The unspoken comment of many of us as we read or hear a parable from the Gospels is ‘This is ideal and good; but very unpractical'. It certainly does not seem to fit in with the world as we know it; our twentieth-century, fast-moving’ commercial world would seem an unsympathetic place for the practice of the Christian virtues. I think the truth really is however that it is all too practical, and in our more sincere moments we know that it is only the Christian virtue which is found in the most unlikely places, which keeps the world in existence at all.

The story of the Good Samaritan is of course a story made up to point a moral: it has its deliberate artistic exaggeration. To begin with our Lord chooses a Samaritan as the hero of his story, because the Samaritans were in the eyes of the Jews highly unpopular neighbours.