^ PRINCETON, N. J. 5/^^^. Division . . . pJIj. .sJ. .^. . W. ^ \ NwTiber THE Unity of the New Testament. A SYNOPSIS OF THE FIRST THREE GOSPELS AND OF THE EPISTLES OF ST. JAMES, ST. JUDE, ST. PETER, ST. PAUL, TO WHICH IS ADDED A COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLE TO HEBREWS. FREDERICK DENISON 'MAURICE, M. A., CHAPLAIN OF LINCOLN'S *INN. " Search the Scriptures ; for in them ye think ye have eternal life : and they are they which testify of Me. — St. John. (FIRST AMERICAN EDITION.) BOSTON: LEE & SHEPARD, Publishers. NEW YORK: CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM. Su illemoriam. THIS VOLUME, NOT OF COMMENTARIES ON, BUT OF STUDIES INTO, THE CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURES, IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, BY THE AMERICAN MAURICE MEMORIAL UNION, WHO HAVE FOUND " HIS METHOD" OF INQUIRING INTO THE REVELATION OF HIMSELF, THAT THE FATHER OF SPIRITS HAS MADE, IN MATERIAL NATURE, HUMAN LIFE ; AND SACRED SCRIPTURE, A-N ENLIGHTENING, COMFORTING, AND QUICKENING INFLUENCE, WHOSE BLESSING THEY WOULD FAIN SPREAD AND PERPETU- ATE, TO AID IN CONSECRATING THE NATION WHICH ESPECIALLY ASPIRES To IDENTIFY Liberty and Law. THE AMERICAN MEMBERS OF MAURICE MEMORIAL UNION. Mrs. Augustus Hemmenway, 40 Mt. Vernon st. Miss Anna C. Lowell, Central St., Roxbury. Rev. E. A. Washburn, D.D., Fourth av. and 2ist St., New York. Rev. Samuel Osgood, D.D., 154 W. nth st., New York. Rev. R. Heber Newton, 33 E. 83d st., N.Y. Rev. R. M. Kirby, Salt Lake City, Utah. Rev. E H. Porter, Pawtucket, R.L Rev. Walter W. Williams, New York. Rev. L. G. Stevens, St. Stephens' Rectory, N. Brunswick. Rev- John Weaver. Rev. Thos. B. Wells, Painesville, Ohio Rev. Wm. Lloyd Himes, South Groveland, Mass. Rev. J. N. Mulford, Troy, N.Y. Rev. John P. Appleton, Boontown, N.J. Rev. Frederic T. Webb, Council Bluffs, Iowa. Rev. Alexander Mackay Smith, South Boston. Rev. Leonidas Coyle, Bridgeton, N.J. Rev. G. F. Flichener, Newark, N.J. Rev. Charles R. Baker, 244 Washington av., Brooklyn, N. Y. Rev. Edward T. Bartlett, Matteawan, Dutch- ess Co., N.Y. Rev. T. S- Pycott, 2 Bible House, New York. Rev. John W. Kramer, 259 W. nth st., N.Y- Rev. Edward L. Stoddard, Jersey City Heights, N.J. Rev. Brockholst Morgan, Portchester, N.Y. Rev. John Wm. Payne, Englewood, N.J. Rev. James S- Bush, West Brighten, Staten Island, N.Y. Rev. E. W. Donald, Wash. Heights, N.Y- Rev. J. N. Gallaher, Madison av. and 38th St., N.Y. Rev. A. Sidney Dealy, Passaic, N.J. Rev. G. G. Perrine, Cape Vincent, Jefferson Co., N.Y. Rev. J. H. Rylance, 11 Livingston Place, New York. Rev. W. P. Tucker, Pawtucket, R.I. Rev. J.T. Franklin. Middlebury, Vt. Rev. James Stoddard, Watertown, Ct. Rev. W. G. Andrew, New Haven, Ct. Andrew D. White, LL.D., President of Cor- nell University, Ithaca, N-Y. F. A. Barnard, President of Columbia College, N.Y. Rev. Charles H. Bixby, Wakerfield, R.I. Rev. A. D. Mayor, Springfield, Mass., and in the name of the late Rev. Thomas Starr King, San Francisco, Cal.* Rev. Ebenezar Thompson, Stevens Point, Portage Co., Ind. Rev. T. L. Maxwell, Montclair, N-J. Rev. W. B. Trench, Wooster, Ohio. Rev. Cornelius B. Smith, 137 E- 31st St., New York. Rev. R. H. McKim, 27 W. 27th st., N.Y. Rev. C. C. Tiffany, 59 W. 38th st., New York. Rev. Thomas S. Yocum, Richmond, Staten Island, N.Y. Rev. Arthur Brooks, Madison av. and 35th st., New York. Rev. J. F. Garrison, Camden, N.J. Rev. William N. McVicar, 2007 DeLancey Place, Philadelphia. Rev. Henry Stuart, 512 S. 4th st., Philadel- phia. Rev. H. Forrester. Rev. C. W. Duane, Swedesboro', N.J. Rev. R. N. Thomas, 112 N. 19th St., Phila- delphia. Miss C. Agnes Meredith, 1830 De Lancey Place, Philadelphia. Mrs. Wyatt, 221 Maryland av., Baltimore, and Mrs. Louis Wistar, in the name of the late Philip P. Randolph, 321 S- 4th St., Phila- delphia.* Mrs. H. Elden, Vineland, N-J. Miss Lucy M. Raymond, Providence, R.I. Elezabeth R. Peabody, Concord, Mass. Rev. W. W. Newton, Rector of St. Paul's, Boston. Prof. R. E. Thompson, University of Penn- sylvania, Philadelphia. Miss Wales, 19 Brimmer St., Boston. * Both with their lips and lives these two remarkable men confessed their spiritual debt to Maurice for inspiration and peace- EXTRACT FROM THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE. This book is precisely what its name denotes it to be — a Synopsis. It does not profess to be a commentary, though each book is considered with some carefulness, and though I have often drawn the reader's attention to even minute points which I thought illustrated the writer's design. But my object was not to explain texts. I believe the force of particular sen- tences is not really felt, unless we can connect them with the purpose of the book in which they are found. I have sought for this purpose in each Gospel and Epistle which I have examined. I have desired still more earnestly to show that they have one common subject ; that they refer to a Living Person ; that when considered in relation to him they have a unity which we can discover by no collation of paragraphs. # * * I have not troubled the reader much with what are called practical questions : first, because I have always found them very unpractical ; secondly, because I do not think it is reverent to make use of the Bible for the purpose of pointing a moral or adorning a tale of ours. I believe it contains a revelation. I desire to ask what it reveals. F. D. M. CONT UNITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. LECTURE I. PART I. SUBJECTS COMMON TO THE THREE EVANGELISTS. PAGE. Introduction ^ The Preaching of John 9 The Temptation I5 The Preaching of Jesus I7 CaUing of the Disciples i8 The Miracles 19 Publicans and Pharisees. The New and Old Garment . 25 The Appointment of the Apostles 29 The Sabbath-Day 3^ The Parables 34 Herod hearing of Christ 40 The Sign from Heaven 41 The Leaven of the Sects 43 Peter's Confession • 45 Taking up the Cross '47 The Transfiguration • 5° The Epileptic Boy 52 Prophecy of the Passion 53 The Greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven ... .53 Divorce 5^ Blessing the Little Children 58 The Temptations of the Rich Man ..... 59 The Temptation of the Poor Man 63 The Going up to Jerusalem 65 The Descent from the Mount of Olives . . . .66 Jesus going into the Temple 69 The Baptism of John 71 Paying Tribute to Caesar 72 The Sadducees and the Resurrection . . . . . . 74 What think ye of Christ ? 77 The Prophecy of the Last Days .78 The Passover 97 The Betrayal ^ 9^ (vii) Vlll CONTENTS. The Feast 99 The Lord's Supper loo The Warning to Peter 102 The Agony 103 The Betrayal and Apprehension. The Sanhedrim. Peter's Denial 105 Christ the King. The Arraignment before Pilate . . 108 The Crucifixion . . . . . . . . ill The Burial .112 The Resurrection 113 LECTURE I. PART II. Differences of the Evangelists . . . ♦ uS St. Matthew 119 St. Mark . . - 155 St. Luke 160 LECTURE II. ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, EPISTLES OF ST. JAMES, ST. JUDE, ST. PETER, AND ST. PAUL. Acts of the Apostles 213 Epistle of St. James 221 " " Jude 232 St. Peter. First Epistle 233 " Second Epistle 238 St. Paul 246 Epistle to the Romans 248 First Epistle to the Corinthians . ... 279 Second Epistle to the Corinthians .... 335 Epistle to the Galatians 345 " " Ephesians 360 " " Phihppiaos 3^5 " " Colossians 392 First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians . . 408 The Pastoral Epistles 431 First Epistle to Timothy 435 ^recond Epistle to Timothy ..... 452 Epistle to Titus 459 Epistle to Philemon 462 Conclusion ' . . . 464 CONTENTS. ix THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. LECTURE L How THE New Testament Fulfills the Old . . 470 PAGE. LECTURE IL The Divine Education of the Jews .... 492 LECTURE HL The Filial Dispensation 511 N.B.— All these lectures were delivered on the foundation of Bishop Warburton, and those on the Epistle to the Hebrews several years before those on the Unity of the New Testament. The interesting Essay on Development which makes the preface to the English Edition of the commentary we are compelled to omit on account of its great length. THE UNITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. LECTURE I. MARK I. I. The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. In these Lectures I propose to make a threefold division of the New Testament Scriptures. I shall begin with the first three Gospels : I shall go on to the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter, and St. Paul, connecting the Acts of these Apostles with their writings ; I shall then consider all the books which are as- cribed to St. John. It may seem a strange, almost a monstrous, undertaking, to treat of such subjects within the space that I can allot to them. I am thankful for the limitation of that space. For the purpose which I propose to myself a large field would be a temptation rather than an advsntage. I desire to inquire whether there is a leading truth which goes through these documents, which binds them together, which explains the differences of their form, and their ajoparent incongruities. Such a truth, if it exists, ought to present itself to us on their very surface. It should bear to be tested by minute criticism, but yet it should reveal itself in the general course of the narrative, in the enunciation 2 LECTURE I. of the discourse. No ingenuity should be needed for the detec- tion of it ; the only business of the lecturer should be to show that this principle compels the reader to acknowledge a cohe- rency in these writings, even though his theories incline him to deny it. But if this is all that I hope to do, where lies the need of such an argument ? These books have been the food of Christian men in all lands for centuries ; learning has been exhausted upon them ; harmonists, apologists, commentators, have devoted themselves to the defence and exposition of them. Must not the very suggestion, that the principle upon which they are writ- ten requires to be brought to light in the year 1846, involve either a sentence upon their truthfulness, or upon the sanity of the person who presumes to illustrate them ? I think so. If the principle which I am proposing to set forth has never been expressed in any of the Creeds of Chris- tendom, or has only occupied a subordinate place in them — has never been felt to be the central one upon which every proposi- tion in them is based — if this principle has had no influence upon the order and constitution of society in Christendom, if doctors, and schoolmen, and commentators are now to be in- formed of it for the first time, I confess at once that it cannot be what I pretend that it is, a key to the interpretation of Scrip- ture, and to some of the greatest difficulties that have beset the recent study of it. But all that I desire to do is to bring forth into clearness and prominence, that which we are most of us professing to acknowledge, that which has determined, as I shall hope to show in some future lectures, the course of events and the formation of society in the modern world from the destruc- tion of Jerusalem down to the present time. It seems to me that we have gone astray in the study of Scripture, not from ex- cess of simplicity, but from excess of refinement, from looking to a distance for that which lies at our feet, from refusing to take words as they stand, and to believe that the writers meant what they say they meant. If so it may be a duty, a useful though a humble duty, to claim the books of the New Testament as a INTRODUCTION. 