Matthew 25:5

5. The bridegroom tarried While the judgment day remained in the distance. It is a view on which the New Testament is emphatic, and which false interpretation at the present day has very much obscured, that the final judge is ready, is waiting, is on the point of coming, and so is to be expected, to be looked for, to be prepared for.

They all slumbered and slept The living wait for the Son of man in life, the dead in death.

The following extract from Ward’s View of the Hindoos will in some degree illustrate the circumstances of this parable: “At a marriage the procession of which I saw some years ago, the bridegroom came from a distance, and the bride lived at Serampore, to which place the bridegroom was to come by water. After waiting two hours, at length, near midnight, it was announced, as if in the very words of Scripture, ‘Behold the bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet him.’ All the persons employed now lighted their lamps, and ran with them in their hands to fill up their stations in the procession; some of them had lost their lamps, and were unprepared, and it was then too late to seek them, and the cavalcade moved forward to the house of the bride, at which place the company entered a large and splendidly illuminated area before the house, covered with an awning, where a great multitude of friends, dressed in their best apparel, were seated upon mats. The bridegroom was carried in the arms of a friend and placed upon a superb seat in the midst of the company, where he sat a short time and then went into the house, the door of which was immediately shut and guarded by sepoys. I and others expostulated with the doorkeeper, but in vain. Never was I so struck with our Lord’s beautiful parable as at this moment. ‘And the door was shut!’ I was exceedingly anxious to be present while the marriage formulas were repeated, but was obliged to depart in disappointment.”

In this case the nuptials took place at the bride’s house; in the case of the parable at the bridegroom’s; as appears from the foolish virgins being excluded by him. Matthew 25:12.