of the benefit of its fertility. But the cause of the mission of the servants next in order, is not only this consideration, but the additional necessity imposed by the failure of the first mission, to make renewed attempts for the attainment of the same object. The claim of the owner to his own share of the fruits of the vineyard remained the same, whether it was acknowledged by the husbandmen or not; but when it had once been made by him, and once rejected by them, if it was not to be abandoned altogether, the failure of the first application would necessarily lead to a second. Had the first messenger succeeded, there would have been no occasion for another; much less, if the ministry of the servants previously had been found sufficient for the desired effect, would it have been necessary to enforce the same object at last, by the mission of the son. In all these cases, the failure of a preceding experiment, leads to the adoption of a fresh expedient, in the hope of better success; there being no alternative, under the circumstances of the case, except one of these three; either to abandon the prosecution of the claims of the lord of the vineyard, with the first refusal of the husbandmen to acknowledge them, or to return and inflict summary punishment upon them, for the first display of their dishonesty and breach of faith, or if they were yet to be borne with, in the hope of being brought to a sense of their duty at last, to reinforce the same demands by a repetition of similar messages.

If, then, the conduct attributed to the husbandmen, in the reception which they give both to the original demands of the owner, and still more to

every subsequent reiteration of his claims, should be objected to, as unnatural and improbable; unnatural we may well allow it to be, in the sense of ungrateful, and wicked; but improbable, much less impossible, we cannot believe it. No representation can properly be considered improbable, which is agreeable to an actual matter of fact; and it would be abundantly sufficient to justify the circumstances of the fictitious history, in all that relates to the conduct of the husbandmen, monstrous and unnatural as it may appear, that they who are represented by these husbandmen, did actually pursue the line of conduct ascribed to them, in their behaviour to those who are to be understood by the servants. But, indeed, the testimony of daily experience is enough to prove that there is no degree of wickedness to which men, when left to themselves, and to the influence of their own evil passions, may not gradually be brought. The circumstances in which, from the time of the personal departure of the owner, the husbandmen were placed, by relieving them from all sense of present responsibility, and all apprehension of future ill consequences, were liable to make them forgetful of the nature of their tenure, or indifferent to the obligations imposed by it; and might dispose them to treat the very mention of the claims of a master, with ridicule and contempt, if not with violence and outrage. The mere sense of honour, the unassisted force of principle, is but a weak and inadequate restraint, when opposed by the temptation of immediate gain, encouraged by the prospect of impunity. The owner of the vineyard was gone away, and had been now long absent; and for ought which appeared to the contrary, might never return.

His vineyard had been all this time in possession of the husbandmen; and undisturbed possession might seem to have made it their own. Its nominal owner, if he was still in being, was asserting his claim to it not in person, but by messengers; and that was some argument, that he could not, or would not, come back to assert it himself. His messengers had not the power or authority of a master over his tenants; and if they could not give effect to their mission by the mere weight of character, and the deference due to the relation which they supported towards their master, they might be defied and insulted with impunity. Besides, the first step, in a series of crimes, ordinarily speaking, is the most difficult of commission; and if that can be got over, the rest will follow, almost as matter of Let the husbandmen but once have been capable of treating the first of their landlord's messengers, with scorn and contempt, and their conduct towards the rest is easily accounted for-even while it proceeds from insult to violence, and from scorn and contempt, to personal injury, and death itself. The same principle which led to the first instance of such conduct, could not fail to instigate to the rest, if for no other purpose than to justify and bear out its own act: and like the motion of a body, once put into motion, gathering violence by its own momentum, the longer such conduct continued, the more outrageous it was likely to become.

course.

The causes then, which the history assigns for the effect in question, are such as might have produced it, improbable and extraordinary as it may appear the desire of unjust gain, and the hope of impunity; the former excited by the present pos

session of a valuable property, which though belonging to another, these men were determined to make their own, and believed they had an opportunity of doing so; the latter encouraged by the personal absence of its owner, and the presumptive assurance that he could not or would not return to claim it. That it was no forgetfulness of their relation to the owner of the property, or of the terms on which they had been put into possession of it—but on the contrary, a deliberate violation of their engagement, and of the sense of their duty, founded in such considerations as these, appears plainly from the circumstance that they knew the servants of the master to stand in their proper relation to him, even while they refused to acknowledge them as the representatives of his rights; and when conspiring and carrying into effect the death of his son, they still admitted that the inheritance of the vineyard was his, and could not be securely made their own, except by his death.

And if the part ascribed to the owner of the vineyard should be objected to, on similar grounds, as exceeding the bounds of probability in point of forbearance, under so many, and such reiterated provocations; that too may be defended on the same principle, that the part ascribed to him, however unlikely in itself, was the part actually sustained in a real matter of fact, by the person who is represented as the owner of the vineyard, towards those who are represented by the husbandmen. Independent of any such correspondence, however, the credibility of the parabolic narrative in this respect, may be vindicated on its own grounds, if it be only

No

admitted that, to the honour of human nature, there may be dispositions in which gentleness, placability, and forbearance, are capable of predominating as much and as constantly on the one hand, as rudeness, ingratitude, and liability to provoke, on the other. Nor can it be doubted that whether purposely designed for the explanation of his conduct, or not, these properties in the character of the principal personage, are singularly contrasted with the opposite qualities in that of the subordinate. account indeed can be given of the conduct of the owner of the vineyard, from the time that his just claims met with so unexpected a reception from the husbandmen-which does not resolve itself into the effect of unwearied patience, struggling with persevering obstinacy while it was possible for long-suffering to bear with provocation, and forgiveness to keep pace with aggression. Had it been practicable for any degree of condescension, conciliation, and indulgence, to have overcome stubbornness, insolence, rudeness, and inhumanity, which were not absolutely insuperable, the gentleness of the landlord must have achieved this victory over the obstinacy of the tenants. Let us make what allowance we may for the natural partiality which he may be supposed to have entertained for the objects of his own selection-and the natural unwillingness which he might have felt to dispossess them of a privilege of his own bestowing, without the most urgent necessity; this necessity might well be supposed to have made itself felt, and to have more than sufficed to overcome an unwillingness founded in such a motive as that-when the perverseness of the husbandmen had led them to turn a deaf ear to the de