3 possession for the wayfarer. When he realizes that possession, he will, I am satisfied, be more ready than ever to confess his obligations to the scholar. I will at once explain what I mean by this statement. We commonly describe the first three Gospels as biographies of Jesus of Nazareth. We assume that they describe the different acts and discourses which showed Him to be the most perfect of men, the greatest of Prophets ; that they give an account of miracles which proved His mission to be divine ; that then by certain phrases and expressions of great value and significance, though scattered up and down the narratives, not forming the most prominent and obvious part of them, they claim for Him an altogether superhuman nature and origin. We say that it was reserved for the fourth Gospel to declare this nature and origin clearly and fully. We say that this fourth Gospel is far more than the rest a doctrinal Gospel, one from which the trans- cendent dogmas of the Creed have been deduced. We suppose that the main su'pport, however, of those dogmas is to be sought for in the Epistles, especially in the Epistles of St. Paul. We make the great difference between the Gospels and Epistles to consist in this, that the Epistles tell us what we are to believe, that the Gospels set before us the divine example of life and action. This distinction, it is admitted, is not strictly accurate ; the Epistles are practical as well as doctrinal, the Gospels em- body high doctrine as well as an image of holy practice. Still, it is held that the division is good enough for ordinary purposes ; it points out what are the leading characteristics which we are to look for in each class of writings. The Apocalypse, we are told, is less easy to define. Some would say it lies wholly be- yond the line within which the every-day Christian should con- fine his studies ; others affirm, that it is the development of a subject of great practical importance, less clearly treated of elsewhere — that second appearing of our Lord, which stands in such direct contrast to the humble appearance whereof the Gos- pels speak. I fancy that I have given a tolerably fair view of the current 4 LECTURE I. popular apprehensions in this countr}^, respecting the books which we all hold with more or less distinctness, to possess an authority and character different from all other books. I shall not enlarge upon views which have been adopted elsewhere by persons who deny their authority and inspiration altogether. But I wish you to remark that these views, even those which strike us as the most extravagant, start from the premiss on which our popular notions rest. The modern Tubingen school, which has carried its speculations respecting the contradictions of Apostles and Evangelists further than any other, which as- sumes a direct contrast between the spiritual school of Paul and the Judaical school of James, Peter, and John, which limits the genuine Epistles of St. Paul to four or five, which afhrms the book of Revelation to be really the work of St. John, because it is in direct opposition to St. Paul's doctrine ; which takes the fourth Gospel to be a work of the second century, one that for the first time established Christian theology upon an Alexan- drian basis ; this school has brought its erudition audits modern philosophy to explain those discrepancies in the character and primary object of the books of the New Testament, which it supposes us all tacitly to admit, though we may express ourselves in ambiguous language respecting them. Now I do not say that if the notions which our commentators, our apologists, and our harmonists, have sanctioned, those which have crept into our schools, and are more and more pervading all our minds, are admitted, there is 7io refuge except in tjie conclusions of Bauer and his disciples, or in some others which may grow out of them. But I must confess my opinion, that the conflict with the learning of these teachers will be a very hard one, and ultimately a very useless one, if we are not prepared to reconsider the grounds which we and they have in common. We may now and then defeat them in a war of posts ; they may be detected in perversions of ecclesiastical history, or in abuses of their critical skill ; but the on-lookers will regard it as a question for critics to settle among themselves. Without entering into it, or under- standing the arguments on either side, they will practically throw INTRODUCTION. 5 all their weight into the scale of the assailant ; for they will say, " You are resting your faith upon books which wise men, not positively repudiating Christianity, affirm to teach a number of different faiths. It requires much ecclesiastical lore to vindicate them, if you do vindicate them, from that charge. How can you ask ordinary laymen to take such books for the guide of their thoughts and actions as individuals and as members of society? Whatever they are, these books are not what our fathers deemed that they were." There might be more difficulty in arriving at this conclusion if no attempts had been made to explain the Gospel narratives upon a principle which is compatible with the utter rejection of them as historical documents. A long tradition and habit of feeling are great protections against mere critical ingenuity. People would say, " These documents must have some common meaning ; their opponents are bound to show what that is before they ask us to cast them aside." I need not tell you that the rationalist is aware of this demand, and is ready with an answer to it. A writer whose influence has been much more extensive among laymen and ordinary readers, than that of a more learned school like Bauer's can ever be, undertook to show, several years ago, what worth there might remain in the life of Jesus, though almost all the records of it were taken to be mere mythical sto- ries. " It exhibits," he said, " a great idea of humanity ; it is one of a number of experiments of the human spirit to conceive its own greatness and glory ; it explains that notorious tendency of men to raise their benefactors into kings and gods, of which the heathen records present so many examples. It came in at a time when other religions were worn out, and when there v/as an evident craving for something more general, more democratic than the old national faiths. Its rise and progress were alto- gether consistent with what one might have expected from our previous knowledge of the state of the world, and of the decay of that which had been most venerable in it. The Christian Mythology succeeded to the older Mythologies because it had a more comprehensive human basis, and because its falsehoods as 6 LECTURE I. well as its truths were adapted to the state of the period in which it appeared. It is not adapted," continue these Doctors, *' to the state of our age. There is the same decay visible in its influence, the same timidity and unbelief in its professors, which were to be seen in the Jewish and Heathen worlds at the time it was proclaimed. But there is also a power among philosophers, and even among ordinary men, of appreciating the beneficent and human idea of it, which has not existed in any former age. Now is the time when we may disentangle that idea from its sur- rounding elements, and may present it to the world as the last result and essence of the facts and doctrines to which they have for so many centuries given credence," No one, I think, can be so inattentive an observer of the thoughts and movements of our time, as to suppose that these words would have been uttered distinctly and formally by one man, if that which engendered them had not been working in the hearts of thousands. And therefore, whatever faith we may attach to the assertions of the divines of the country in which this doctrine was first openly propagated, that its teacher has not now any great influence over their schools, that he has long since been thrown into the distance by other and more rapid runners in his own direction, that he himself, and still more his followers, have seen the untenableness and impossibility of the half-faith which he tried for a while to preserve, we may yet re- main just as strongly convinced that all the reasonings of these orthodox divines, and even all the earnest faith which their rea- sonings imply, have not made the dogmas of Strauss insig- nificant to them or to us. If we look, we shall find that they are silently adopted by a very large class of thinking and half-think- ing people, not in one, but in every, section of our countrymen. We shall find that they have hold of the minds of the old as well as of the young, of the poor as well as of the rich. We shall find that they stand their ground against all the arguments which Paley and his school have urged in proof of the authen- ticity of the Divine Records ; nay, that they are brought forward in the most popular forms, and before the most humble audi- INTRODUCTION. / ences, as a triumphant evidence that these arguments are super- seded. Nay more, the propagators of this doctrine maintain that Christianity has gained in their hands, that they have more reverence for its principles and essential power than we have. They ask, what the narratives which our harmonists present us with, of journeys to Nazareth and Capernaum, are to the recog- nition which they make of the wonderful, living, divine Truth, in the maxims and the life of Jesus of Nazareth ? What our dry attempts to establish the greatness of His mission by mirac- ulous evidence are, to their ready acknowledgment that His moral teaching undermined more falsehood and established more truth than that of any other man ? What our endless debatings and controversies, to their recognition that He preached and ex- hibited an all-comprehending charity and humanity? I hope the existence and the prevalency of such thoughts may furnish some excuse to those who want it, for the inquiry into which I am now entering. I have said that I believe numbers of students of the Scriptures, starting from the belief that the Gospels are primarily records of our Lord's life as a Teacher of Nazareth, and that the Epistles and the fourth Gospel are the main witnesses to His Divinity, will end in the conclusions of Bauer respecting the essential diversity of the Gospels and Epis- tles. I say now that I think a number of practical people who can scarcely be called students at all, but who have just that habit of thought about the New Testament which characterizes our popular teaching, will fly to the system of Strauss, and will fancy for a time that they have gained in their religious sympa- thies and faith by the exchange. But as I believe that neither one of these classes nor the other knows what it will ultimately lose, I do not say in religious faith and sympathies only, but in the love of truth, in the acknowledgment of any moral basis for individual and social life, above all, in that humanity for which they are ready to sacrifice every thing else ; as I think that this Straussian doctrine is essentially feeble and narrow, in spite of all its pretensions, is* essentially destructive of all the blessings which the' Gospel has brought and will bring to the poor man, 8 LECTURE I. though it seems to be devised for his sake ; I do not care how much 1 lose of their respect, or of the respect of those who op- pose them, while I endeavor to resist their falsehood by confess- ing what seems to me a great and perilous one of our own. Instead of beginning from our Lord considered simply as the Man of Nazareth, it seems to me that the first three Gospels, just as much as the fourth, begin with assuming Him to be the Son of God, and the King of men. To show how He fulfilled these characters is their object. All the discourses and acts which they attribute to Him are simple and natural upon that hypothesis, unintelligible and incoherent upon any other. It will be the purpose of my first Lecture to make good these assertions, first from a consideration of those facts which are common to the three Gospels, then by an examination of their characteristic differences. In the next Lecture I shall endeavor to show that the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter, and St. Paul, illustrating and illustrated by the events recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, exhibit the Gospel of the Son of God and His Kingdom in another stage, and under three distinct aspects ; but just as personally, just as livingly as the Evangelists them- selves do. Finally, that the Gospel and Epistles of St. John harmonize those aspects of this Kingdom which we have traced in the other Evangelists, and in the other Apostles, and that the Apocalypse conducts the history to a crisis which all the other books had been prophesying of, a crisis which is the full mani- festation of the Son of God and His Kingdom, and shows that as it was the Kingdom which fulfilled the meaning of all Jewish institutions and prophecies, so it would be the real foundation of all human society after these institutions were dissolved. If the facts looked at in the most simple manner, should seem to bear out these conclusions, the arguments which Bauer and his school have used to prove the diversity and contradiction of the New Testament books, will establish their unity. The argu- ments which Strauss and his school have used to prove that they embody the conception of something transtendently human, will show that their basis is essentially divine. Finally, the belief of THE PREACHING OF JOHN. 9 their authority will not depend upon an acquaintance with old traditions, or upon our power of understanding ingenious special pleas, but upon the testimony of eighteen centuries, which will declare whether such a kingdom as that which the New Testa- ment says would come into existence, has come into existence or no. The last inquiry I have said belongs to another division of these Lectures : upon the former I enter to-day. When I make quotation's from records which occur in all the three Gospels, I shall take them from St. Matthew, because his is said to be emphatically the Ebionite Gospel, that which is most directly opposed to the doctrine of St. Paul, the teacher of the Gentiles. THE PREACHING OF JOHN. ist. The first announcement which is common to all the Evangelists is this : " In those days came John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of Judsea, and saying. Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The words " kingdom of heaven " meet us at the outset of our inquiry. They seem to be significant words. Possibly the description given of St. John's preaching and of his acts may help us to determine what their significance is. Those who suppose St. Matthew to have been a bigoted Jew, and merely to have engrafted a carnal Christianity upon his old Hebrew notions, will readily admit that he intended by this phrase an actual sovereignty. They will say at once that he derived his notion of that sovereignty from the Jewish Scrip- tures. He was dreaming of the restoration of the kingdom of David. He calls it a Kingdom of Heaven, because he believed its power was derived from the Lord God of Israel. He does not the less mean one that was to be established upon earth. These views of the phrase, I say, will be at once admitted as especially applicable to St. Matthew by those who give him the character which Neological critics assign him ; as applicable also to St. Mark, and in a somewhat less degree to St. Luke. I lO LECTURE I. cannot conceive how we can adopt any other conclusion. For a Jew to use this word Kingdom, and merely to intend by it what modern theologians intend when they speak of a " Christian dis- pensation," or a " divine and miraculous doctrine," is utterly impossible. Whatever notion any old Prophet attached to the words Divine Kingdom, when he spoke of it in connection with the son of Jesse, or with Solomon, or with Hezekiah, that we are bound to believe it must have borne in the mind of an Evan- gelist who had been bred up in the faith of these Books, and was thoroughly devoted to them. What sense then did these words bear when they were used by Isaiah or Jeremiah ? Did the kingdom of Solomon or of Hezekiah differ, according to their conceptions, from the king- dom of Pharaoh ^r of Hiram in this^ that it was more externally splendid ? I take the Jewish kingdom at the moment of its greatest magnificence, just when the temple had been built, in those days when no man counted silver any thing, when the treasures of the world were pouring into Jerusalem, Would not any one of the Prophets have felt that the glory of this kingdom consisted precisely, as it consisted at the time of its greatest op- pression,— when the armies of Sennacherib had destroyed all the fenced cities, and were laying siege to Zion, — in the fact that the visible king was a witness of an invisible one, in whom all the real dominion dwelt ? On what other ground than this do the exhortations of the Prophets to their countrymen, when any great calamity was threatening them, rest? Do they not tell them that they are not acknowledging the invisible King, that they have forgotten His covenant with them, that they are bow- ing down before visible things, stocks and stones ? Do they not tell them to return to Him from whom they have deeply re- volted ? Do they not declare that He is coming out of His place to show them that He is their King, and the Ruler over the whole earth ? Do they not say that whether the house of David, the people, the priests, trust him or not. He will prove Himself to be the King of kings and Lord of lords ? Does any one dream that this language, King of kings and Lord of lords, THE PREACHING OF JOHN. I I imports any thing less than this, or other than this, that He has dominion in a region which other kings are trying to reach, but cannot reach, that He sways the inner operations of nature, and orders the minds and wills of men ? Does any one doubt that the seer is calling upon his people to turn from their gross, vul- gar, slavish notions of mere external dominion, which were the root of all idolatry, to Him in whom all real, essential power dwelt without measure ? So only would they understand the difference between a king of Judaea and a king of Babylon. So only would they understand what that full and perfect kingdom was which all their sore discipline was to prepare them for. John, we are told, was clad in a raiment of • camel's hair, he had a leathern girdle about his loins, his meat was locusts and wild honey, he preachtd in the wilderness. All these signs surely testify that he, as much as any old Prophet, came to with- draw men from visible things to an invisible Ruler. His stern and simple words contain the very essence of the old propheti- cal discourse. The people felt that they did ; they went out into the wilderness to him. They asked him whether he was Elijah? They were sure that he had a message to the nation, and to each member of it. Their consciences responded to that mes- sage. They were not apparently bowing down before any idols, there was nothing in their circumstances to suggest a resem- blance between themselves and those whom Elijah called to renounce the worship of Baal. But their hearts confessed the resemblance ; they knew that they were idol-worshippers as much as their fathers had been. They knew that they, with their synagogues in every city, were as much apostatizing from the Lord God of Israel, as those who had their groves in every high place. John put their conviction to the test. He came baptizing with water. He called upon Jews to submit to a rite which admitted Gentiles to the privileges of the Temple-worship. They were to confess that they had need of purification. And what purification ? John spoke of it as of the most inward kind. It was for the remission of sins. He did not shrink 12 LECTURE I. from explaining the meaning of his own sign. The most hon- ored of the Jews were called a generation of vipers, were warned of a wrath to come, were told that they were not to say within themselves, We have Abraham to our father, for that God was able of those stones to raise up children unto Abraham. That no doubt might remain upon their minds whether this baptism. imiDorted the removal of some external defilements, or whether it denoted the most internal reformation, they were told that the axe was laid to the root of the trees, and that whatsoever did not bear good fruit would be hewn down and cast into the lire. All this language, I submit, is perfectly consistent with itself ; there are no symptoms of awkward patchwork in it, of some later refinement grafted upon a Judaical stock. Read it by the light of the Jewish Scriptures, by all means ; you cannot read it by any other. But that light will show that at a time when the •last gleam of native royalty had departed from Judaea, when it bore the most ignominious signs of a Roman province, when pretenders were continually arising who reminded the people of their ancient glories, and urged them to break the sceptre of the oppressor, there was a voice which spoke of the very kingdom which all devout Jewish rulers had acknowledged, as about to be manifested, which declared that to be the Kingdom of Heaven, because it was a kingdom over the inner man, over the spirit and heart, which insulted and set at nought all exclusive Jewish pretensions, at the very moment when it was asserting the great- ness of Jewish privileges, which announced a crisis as at hand which would shake the whole of society, as it then existed, to its centre. THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST. But say the three Evangelists, " John spake to the people, saying, I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance ; but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear ; He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost;" St. Matthew and St. Luke add, '' and with fire:' THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST. 1 3 Whether we introduce those words or leave them out, the main idea of the passage is clearly the same. The expression fire, and the words respecting the fan in the hand, which follow, bring before us more distinctly the vision of One coming to purge, to sift, to judge, of One who will penetrate through all appearances, whose work is with the inner heart of the society, and of the individual. But the words, " He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost," contain that meaning, and fix our thoughts upon the nature of the power which He of whom John spake would exercise. The call to repentance was the call to an in- ternal, spiritual act. John declares that the greater One will carry out perfectly that which he has done imperfectly, will strike more at the root of the tree than he had been able to strike, would show what his baptism meant, would give the energy which would enable men to do that and be that which he told them they must do and be. Let us never forget that these car- nal, Ebionitish, Jewish Gospels, make this the foundation of our Lord's history. The ground of it, according to them, lies in the proclamation — " He comes to baptize with the Spirit and with fire." I call your attention to this, as one of the most obvious, superficial indications of their common intention, one which it requires no skill to discover, one which the most careless reader cannot overlook. I call upon you to watch each step as we pro- ceed, and to say whether this superficial fact is not the indica- tion of something which goes through the heart of every narra- tive, and which it is just as rational to suppose was interpolated into them, as to suppose that a bricklayer interpolated the idea of the Parthenon. The story goes on, " Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jor- dan, unto John, to be baptized of him. But John forbade Him, saying, I have need to be baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me ? And Jesus answering said unto him. Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered Him. And Jesus when He was baptized went up straightway out of the water, and lo ! the heavens were opened unto Him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, 14 LECTURE I. and lighting upon Him ; and lo ! a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." What a central place this narrative occupied in the Gospel history, what importance it had in the scheme of Christian doc- trine, all the elder heretics perceived. Every Gnostic was bound to give his interpretation of it, and to connect it with his theory of the relation between the Jesus and the Christ. Those in modern days who reject the early chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke, are bound in consistency to regard this as the com- mencement of the Evangelical records. Assuredly neither the one nor the other can have erred in supposing that it did hold a most prominent place in the minds of the Gospel writers themselves, and that they connected with it all that they tell afterwards of our Lord's Ministry. No doubt they have found a plea in the narrative itself for maintaining their charge of car- nal and superstitious notions against these writers. If there are no visible signs of that which is invisible, if the belief of an actual Man being the Son of ^God is at once to be rejected as anthropomorphic, there need be no more debate upon the ques- tion ; it is settled, by one comprehensive peiitio priJicipii. But if not, plain men will not be hindered by being told that the form of a Dove or the Voice from Heaven are merely Jewish or Pagan methods of projecting outwardly certain processes or ex- periences of our own minds, from perceiving that this record carries us into that deep and inward ground which philosophy is always seeking to reach, but has never found. That King- dom of which John spoke as at hand, is declared to have its foundation in a living Person. He who had been always ruling it, is now revealed : " This is my beloved Son " is the revelation. It is of a Son of God, clothed with the Spirit of God that He may exercise dominion over the spiritual world and over all the inward powers of things, that the Evangelists are to testify. We are to see whether men so simple and brought up in so narrow a school, make good their magnificent pretensions ; whether they do not betray, by some exaltation of the mere human Friend and Teacher, the vanity and incoherency of their dream ; whether THE TEMPTATION. 