is more or less a mystery. There is an infinite distance between the Divinity and humanity, and yet they come so close in Jesus.

The fifty-first, fifty-second and fifty-third verses of Luke exactly correspond to the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth verses of the tenth chapter of Matthew, and they have already been explained in our Commentary, Vol. II.

LUKE XII. 54-59

54. And he said to the multitudes also: When ye see a cloud rising in the west, straightway ye say: There cometh a shower; and so it cometh to pass.

55. And when ye see a south wind blowing, ye say: There will be a scorching heat; and it cometh to pass.

56. Ye hypocrites, ye know how to interpret the face of the earth and the heaven, but how is it that ye know not how to interpret this time?

57. And why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?

58. For as thou art going with thine adversary before the magistrate, on the way give diligence to be quit of him; lest haply he drag thee unto the judge, and the judge shall deliver thee to the officer, and the officer shall cast thee into prison.

come out

58. Ὡς γὰρ ὑπάγεις μετὰ τοῦ ἀντιδίκου σου ἐπ' ἄρχοντα, ἐν τῇ ὁδῷ δὸς ἐργασίαν καὶ ἀπηλλάχθαι αὐτοῦ, μήποτε κατασύρῃ σε πρὸς τὸν κριτὴν, καὶ ὁ κριτής σε παραδώ σει τῷ πράκτορι, καὶ ὁ πράκτωρ σε βαλεῖ εἰς τὴν φυλακήν.

59. I say unto thee: Thou 59. Λέγω σοι: Οὐ μὴ ἐξέλθης shalt by no means ἐκεῖθεν ἕως καὶ τὸ ἔσχατον λεπτὸν thence, till thou have paid the ἀποδῷς. very last mite.

In the preceding discourse Christ had directed his words to his disciples; but here he addresses the multitudes and the tenor of his speech is severer. It is not necessary to seek a close nexus between this part of the discourse and that which precedes. Not all the words of Jesus have been written, and many times the order of the account is merely the work of the narrator. Not even of Luke could we say that his grouping of events is always chronological.

The great error of the Jews was the failure to acknowledge the Messiah, when he came. The signs of the times clearly indicated that the Messiah had come. But the Jews closed their eyes to the truth. Though the mode of illustration is slightly different, the substance of the fifty-fourth, fifty-fifth 'and fifty-sixth verses of the present passage of Luke correspond to the second and third verses of the sixteenth chapter of Matthew. A full exposition of them will be found in the Second Volume of our Commentary.

In the fifty-seventh verse, Jesus chides the Jews for their dishonesty. Theirs was the worst kind of dishonesty; it was that species of dishonesty that will not acknowledge the evident truth. The proofs of Jesus' true character were so convincing that they could not with honest consciences reject him. Hence, they rejected the truth and Jesus. This same species of falsity exists to-day in the enemies of the Catholic Church; it is inspired by the same evil spirit. The logical reasoning of an hour ought to convince a man that if Christ ever founded a