xvii. 10), and, in the employment of the gifts intrusted to him by God,

a steward of injustice, οἰκονόμος τῆς ἀδικίας, may best atone for this pervading unfaithfulness by lenity and beneficence towards his fellow-men, and may by their intervention procure a place in heaven. It is true that the beneficence of the fictitious steward is a fraud; but we must abstract this particular, as, in the case of two previous parables, we have to abstract the lukewarmness of the friend, and the injustice of the judge: nay, the necessity for such an abstraction is intimated in the narrative itself, for from v. 8 we gather that what the steward did in a worldly spirit is, in the application, to be understood in a more exalted sense of the children of light. Certainly, if we suppose the words, He that is faithful in that which is least, etc. (10–12) to have been uttered in their present connexion, it appears as if the steward were set forth as a model, deserving in some sense or other the praise of faithfulness; and when (v. 13) it is said that no servant can serve two masters, the intended inference seems to be that this steward had held to the rightful one. Hence we have expositions such as that of Schleiermacher, who under the master understands the Romans; under the debtors, the Jewish people; under the steward, the publicans, who were generous to the latter at the expense of the former; thus, in the most arbitrary manner, transforming the master into a violent man, and justifying the steward. [968] Olshausen carries the perversion of the parable to the extreme, for he degrades the master, who, by his judicial position evidently announces himself as the representative of God, into ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμου τούτου, the prince of this world, while he exalts the steward into the image of a man who applies the riches of this world to spiritual objects. But as in the moral (v. 9) the parable has a consistent ending; and as inaccurate association is by no means unexampled in Luke; it is not admissible to concede to the following verses any influence over the interpretation of the parable, unless a close relation of idea can be made manifest. Now the fact is, that the very opposite, namely, the most perplexing diversity, exists. Moreover, it is not difficult to show what might have seduced Luke into a false association. In the parable there was mention of the mammon of unrighteousness, μαμωνᾶς τῆς ἀδικίας; this suggested to him the saying of Jesus, that he who proves faithful in the ἀδίκῳ μαμωνᾷ, the unrighteous mammon, as that which is least, may also have the true riches committed to his trust. But the word mammon having once taken possession of the writer’s mind, how could he avoid recollecting the well-known aphorism of Jesus on God and Mammon, as two incompatible masters, and adding it (v. 13), however superfluously, to the preceding texts? [969] That by this addition the previous parable was placed in a thoroughly false light, gave the writer little concern, perhaps because he had not seized its real meaning, or because, in the endeavour completely to disburthen his evangelical meaning, he lost all solicitude about the sequence of his passages. It ought, in general, to be more considered, that those of our Evangelists who, according to the now prevalent opinion, noted down oral traditions, must, in the composition of their writings, have exerted their memory to an extent that would repress the activity of reflection; consequently the arrangement of the materials in their narratives is governed by the association of ideas, the laws of which are partly dependent on external relations; and we need not be surprised to find many passages, especially from the discourses of Jesus, ranged together for the sole cause that they happen to have in common certain striking consonant words.

If from hence we glance back on the position, that the parable of the unjust steward must have been spoken in connexion with the foregoing one of the prodigal son, we perceive that it rests merely on a false interpretation. According to Schleiermacher, it is the defence of the publicans against the Pharisees, that forms the bond; but there is no trace of publicans and Pharisees in the latter parable. According to Olshausen, the compassionate love of God, represented in the foregoing parable, is placed in juxtaposition with the compassionate love of man, represented in the succeeding one; but simple beneficence is the sole idea on which the latter turns, and a parallel between this and the manner in which God meets the lost with pardon, is equally remote from the intention of the teacher and the nature of the subject. The remark (v. 14) that the Pharisees heard all these things, and, being covetous, derided Jesus, does not necessarily refer to the individuals mentioned