15 they really speak as men would speak who were commissioned to set forth one who derived nothing from the accidents of His position on earth, every thing from his relation to a divine and invisible Father. THE TEMPTATION. The next step in the narrative bears the clearest marks, say all neological interpreters, of being mythical. It has nothing to do with the regular course of the story ; it has been introduced, like all legends of great heroes, to give the common events sig- nificance, whereas it really disturbs their sequence, and shows what a curious mosaic the composition is. I quite admit that if the Gospels are the history of the journeyings of Jesus of Naza- reth for one, or two, or three years, from Judaea to Galilee, from Galilee to Judsea — if it is by our skill in tracing out the times in which these took place and their coincidence with Jewish festi- vals, that we are to measure our knowledge of the facts of the Gospel history and of their relation to each other — the Tempta- tion stands awkwardly in our way. If, on the other hand, we take the history of the-Baptism to be what it seems to be j if Jesus was then declared to be the Son of God, if He was sealed with the Spirit, there seems precisely that connection between the history in the third and fourth chapters of St. Matthew, which the composers of our Litany recognized. " Thou art the Son of God," is the assertion of the Baptism ; "if Thou be the Son of God," is the form of the Temptation. He is endued with the filial Spirit ; he wrestles with the Spirit of disobedience. He will not separate Himself from Man by making stones into bread for Himself ; for Man is to live by every word of God. He will not cast Himself from a pinnacle of the Temple ) for it is writ- ten, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." He will not take the kingdoms of the world from Satan ; for it is writ- ten, " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God." The idea of a Son claiming nothing for Himself, in all things trusting His Father, obeying His Father, is surely brought out here with a clearness, definiteness, simplicity, an absence of all pomp of l6 LECTURE T. words, of all the ordinary accidents and coloring of a legend, which is at least very very strange. The idea of a spiritual con- flict, of a battle with a spiritual foe, is surely set out with a free- dom from the material appliances of the most vulgar as well as of the greatest artists, which you would scarcely be prepared for in a Jev;ish tax-gatherer ; still less if the story of that Jewish tax-gatherer was afterwards embellished by some theological doctor. But does it not, I shall be asked, give a personality to the Spirit of Evil, and is not that characteristic just what one looks for in a legend? Most assuredly, I conceive, one cannot read the story without feeling that our Lord was engaged in a personal battle with a personal foe. It is no shadow-fight. There is nothing in it which bears the look of a dream or a vis- ion. Every thing is intensely real. But the wonder is that this reality and personality should be preserved and sustained with such an absence of materialism. No image of the Tempter is presented to us, neither such a one as a middle-age painter would have given, nor such a one as belongs to the Miltonic concep- tion. We feel that the Son of God, clothed with a human body, was not a Person in virtue of that body. We feel that the per- sonality which belongs to the opposing power has in like manner nothing to do with an outward shape or visible circumstances. We are led to feel that there is a deep, radical evil, a spirit of evil, underlying all the shapes and forms in which it presents it- self to us on earth. We feel that He who could reach to that radical evil, and dispossess those shapes and forms of it, could alone assert the dominion of the God of Truth and Love over the world. We feel that this radical evil is nothing original, nothing which God created, that it is essentially the spirit of dis- obedience, a perverted, rebel will, and that He who has the true obedient will must be the destroyer of it, the Redeemer of the Universe from it. Such an introduction to a history of a series of acts of redemption or deliverance, bears no marks of being transferred from some other records to a place for which it was not intended. If it has a meaning at all, it is in its right posi- tion there. The want of it would be a cause of real perplexity. THE PREACHING OF JESUS. THE PREACHING OF JESUS. " Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison," says St. Matthew, " He departed into GaHlee." He quotes a passage which he says was fulfilled by His coming into the coast of Zebulon and Naphtali, and then proceeds, " From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, Repent ; for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." St. Mark says, " Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying. The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand ; repent ye, and believe the Gospel." St. Luke says, "And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee, and there went out a fame of Him through all the region round about." He then describes His coming to Naza- reth, where He had been brought up. His reading the passage from Isaiah, where it is written, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord." These passages will be connected, and rea- sonably connected, by a harmonist, as referring to the same visit to Galilee. I quote them to point out what seems to me a much more radical and important coincidence, that which concerns the nature of our Lord's preaching, and its connection with the fore- gone history. He, when He comes to Galilee, begins preaching the Kingdom of God, begins saying, " Repent ; for the Kingdom of God is at hand." No other account is given in the first two Evangelists of the words spoken by Him who had been declared to be the Son of God except this. John the Baptist's message is precisely the message of the Christ. There is the same an- nouncement of a kingdom, the same call to repentance, the same allusion to the fulfilment of the time, to some approaching crisis. Only this announcement is now called a Gospel. It is good news that the kingdom is at hand, that the time is fulfilled. Men 2 1 8 LECTURE I. are to repent and believe this good news. St. Luke expands and explains the words of the other Evangelists. He begins with declaring that Jesus came in the power of the Spirit into Galilee. He shows, in a particular synagogue, what the kind of preaching was, which elsewhere, though not there, was glorified of all. His preach ng is the announcement of One who was able to heal the sick and deliver the captives, because the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him — a Deliverer who was to undo chains which no one could undo who was not endued with a Spirit — the King who had dominion over the secret powers and the inner being of man was declared to be at hand. Men were to repent, that they might understand what His government over them was. To confess His dominion over them was to believe the Gospel. CALLING OF THE DISCIPLES. " And Jesus," says St. Matthew, " walking by the sea of Gali- lee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea ; for they were fishers. And he saith unto them. Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, and followed Him. And going on from thence, He saw other two brethren, James the Son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebe- dee their father, mending their nets. And He called them. And they immediately left the ship, and their father, and fol- lowed Him." St. Mark gives nearly the same account. St. Luke's is connected with the wonderful draught of fishes. But these words, " From henceforth thou shalt catch men," which are the key-words to his narrative, belong equally to both the others. Supposing we had no other narratives but these, sup- posing all that is peculiar to St. Luke's Gospel was omitted, supposing we had heard nothing before of a Kingdom, or of a Son of God, our first conclusion, I think, w^ould be, "This slory, told wdth such severe simplicity, in such few words, is certainly intended to describe the way in wdiich some royal person. claimed THE MIRACLES. I9 authority over the humble men about him, took them into his service, assigned to them some high office, the nature of which they were but little able to apprehend, but which implied some very remarkable influence and ascendancy over their fellow- creatures." If then we* found that all the previous records seemed to speak of such a King, of a mysterious authority which He exercised, and which He was come to assert and use on be- half of human creatures, we should certainly think that this nar- rative stood in a very close and natural relation to the other. Upon any other hypothesis than this, if any other feeling or con- viction possessed the mind of the writer, we should certainly look for quite a different phraseology, one much less direct and simple, but also much less august. THE MIRACLES. *' And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their syna- gogues and preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people. And His fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought unto Him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy. And He healed them." This is the announcement in St. Matthew's Gospel which immediately follows the call of the disciples. If you turn to the passage in St. Mark, from the 21st to the 35th verses of the first chapter, you will find that he speaks especially of one man in a synagogue who had an un- clean spirit, and who cried out, " Let us alone ; what have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth ? I know Thee who Thou art, the Holy One of God ; " that he then alludes to the cure of Simon's wife's mother of a fever, then to His healing many who were sick of many diseases, and casting out many devils. If you turn to the passage in St. Luke, from the i6th to the 44th verses of the fourth chapter, you will find continual allusions to cures and healings, the same account of casting out 20 LECTURE I. the unclean spirit in the synagogue which we had in St. Mark, the same reference to the cure of Simon's wife's mother, con- cluding with the words " Devils also came out of many, crying out and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God." If you read and compare these different passages carefully, you will be struck, I think, with nothing more than the close blending of what is called the miraculous part of the story with that which refers to the preaching. " He preached the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healed all manner of sickness," says St. Matthew. " He taught them," says St. Mark, " as one having authority, and not as the scribes ; and there was in their syna- gogue a man having an unclean spirit, etc. And they were all amazed, insomuch that they questioned among, themselves, say- ing, What thing is this ? What new doctrine is this ? For with authority commandeth He the unclean spirits, and they do obey Him." The same, or nearly the same words, are repeated in St. Luke, in nearly the same connection ; and the whole narra- tive in his fifth chapter assumes and illustrates, even more than those in the other two Evangelists, the connection between the " doctrine," and the " word," and these acts of " authority." Now, supposing the words, "preaching the Kingdom of God," were taken as I have taken them literally, supposing the actual King of the world was coming to claim and assert His King- dom, supposing He who by His word had given life and breath to all creatures, was really come to show Himself to His crea- tures, and to claim their homage ; such a connection as this would surely be most natural. You would not expect the Evan- gelist to say, as we are wont to sa}-, " Christ delivered this beau- tiful and touching discourse, and then to make it known that He had a high commission, and that He ought to be listened to. He put forth strange, novel, unwonted powers." You would expect them to say just as they do say. He declared His kingdom, and He healed the sick. He used the powers which He had always been using ; He declared who it was from whom all healing had always come. There would be many other indications which would show THE MIRACLES. 21 which of these two views of our Lord's character and objects was the ruling one in the minds of the Evangelists. If they were writ- ing the legend of a great hero or saint, who was to be exhibited as doing things more extraordinary than man had ever done, the acts represented would be of as outward and glaring a kind as possible. The common physician labors by getting at the secret source of diseases to overcome the outward symptoms. The legendary miracle-worker by touches and charms acts upon the direct, palpable malady which is presented to him, and lets all the world admire how rapidl/it has disappeared. Supposing, on the other hand, a writer to represent one w^ho had the domin- ion over all the secret powers and springs of human life, whose servant the physician had been, by whose wisdom the physician had acted, when he sought to trace the sign home to its princi- ple, you would not wonder if he told you that this Person spoke to something within the man, and set that right first, that when he had given the blessing He did not care that it should be made known ; that He referred to the disappearance of the external symptoms or manifestations of disease merely as proofs of a radical cure. These are characteristics of the Evangelical nar- ratives ; every one knows that they are ; every one is more or less struck wath them. They are taken notice of as indications of the simplicity of the writers, as signs of the absence of strain and effort at display in their narratives ; they are not dwelt upon, I think, as marking the very purport of these narratives. In close relation to this subject stand the allusions to the casting out of devils, which recur so frequently in all the pas- sages I have quoted. You cannot help perceiving that the Evangelists connect particular kinds of sickness with diabolical possession ; but that they do in some sort leave the impression upon our mind, that all sickness has this origin. At any rate, they direct our attention to this exercise of power as the most characteristic of Christ, as that which explains all His other ex- ercises of it. This is a point which the commentators on the Gospels are in general rather anxious to pass over. They re- gard it as a difficulty to be got rid of in one way or another. 