Luke 15:14-16

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The liberty of self-enjoyment is not unlimited, as the sinner would fain think; it has limits of two kinds: the one pertaining to the individual himself, such as satiety, remorse, the feeling of destitution and abjectness resulting from vice (when he had spent all); the other arising from certain unfavourable outward circumstances, here represented by the famine which occurs at this crisis, that is, domestic or public calamities which complete the subduing of the heart which has been already overwhelmed, and further, the absence of all divine consolation. Let those two causes of misery coincide, and wretchedness is at its height. Then happens what Jesus calls ὑστερεῖσθαι, to be in want, the absolute void of a heart which has sacrificed everything for pleasure, and which has nothing left but suffering. We can hardly avoid seeing, in the ignoble dependence into which this young Jew falls under a heathen master, an allusion to the position of the publicans who were engaged in the service of the Roman power. But the general idea which corresponds to this touch is that of the degrading dependence, in respect of the world, to which the vicious man always finds himself reduced in the end. He sought pleasure, he finds pain; he wished freedom, he gets bondage. The word ἐκολλήθη has in it something abject; the unhappy wretch is a sort of appendage to a strange personality. To feed swine, the last business for a Jew. Κεράτιον denotes a species of coarse bean, used in the East for fattening those animals. At Luke 15:16, the Alex. Mjj. are caught in the very act of purism; men of delicate taste could not bear the gross expression, to fill the belly with...There was therefore substituted in the public reading the more genteel term, to satisfy himself with...; and this correction has passed into the Alex. text. The act expressed by the received reading is that, not of relishing food, but merely of filling a void. The smallest details are to the life in this portraiture.

During this time of famine, when the poor herdsman's allowance did not suffice to appease his hunger, he was reduced to covet the coarse bean with which the herd was carefully fattened, when he drove it home: the swine were in reality more precious than he. They sold high, an image of the contempt and neglect which the profligate experiences from that very world to which he has sacrificed the most sacred feelings.