right that the weak should accept that help. The rule must work both ways. If there are to be givers, there must be recipients. Most men belong more or less to both classes. It is possible for a man to belong altogether to one class. To be altogether a giver, or to be altogether a receiver, is hardly to be borne. But if I find myself altogether in either class, there presses upon me again that law of love which binds together the human brotherhood.

There are few households which have not, or shall not have, beneath the roof, someone dependent, through misfortune, or sickness, or age, upon the ministrations of others. The dependent one has the hardest part to play, because it is the passive part. But his part is important to the life of the whole. It would be easier for such to endure their lot if they could realize this, if they could view the situation with sufficient detachment to see how character develops through service, and how surely a benediction descends upon the home where self-sacrifice enters into the pressing, daily thought of all its inmates.

What luminous reflection would stream back upon the past, if the tired sufferer,

delivered at last from earthly life, could revisit the scene of his anguish, to know how sincerely he is missed and mourned, and how the end of the long ministry of love is regarded not with a view to the lifting of a burden, but as the end of a term of privilege and joy!

XIII.

UNSOUGHT RESPONSIBILITIES.

When the King came in to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment; and he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then said the King to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness.-S. MATTHEW Xxii, 11-13.

WE ARE told in a parable that a certain king, indignant that his invited guests refuse to attend the nuptials of his princely son, sends forth his servants into the highways to find him other guests, inviting all without discrimination, whomsoever they may meet, bad and good, workmen and loaftrs, travelers and beggars. Men who never dream of social preferment find themselves suddenly bidden to be the guests of the great king in the palace hall. The invitation is almost a royal command. When the hour of the marriage-feast arrives the hall is filled with a motley concourse of impromptu banqueters. They are second-hand guests, a horde of social substitutes.

When they are all assembled, the king comes in to see the guests. His purpose seems further than to extend a welcome. It is almost a military inspection. For the king, in his rounds, suddenly halts before a man who has not properly arrayed himself for the occasion. He alone has dared to enter the royal presence just as he was when the invitation came to him, clad in the worn and dusty garments of the street. "Friend," says the king, "how camest thou in hither, not having a wedding garment?"

A terrible silence falls upon the company. All eyes are turned upon the wretched man without a wedding garment. He has nothing to say in his defense. He is speechless. Or, better to translate the original, he is "muzzled," or "gagged," perhaps with terror and shame. He makes no excuse for himself. One's sympathies are inclined to make excuses for him. Perhaps he has no wedding garment. Or, perhaps, if he has one, it never occurred to him that the hasty and informal invitation called for formal dress. He had not asked to be invited. Why should the king compel him to come, and then find fault with his clothes? But, whatever arguments flash through his mind, the man without a

wedding garment stands speechless. "Bind him hand and foot," cries the king, "and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness."

This parable tends to stir in the reader, or hearer, a latent sense of protest against injustice. The strongest proof of this, aside from one's own feeling about it, is that the modern commentators upon Holy Scripture are agreed in the attempt to explain away the injustice. They declare that it was the custom of oriental kings to provide wedding garments for their invited guests at a marriage. The crime of the man without a wedding garment, therefore, was not that he failed to provide himself with proper apparel. It was that, when the king had provided for him the garment suitable to the occasion, this ragamuffin strode past the king's servants who proffered it, and all unkempt, and unwashed, and disheveled, entered the glittering presence chamber of royalty. In this view, the man's action would not only have been grossly insolent; since his host was the king, he thereby declared himself an anarchist. He brought upon his own head the punishment which followed.