22 LECTURE I. Some may take the way of saying that the Evangelists adapted themselves to the Jewish mode of speaking, some may say that possession belonged to that particular age, some may urge cases to prove that it has not been quite unknown in any age, some may talk of the anthropomorphism and superstition which were natural in such writers. These last are plausible and high- sounding words ; whether those who use them glibly and habitu- ally have ever really considered their meaning, is another ques- tion. By anthropomorphism I understand conceiving that which is spiritual under a human shape- I do not find the Evangelists speaking of the devils as having any human shapes. By super- stition I understand the setting that above us which is properly beneath, or making our object of worship an object of fear. I find the Evangelists not setting up the devils as powers above, but as powers working within ; I find them representing the Christ, not as teaching men to fear them and worship them, but as delivering men from them, and teaching men to worship God. And if that be the object which all these acts of power and maj- esty aim at, I submit that they are at least in marvellous accord- ance with the story which stood at the commencement of these Gospels, and seemed a preface to them. He who was pro- claimed to be the Son of God, and was endued with the Spirit of God, was led up by that Spirit into the wilderness, and was tempted of the devil. He warred with that radical Spirit of dis- obedience which had asserted dominion over human creatures, and had sought to make them his servants : He now wars with all the forms in which that evil power is working for men's mis- chief. That power is most directly, personally manifested in whatever concerns man personally, in whatever affects him mor- ally whether it be mixed with physical disease or not. The un- clean spirit, the spirit of despair which drives a man into the tombs, and makes him cry, and cut himself with stones, and be- come a terror to his fellows, who cannot bind him, no not with chains, is the most essential and inward tyrant. Christ in as- serting lordship over him, in bidding him come out of the man, proclaims that every thing which is unhealthy, diseased, corrupt. THE MIRACLES. 23 whether it affects body or mind, or both in their mysterious unity, is not from above, but from beneath, is not according to the original order and constitution of the universe, has not come from God, but has come from rebellion against God ; is there- fore to be redressed and abolished by the Holy One of God, the Son of God, who comes to preach and to establish the Kingdom of God. Instead therefore of dwelling upon the other miracles with great earnestness, as the only satisfactory evidences of our Lord's mission, and endeavoring to pass over the stories of the casting out of devils as perplexities to be avoided, we shall, if we follow the Evangelists, seek in these for the general law and principle of the miracles, considering that they explain, more than any of the others, the nature of His operations and the end of his coming. At all events, the Evangelists, whatever others they may omit, or report differently, all agree in fixing our attention upon these, and in using language which continually suggests their relation to the rest. All three, though with some diversity of circumstances, report the cure of the man or the men among the tombs, as if it seemed to them the most characteristic and remarkable. All three speak, St. Matthew more than once, of the way in which the Pharisees explained these miracles, " He casteth out devils by the Prince of the devils." All record His argument in answer to that charge, " A house divided against itself cannot stand." All record these words, two of them in direct connection with this charge, " Wherefore I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men ; but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven : " words which even without St. Mark's divine explanation, '' be- cause they said he had Timmclean spirit," would lead us naturally to the conclusion, that their sin consisted, not in denying the power of Christ, but in calling good evil, and evil good ; a state of mind implying a hatred of God's character and essence. All the Evangelists again agree in attributing to our Lord these words, which are so utterly perplexing and baffling to any one who regards the signs and powers which Christ exhibited merely 24 LECTURE I. as Startling portents, " If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? Therefore shall they be your judges." In what possible senses could their sons be their judges ? Was the power with which they wrought then like His power ? If he was the true King of the world, all power which had ever been exerted was His power ; He was come to show from whence such power was derived ; and therefore if His power was evil, all the power which was ever exerted by any Jewish physician for the healing of diseases, or the removal of madness, was evil also. Lastly, all the Evangelists agree in connecting faith in the subject, with most, if not all, these acts of power. Now if the miracles were merely, or chiefly, evidences of a divine mission, unconnected with the nature and character of that mission, one would rather have expected that the displays would have been most startling and overwhelming where the unbelief was most obstinate. In most legendary records it is contrived so. The faith is the effect of the surprising spectacle ; it is wrought in the most reluctant. Whereas if these s'igns and powers were but the tokens and manifestations of the p/esence of One who came to claim the human spirit as His subject, and to raise it out of sub- jection to other masters, we perceive at once that there is some- thing more regal and more mysterious in an act which calls out the man himself into trust and hope, than in that which merely rectifies the energies of his body or even of his mind. Not only the limb is straightened, not only the issue of blood is stanched, but the person who wields the limb, through whose veins the blood flows, is called into existence and health by the voice of the life-giver. These remarks cannot be new to any one ; they are of worth only so far as they set in order thoughts with which we are all familiar. No reader of the-Gospels has ever doubted that the graciousness or benignity of Christ's miracles was part of their very nature. That quality has been brought forward by writers on evidence with more labor and particularity than was at all needful ; for the heart receives such impressions the more read- THE NEW AND OLD GARMENT. 2$ ily, and the more deeply, if they are not forced upon it. Tlie apparent exceptions in the curse upon the fig-tree, and the de- struction of the swine, have been accounted for with painful in- genuity, as if our consciences required to be convinced that a moral lesson, which is to work for the cure of human beings, may be obtained by the death of a tree or an animal. What I desire is that we should follow out the conviction which such expres- sions imply, and should acknowledge that the Evangelists looked upon these miracles as methods by which the great Deliverer was revealing himself in that character, was actually breaking the fetters by which human bodies as well as spirits were bound. In that way all the other miracles which the Evangelists record will be felt, I think, to. have their own wonderful suitableness in the divine economy, for the after as well as the immediate instruc- tion of men, especially to emancipate them from their supersti- tions. For the disciples to learn that the winds and waves were subject to their Master, for the multitude to feel that it was He who gave them their bread, was as needful as that they should feel that He restored the decayed powers of the body and the soul. Jews required such a lesson, for they were as prone now, as in former days, to tremble before the powers of nature, and to think that man lived by bread alone, and not by the word of God. But what a lesson was also in reserve for the worshippers of Neptune, Ceres, ^sculapius ! what a witness to them that the powers which they supposed were divided amidst different capricious deities, were really gathered up in the one Lord and Friend of man ! PUBLICANS AND PHARISEES. THE NEW AND OLD GARMENT. All the three Evangelists give the following narrative nearly in the same order, the name of Matthew in one being exchanged for that of Levi in the two others : " And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom : and He said unto him. Follow me. And he arose, and followed Him. And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat 26 LECTURE I. in the house, behold many publicans and sinners came and sat down with Him and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto His disciples, Wliy eateth your Master with publicans and sinner* ? But when Jesus heard that. He said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye, and learn what that meaneth, I will hav^e mercy, and not sacrifice ; for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Then came to Him the disciples of John, saying. Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not ? And Jesus said unto them. Can the children of the bridechamber mourn as lono: as the bridegfroom is with them .? But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast. No man putteth a piece of new cloth into an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish. But they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved." I may seem to be joining together two passages which have no direct relation to each other. But I am endeavor- ing to follow the Evangelists strictly ; and where I find them all agreeing in the same order, I take it for granted that they felt the connection in the parts of their story, and wished to make us feel it. I think the minds of their simplest readers have re- sponded to their intention. They have perceived that the ques- tion of John's disciples naturally rose out of our Lord's answer to the Pharisees, and that His similitudes of the new and old garments, and of the new and old bottles, were intended to ex- plain a very deep ground for the difference between the position of His disciples and that of the disciples of the Pharisees or of John. I. In the call of Levi, or Matthew, we discover at once the same assertion of a power over the will of the person spoken to, which was indicated in the call of Andrew and Simon, James and John. The words used do not in the least answer to our notion of a disciple attaching himself to a master, from some prefer- THE NEW AND OLD GARMENT. 2/ ence ; they convey, in the plainest manner, the idea of One speaking who had authority, — an authority which the conscience and heart recognized, though there was nothing in the outward appearance to support it. II. But Matthew is not a fisherman ; he is a rich tax-gatherer. As soon as he has obeyed the call, he gathers about him men of his own class, and invites his Master to eat with them. The members of this class had not merely a bad reputation. A num- ber of them must have been extortioners ; and the general dis- like felt for them must have thrown them into the company of people deserving to be called sinners. To suppose that Mat- thew's company consisted merely of persons who had acquired that name through the prejudice of the Pharisees, is to twist the letter of the Gospel, and I conceive still more entirely to set aside its meaning. Now the Pharisees do not complain of our Lord for showing kindness or condescension to these wTong- doers, but for mixing with them as if they were friends, for eat- ing and drinking with them. Did not the analogy of the Law justify them in doing so.? Was it not a part of righteousness to avoid the contact of impurity.? The Evangelist does not sug- gest any answer to these questions. He over-reaches them all with the words, " They that be whole need not a physician, but they that be sick." If he looked upon his Master as the King of Men, who had come to restore an order which had been violated, such language was natural. If he believed that in Plim dwelt that righteousness which all the precepts of the Law were trying to set forth, and that He was come to establish that righteousness in the hearts of those who had gone furthest astray from it, the proverb had a most true and obvious application. If, in other words, he felt that the Kingdom of our Lord was that kingdor-.i over men which had been lying beneath all legal rules and ordinances, and which was to assert its own power, by ful- filling their purpose, even when it seemed most to dispense with them, one can feel how consistent this story is with all that has gone before. Upon any other view of the case it would seem as if the Pharisees' objection was un refuted. 