“You may say, why does he not send them a message,” he was saying, “to tell them he is there waiting for them. But that is just what he does do. He is constantly sending out messengers to tell them to come in,” he went on. “But they mostly laugh at them. ‘It’s not likely,’ they say, ‘a man like that would trouble his head about such as us, even if we were his children!’ And are some of you thinking inside now, ‘We wouldn’t do that! We should be only too glad to believe it’? But there’s the rub. These children who won’t go into the house are just like you—they won’t do anything about it. Why, here I am, sent to you with this very message, and you fancy I am only talking without meaning. I am one of those who have been in the house and have found my father to be oh so grand! And I have come out again to tell you that if you go in, you will have the same kindness that I have had. All the servants of the house will rejoice over you with music and dancing—so glad that you have come home. But you will not take the trouble to go.

“There are certain things required of you when you go,” he went on. “Perhaps you are too lazy or dirty in your habits to want to do such things. I have known some to refuse to scrape their shoes when they went in, and then complain loudly that they were refused admittance. A fine house it would be if they were allowed to run in and out as they pleased! In a few months the grand beautiful house would be as wretched and dirty as the houses they live in now. Those are the people that keep grumbling about not being rich. They want to loaf about and drink and be a nuisance to everybody. They think it hard they should not be able to do just as they please with everything that takes their fancy, when they would do nothing but break and spoil it, and make it no good to anybody. Their father, who can do whatever he sees fit, is not one to let such disagreeable children work what mischief they like! He is a better father than that. And the day is coming when, if he can’t get them to mind him any other way, he will put them where they will be ten times more miserable than ever they were at the worst time of their lives, and make them mind. Out of the same door whence came the messengers to ask them in, he will send dogs and bears and lions and tigers and wild cats out upon them.

“I daresay, some of you will say, ‘But that’s not the sort of thing we care about. We know you’re just dressing up religion in your little fable about the beautiful house, and we don’t need it.’ I know this is not the kind of thing some of you care for. I know the kind of thing you do care for—low, dirty things. You are like a child that prefers mud and the gutter to all the beautiful toys in a grand shop. But though these things are not the things you want, they are the things you need. And the time will come when you will say, ‘Ah, what a fool I was not to look at the precious things and take them when they were offered me!’”