2S LECTURE I. III. But if this explanation is adopted, tlie difficulty of John's disciples, though a very different one from that of the Pharisees, admitted of a similar solution. John's disciples might remember that their master had gained a more ready hearing from pub- licans and sinners than from scribes and Pharisees. They could not forget the phrase, "generation of vipers," which they had heard applied to those of the last class who came to his baptism. But then was not his most obvious characteristic, self-restraint, indifference to the good things of the flesh ? Was not this the characteristic which he would especially have wished his dis- ciples to imitate, even though in imitating it they might adopt the rules and practices of the Pharisees ? The eating and drink- ing of the new Teacher, was it not directly at variance with this lesson and these habits ? It was not so much the character of the company which startled them, as the fact that a Teacher of righteousness should lead his followers into places of entertain- ment at all. Why was not fasting as much to be the sign of them as of the schools which had preceded them ? The first answer is, " The bridegroom is with them." A strange expression surely for the teaclier of a school to use, one altogether perplex- ing and beyond the circle of the associations which such a character suggests. Yet not a novel association to those who had read the forty-fifth Psalm, to those who had heard of a King greatly delighting in the beauty of his affianced Bride, of "his riding on because of truth, and meekness, and righteousness, of her forsaking her father's house that she might dwell with him. I do not now examine into the force of these expressions. I merely say that the effect of the phraseology upon the mind of a Jew would inevitably be to connect the person who applied it to himself with mysterious ideas of royalty and divinity. The disciples could not fast because they had attained the end for which the fasting was ordained, the apprehension and discovery of the Lord and Ruler of their spirits. There would come a time when there should be a sense of being deprived of that object, and then would they fast in those days. But the idea is much more fully brought out in the second part THE APPOINTMENT OF THE APOSTLES. 29 of the answer. No one, I believe, has ever doubted that the old garment and the old bottles referred to the institutions of the ancient economy ; the new garment and the new bottles, to those which Christ would establish. Every one has seen that in some way or other our Lord meant to say, that it would be mis- chievous merely to re-enact the forms and customs which had belonged to the past, until the substance and the life, of which customs and forms are the outside, had been brought out and revealed. But surely if His Kingdom was not the everlasting Kingdom, which all Jewish institutions had been imperfectly ex- hibiting, these comparisons, and the argument which is founded upon them, would not hold good. He would be substituting new bottles for the old, not expressing the wine which was to fill the bottles. No more beautiful illustration could be conceived of the assertion that the Kingdom of God, when it had once un- folded itself, would work out a drapery fitted for itself, and that it would not merely make use of that drapery which belonged to it when it was yet undeveloped. But if that were not the inten- tion of the Evangelists, one must feel that they used illustrations, apparently of the most simple and natural kind, with most artifi- cial and unreal signification. THE APPOINTMENT OF THE APOSTLES. " And when He had called unto Him his twelve disciples, He gave them power over unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease." Then follow the names of the Apostles. " These twelve Jesus sent forth and commanded them, saying. Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not ; but go rather unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying. The Kingdom of Heaven is at. hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils : freely ye have received, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey ; neither two coats, neither shoes nor yet staves : for the workman is worthy 30 LECTURE I. of his meat. And into whatsoever city or house ye shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy, and there abide till ye go thence. And when ye come into an house salute it, and if the house be worthy, let your peace come on it ; but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to you. And whosoever shall not re- ceive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off tlie dust of your feet." This passage dif- fers in a few particulars from those which correspond to it in St. Mark and St. Luke. The calling of the Apostles is separated by both of them from their designation to their work. Our Lord's commands to them are much more minute and detailed in the tenth chapter of St. Matthew than in the sixth of St. Mark and in the ninth of St. Luke. Some of them are transferred by St. Luke to the seventy disciples. But the words which I have quoted, with the exception of those respecting the Gentiles and the Samaritans, belong to all three. I do not know that it is necessary to dwell on the importance which the Evangelists evidently attach to this commission. Every one feels it and admits it. It would be the greatest waste of time to argue or to prove that our Lord speaks to His Apostles constantly as the heralds of a Kingdom, as men entrusted with spiritual powers, as men who are to be the founders of a society, as men whose immediate task was to be the precursors of infinitely higher tasks which were to be committed to them hereafter. " All this, it will be said, is just what we might have expected ; it is an ex post facto list of directions. The Evangelists wrote with the experi- ence of what the Apostles had dorte, they antedated events which they themselves had possibly witnessed, or which were handed down to them." What I wish to remark is simply, that this nar- rative is in exact keeping with all that has gone before. John the Baptist came announcing that a Kingdom was at hand. Our Lord preached, " The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand ; " the twelve were sent forth with the same message. The Kingdom which John announced was evidently a Kingdom over the spirit of man. He said that the person who came after him would baptize with the Spirit. All the acts by which Christ is said to THE SABBATH-DAY. 31 have testified of His Kingdom, were acts of spiritual power, acts of dominion over spirits. The same powers are said to be com- mitted to the Apostles for the same purpose. Every thing cer- tainly in the tone of thought, in the deliberate, and in the accidental expressions of the Evangelists, where they agree, and where they vary, intimate a settled persuasion in their minds, that they are describing the acts of a Ruler, of One who had ruled in times past, and would give mightier evidence of His rule in the times to come, who had called out the twelve tribes to be His national witnesses, who was now preparing men who should at once represent those tribes, and should carry out the purpose for which they were chosen, to all the families of the earth. There is no faltering in their statements on this subject, no occasional forgetfulness of this idea, and substitution of an- other ; it is the assumption that pervades the whole narrative ; it is not forced on our attention anywhere, it makes itself felt everywhere. THE SABBATH-DAY. " At that time Jesus went on the sabbath-day through the corn ; and His disciples were an hungered, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto Him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath-day. But He said unto them. Have ye not read what David did when he was an hungered, and they that were with him, how he entered into the House of God, and did eat the shew-bread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests ? Or have ye not read in the Law, how that on the sabbath-days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless .<* But I say unto you. That in this place is One greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the sabbath-day .... And, behold, there was a man which had his hand withered, and they asked Him, saying. Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath-days ? that they 32 LECTURE I. might accuse Him. And He said unto them, What man shall there be among you, which shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath-day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out ? How much then is a man better than a sheep ? Where- fore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath-days." The story of the corn-fields, and that of the man with the withered hand, occur in all the three Evangelists. Each one dwells with special em- phasis on this and the other complaints of the Pharisees respect- ing our Lord's neglect of the sabbath-day. All speak of it as the first great provocation which led them to hold a council against Him that they might destroy Him. St. Mark says this was the occasion on which He looked round on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts. St. Luke recurs again and again to the subject. The first narrative is in his fourth chapter, the next in the thirteenth, the third in the four- teenth. Considering the brevity of the Evangelical histories, it is surprising how much space is devoted to this subject, and how much the writers seem to have felt that it was necessary to the illustration of our Lord's life. But why should this be so ? The sabbath was undoubtedly one of the most memorable Jewish in- stitutions. Supposing there was a pharisaical excess of extrav- agance in the observation of it, might we not have expected a great teacher to have pointed out the equal or greater danger of the opposite tendency to which the Sadducees probably were liable ? This was no case of a tradition of the elders ; it w^as a positive commandment, like that of honoring father and mother. And yet the whole weight of the example and authority of Jesus seems thrown into the scale of permission and toleration, which we might suppose would be already the heaviest. " The Son of Man," says St. Matthew, " is Lord also of the sabbath-day." " The sabbath was made for man," says St. Mark, " not man for the sabbath ; therefore the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath." St. Luke repeats the last words, connecting them directly with the act of David in eating the shew-bread. Here we have an explanation supplied by the Evangelists themselves, of the importance which they attach to these dialogues. He THE SABBATH-DAY. " 33 who had instituted the sabbath-day, He of whom it had testified, was come to assert His own dominion over it, to declare what he had meant by it. That lordship was denied by the Pharisees, that meaning was wholly set aside. It was not an error of ex- cess. It was a dreadful, fatal contradiction of the whole nature and essence of this commandment, and of all the command- ments. They had no feeling that the sabbath was meant for man ; how could they enter into the force of the words, " Thou shalt rest, and thy man-servant, and thy maid-servant, and the stranger that is within thy gates ? " What cared the Pharisee for the man-servant, or the maid-servant, or the stranger.'' What they cared for was the day, abstractedly, nakedly, divested of all its life and associations. To it the man-servant, the maid- servant, the stranger, were to be sacrificed. Then how could they look upon the Son of Man, who had come as the King and Deliverer of man-servants, and maid-servants, and strangers, as the Lord of this day.-* How could they welcome such a Person at all, coming with such an object, while their whole spirits were concentrated in the mere husk of the institution ? I say the husk, not the letter ; for they could not read the letter. The letter witnessed against them ; it spoke of the relation between man and God, of God sharing man's labor, and of man sharing God's rest. It proclaimed the very truth which the Pharisees were denying when they called Christ a blasphemer. All the latent inhumanity, as well as the real Atheism of the Pharisee, lay wrapt in his feelings about the sabbath-day. Was it wonder- ful that he should hold a council against Christ for the acts and words which brought these feelings to light.'* Was it wonderful that the holiest and divinest anger should have been awakened by the awful contradiction of men turning the commandment of God into a practical denial of Him ? But all this profound mo- rality is inexplicable, all this wonderful assertion of the principle which the Pharisees were undermining is reduced to nothing, if the Gospels were not, as they pretend to be, primarily and throughout, the history of a Son of God, and a King of Men. 3 34 LECTURE I. THE PARABLES. Nearly the whole of the thirteenth Chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel is devoted to our Lord's parables. Many others occur in the after chapters of his Gospel ; St. Mark records but few. There is nothing in which St. Luke is so characteristically dis- tinguished from both the other Evangelists, as in his selection of parables. There are three which are common to all these Gospels, the parable of the Sower, the parable of the Mustard- seed, and the parable of the Lord of the vineyard and the hus- bandmen. I propose to consider each of them, with as much of the con- text as all the Evangelists have thought needful for their eluci- dation. I. The Sower is treated in every Gospel as a specimen of this mode of teaching. The explanation of it is connected in all with the reason for speaking in parables. It deserves, there- fore, very especial attention. We may hope to learn from it whether the teaching of our Lord confirms or weakens the con- clusion which we have drawn from His Baptism, His temptation. His mirticles. His arguments with opponents. We may, per- haps, begin our enquiry with our Lord's answer to the disciples' question, which was suggested by the parable of the sower, " Why speakest Thou unto them in parables ? He answered and said. Because unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the king- dom of heaven, but unto them it is not given." These words at once connect the parables with the phrase which has already encountered us so often, and which thus far has borne a definite and uniform signification. Only we have here the word " mysteries " for the first time associated with the word "kingdom." How associated? Were not the Apostles then to preach the kingdom of God ? Was the information which their Master communicated to them respecting it esoteric, intended for their own use, or for that of a set of initiated dis- THE PARABLES. 35 ciples whom they should gather round them ? If this were so, it would be difficult indeed to reconcile the use of parables with the other part of these records, a difficulty which would not be the least diminished by attributing any amount of imposition and self-glorification to the minds of the Evangelists. Everywhere else they are endeavoring to set forth their Master in contrast with the learned doctors of the Jewish schools, as the Teacher of the poor and the ignorant. Here they would be gratuitously admitting that they had received a peculiar and special instruc- tion, which at the same moment they were with ludicrous sim- plicity divulging. But when we look at the discourse itself, we find it still more difficult to maintain this view of the case. The interpretation of the parable of the Sower was evidently that which they were by all possible means to make their hearers ac- quainted with. They were instructed themselves in the hinder- ances which prevented the Word from taking root and bringing forth fruit, on purpose that they might warn others of those hinderances. I speak to them in parables, because they cannot receive the lesson I wish to impart in any other way. The thing is hidden from them, and this my discourse will tell you why it is hidden from them, where the veil is, how, and by whom it has been drawn. Their own inner life was concealed from the mul- titude, because their hearts had waxed gross and their ears were dull of hearing. The secret operations which were going on there were just those which they had no perception of. The government which was exercised over themselves, over their own hearts and spirits, could only be made known to them through outward things with which their eyes were conversant. Even these they observed very imperfectly, often scarcely at all. It was a discovery, a revelation, to remind'them of the secret pro- cesses by which the seed was transformed into the stalk, and the ear, and the full corn in the ear. The world of nature was to them almost as is a landscape to a blind man's eye ; still they could not be quite unconscious of facts with which they were every day occupied. They might be awakened to an observation of these ; they might be led to perceive an order in the things 36 LECTURE I. about them, in the >vorks of nature and of man, with which they were most familiar ; thence they might be led to discover the traces of an order and dominion nearer to themselves, one work- ing continually for their discipline and deliverance. Those, on the other hand, who were feeling, however confus- edly, after the light and knowledge which most nearly concerned themselves, who cared less for the earth, and its seeds, and its fruits than to be set free from their ignorance, than to be made right and true within, the hearts which craved for guidance and sought in their weariness for a resting place and a home, the children who were crying for a Father, had an immediate hold upon the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven ; to them it was given to know them : the others saw them projected outwardly in the sensible world. Some such view as this, I think, would be generally taken of this language. I am not the least desirous to suggest a novel one, but merely to show how exactly such a view accords with, and carries out the idea of a Kingdom which has the first and highest sphere of its operations in man's inner being, but which extends into every part of his life, through the whole of society, thence through the whole intellectual and sentient universe. If we supposed the actual King of men come to make manifest the nature of his government to them, to show them what rule he had been exercising over them, and for what ends, how it was thwarted, why they were unaware- of its presence ; if we supposed that King of Men to be also the King of nature, the Creator and Lord of the world in which men is dwelling, if we supposed Him to have made that world especially for the habitation of man, to have placed him in the centre of it, to have ordered it according t-o laws which could only perfectly exhibit themselves when they bore upon his character and his acts, we should certainly feel why the parable of the Sower must be the key to all parables, why it is said to set forth a mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven, why it sets forth at the same time a mystery of the kingdom of earth, why it belongs to the life of each individual man, why it has the closest relation to the history of the race. THE PARABLES. 37 That the Son of Man deposits his word in a voluntary being who can prevent it from producing its regular and natural effects, this is the direct, obvious doctrine of the parable. The corre- sponding fact in the kingdom of nature is that a person puts a seed into the ground which certain qualities in the ground may make unfruitful. In each case we are reminded that productive- ness is the law, that unproductiveness is the anomaly, the result of some perversity, and yet of a perversity which is most likely to appear, which it requires a power not existing in the human or in the natural subject to remove. Each is intended to receive that power, to submit to it ; then all its latent capacities are dis- covered and unfolded ; then the results become in their due season visible. In each case the processes are secret and orderly; in each case the disappointment arises from the pro- ductive power not penetrating deeply enough into the ground ; in each case that which ultimately appears upon the surface is to the eye quite different from that which was the cause of it. Dwell upon these great lines and landmarks of the discourse, try to harmonize them in your mind, and you arrive, I conceive, at such a sense of the reality of the distinction and of the resem- blance of the two great spheres which compose our universe, as no definitions or philosophical arrangement can give. But you feel at the same time that these spheres must be under the authority and direction of a Person, that the phrase " Kingdom " has a literal and not a metaphorical application to them, .that you could not choose any other which would not be a feeble and awkward exchange for it. II. I spoke of the parable of the Sower as relating to the life of the race as well as to the life of the individual. If it is the history of the operation of the Divine Will upon human wills, we cannot limit it to a number of particular experiences. The history of man must be contained in it. Nevertheless I can quite acquiesce in the common feeling that this parable less obviously concerns the movements and growth of human society than cer- tain others. I can readily admit the parable of the Mustard- seed to be, as it is commonly said to be, a prophecy of the future 38 LECTURE I. unfolding of the Church collectively. But then I must ask you to observe that the character of this unfolding is essentially the same with that which has been described in the former case. The mustard-tree cannot have been the greatest or stateliest of the trees of the forest. Its greatness and stateliness are not the subject of the parable. The subject is clearly the growth, first of a herb, then of a tree, out of the most insignificant of all seeds. Underground processes are here also implied.' The Apostles had already heard the parable of the Sower, their minds had taken in to some extent the spirit and purport of it. They would needs apply the interpretation of it here also ; they would sup- pose that the mustard-seed, like that which brought forth the corn, was sown and watched by a Divine husbandman, they would conclude that it was planted in human spirits, that these were by some process brought into such unity and fellowship that they could be represen'-id by one great tree with many branches. Of course I do not suppose any elaborate process of reasoning to have gone on in the minds of the Galilaean fisherman. It was the beauty of this scheme of instruction that such processes were not needful : the natural image united to the experience of the spirit within supplied the place of them. The Divine Teacher had already written His lessons upon the sensible world ; He had only to open the eyes of His Disciples to read them there. The one tree with its different branches, and the fowls of the air at last lodging in them, though it was only an imperfect rep- resentation of spiritual unity and of all the diverse and living forms in which it exhibits itself, was still a far closer approxima- tion to that reality than any discussions about unity in the schools could possibly give birth to. The image bore witness that no artificial or deliberate combination of different persons and wills, just as no combination of leaves and branches, could produce the oneness ; that it must have a root underneath the soil, that an original unity must be the ground of the diversity, not the result of it. The Kingdom of Heaven then in the par- able of the Mustard-seed presents itself to us under a new aspect, but as preserving the same essential characteristic. There is THE PARABLES. 39 One who is ruling, One in whom it consists, One from whose secret life it receives all its different energies. III. Still it will be observed that one element in the Gospel- narratives seems to be wanting in both these parables. It is affirmed that the sower of the seed is the Son of Man ; the growth of the mustard-seed is the growth of a kingdom ; a king is implied in it. But is this Son of Man, this King of men, the Son of God ? Can we say that such a person is declared to be the source whence all the agencies and instruments are derived, which are at work in human society and in the world of nature ? I said there was a third parable which is common to the three Evangelists. Each one of them dwells upon it very emphatically, as that parable which told most directly upon the consciences of the chief priests and scribes, which they felt was spoken against them, and which stirred them up to seek for an immediate re- venge. A vineyard, it is said, was let to husbandmen ; the owner of it sent servant after servant to demand the fruits ; one was beaten, another stoned. "Last of all he sent unto them his son, saying. They will reverence my son. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him. When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, wdiat will he do unto those husbandmen ? They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons. Jesus said unto them, Did ye never read in the Scrip- tures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner ? this was the Lord's doing, and it is mar- vellous in our eyes." This passage, I think you will perceive, is in very striking ac- cordance with all we have considered previously, (i) A Son is represented coming forth after a succession of servants, but it is clearly intimated that the Son was before the servants. The first agent in all the works of God declared himself last. That power was revealed to whom all the rest were subordinate, and 40 LECTURE 1. from whom they were derived. (2) He came, Hke all who had been before, to seek the fruits of the vineyard, or, as our Lord Himself interprets it, to see whether those to whom the King- dom of God had been committed were worthy of such a trust. (3) The consummate act of rebellion arose from a wish to claim the inheritance. The husbandmen would not acknowledge the Son because they would not acknowledge a Father. They wished to appropriate as their own that which belonged to Him, which they could only hold, as the son held it, by faith in Him, by renouncing themselves. (4) Thus this parable, just like the preaching of John, like our Lord's own preaching, like His other discourses, like His miracles, is looking forward to a judgment which was at hand, which would declare that the axe was laid to the root of the tree, and that since it did not bear good fruit, it would be hewn down and cast into the fire. The more then we look into these parables, those which belong expressly to the first three Gospels, and are wanting in the fourth, the more the truth seems brought home to us, that it cannot have been the first object of these Evangelists to exhibit to us a human teacher, or a set of maxims and examples which he presented ; that it must have been their first object to declare a King of men and a Son of God, who came to show forth the kingdom which was implied in the Jewish kingdom, and to overthrow the one by establishing the other. HEROD HEARING OF CHRIST. " At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the fame of Jesus, and said unto his servants, This is John the Baptist ; he is risen from the dead, and therefore mighty works do show forth them- selves in him." This announcement with some variations occurs in all the three Evangelists. In the first two the narrative of John's death is appended to it. I introduce it because I do not wish to pass over any passage which is common to them, even if it seems insignificant. 1 do not think this is insignificant, especially when it is connected with a passage which we shall THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN. ' 4I meet with presentl}-, and with some which will be considered afterwards in the fourth Gospel. The question of the relation between our Lord and John the Baptist bears in a very remark- able manner upon the history of early Christian opinions, and has a close reference to the subject with which we are occupied. I shall say no more of it. in this place, except that the desire of Herod to connect Christ with John, or with some old Prophet, indicates the restless fear which characterized all his family, lest the teacher should turn out to be a king. They would gladly indulge the people in any, even the highest fancy respecting a favorite instructor, to escape that perilous alternative. THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN. " The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired Him that He would show them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather ; for the sky is red. And in the morning. It will be foul weather to-day ; for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky ; but can ye not discern the signs of the times ? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given unto it but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed." In the eighth chapter of St. Mark, at the nth verse, we have this account of the same transaction : " And the Pharisees came forth, and began to question with Him, seeking of Him a sign from heavep, tempting Him. And He sighed deeply in His spirit, and said. Why doth this generation seek after a sign ? Verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation." The following passage in the eleventh chapter of St. Luke, at the 29th verse, evidently corresponds to these two : " And when the people were gathered thick together, He began to say. This is an evil generation ; they seek a sign, and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet. For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall the Son of Man be to this generation." This subject of 42 LECTURE I. signs occurs so often, and is dwelt upon so emphatically by the Evangelists,, that it requires a serious consideration. The Phari- sees evidently thought that they were asking for some proof altogether different from any our Lord had furnished them with. To heal the sick, to cast out devils, was not in their minds at all an adequate attestation of His power. It proved, no doubt, that he had j"<9;;zd' power, but was it a power from heaven'^ To establish that fact there must be some visible token in the /z^^z/^/^i" showing that He had come from thence, and derived His power from thence. Here is the test, the experimentum cruds by which we discover what their notion of heaven was. However their rabbis might distinguish between the first, second, and third heaven, all had really the same sensuous character. However they might de- nounce the heathen idolatry, they were worshipping a cloud- compeller, a mere God of nature, as much as any Greek was. It was a visible sign in a visible heaven that they wanted. Such, and such only, was recognized by them as a sign from God. Must not He who came preaching the Kingdom of heaven, the Kingdom of His Father, have sighed deeply when the people who were chosen out of all lands to witness of the true God, gave this proof that they had lost the power of acknowledging any God but a God of sense. How exactly do His words con- vey the meaning of this sigh, " A wicked and adulterous genera- tion seeketh after a sign ; " a generation utterly sensualized, self- seeking, without the power of looking upon heaven, except as a shadow cast from the earth, which seemed to them alone real and substantial ! How exactly, too, do the words, " No sign shall be given them but the sign of Jonas the prophet," corres- pond to all that we have found in the preaching of the Baptist, and in the preaching of Jesus himself. Whatever else may be im- plied in the sign of Jonas, the first and simplest idea of it un- questionably is that which is conveyed in the passages I have quoted, that which St. Matthew and St. Luke are agreed in put- ting forward most jDrominently, that which explains the " no sign " of St. Mark ; for if the only sign given was that of Jonas, no sisn would be given in the sense in which the Pharisees de- THE LEAVEN OF THE SECTS. 43 sired one. Jonas came preaching repentance to the Ninevites, he called to them to turn from their evil ways, else the city which had stood for generations would be destroyed. That proved him to be a prophet from heaven. The people owned him be- cause he spoke to their consciences, because he discovered to them their evil. The scribes and Pharisees did not acknowledge this sign of a prophet. The other would assuredly come to them in due time. Signs there would be in heaven and earth that the city of David was to be left desolate, and an astonishment and a hissing to all people of the earth. So important is this discourse respecting signs in illustrating the purpose of the three Evangel- ists, and in showing how far they were the vulgar materialists which the wise men of this day suppose them to have been. THE LEAVEN OF THE SECTS. " Then Jesus said unto them. Take heed, and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees." St. Mark states the injunction somewhat differently, chap. ix. ver. 15, "And he charged them, saying, Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the leaven of Herod." St. Luke, chap. xii. ver. I, limits it to one of these sects, "He began to say unto His disciples first of all. Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy." In St. Matthew and St. Mark the admo- nition is connected with the disciples forgetting to take bread. The disciples fancied that He was afraid of poison. Iif St. Luke the words are parts of a general discourse. The reason which enforces them is, " for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known." The word " leaven " might naturally suggest a suspicion to the disciples which perhaps was not wholly unjustified by what they knew of the practices of these sects, and of their special malice against Jesus. Still the use of this word in their own Scriptures, interpreted by the Paschal feast, if they had entered into the meaning and spirit of their Master's teaching, would have led them to feel that this was not the s'Vnification of leaven 44 LECTURE I. which He was most likely to intend. He rebukes them directly for not trusting Him to give them such bread as was needful and healthful for them, after the evidences they had had of His power; He rebukes them implicitly for seeing nothing according to its inward meaning, every thing in its coarse and carnal ap- plication. And hereby He seems also to explain more distinctly what that mixture was which Pharisees, Sadducees, and Hero- dians, all alike introduced into their doctrine, though they dif- fered so greatly among themselves, though technically and dog- matically they were opposed to each other. The leaven of the Pharisees was especially, as St. Luke says, hypocrisy. As the ordinary bread was leavened, and yet leaven is always presumed to make it less pure, — to be that which gives the other elements consistency, but in some sense by the destruction of their proper qualities, — so the Pharisee mixed that which is earthly with that which is heavenly, till the whole substance was changed. God's Law and Covenant were meant to separate a man from his evil nature, to bring him under a new power and principle. The Pharisee incorporated the Law and the Covenant with the evil nature ; the motives, influences, tendencies of that nature were used to bind together the maxims of the Divine Law, to make it operative. Thus his whole life, outwardly consistent and co- herent, became a great practical contradiction. He was an actor. A mask made in imitation of the real, living, divine Form, supplied its place. His inward being perished more every day ; for that which should have kept it alive was itself turned into an instrument of its destruction. To the Pharisee the words especially applied, " That wdiich is hidden shall be known, that which is covered shall be revealed." The secret ground of the heart, the inner man, which was becoming more and more un- known unto itself, which was buried under a mass of outward practices and formalities, which was concealed by the darkness of fleshly desires and religious self-deceits, would come forth into the light of day. The man would stand forth discovered to him- self, discovered also by his open evil acts to the world. On the other hand, there would be a clear, broad distinction between PETERS CONFESSION. 45 the Divine bread which he had defiled, and the leaven which he had mixed with it. All this applied most characteristically to the Pharisee. He was emphatically the hypocrite. Divine spiritual principles were not recognized, and were therefore not perverted in the same way, or to the same degree, by any other sect as they were by him. But the Sadducee and the Herodian were also, each in his own manner, leavening the divine food which had been given them for the nourishment of themselves and of the whole people of Israel. The one by the maxims of mere earthly and prudential morality, the other by the rules and maxims of state-expediency, were transforming the righteousness of God into a human system, utterly ineffectual for the guidance of man, ministering to his pride, favorable to dishonesty. They also were hypocrites, though not religious hypocrites, like the Pharisee. Each had to keep up a name and a character ; the Sadducee for wisdom and superiority to vulgar prejudices, the Herodian for political sagacity, and for desire to preserve Jewish customs and religion along with subjection to the Caesars. P^ach was trying to blend contradictions, to bring the traditions of their forefathers into harmony with their own partial, corrupt, grovelling objects. Of this leaven then the disciples had to be- ware. It did not belong exclusively to one sect or form of opin- ion or another. It was sure to debase all persons who were not taking pains to exclude it. No notions or practices were a pro- tection against it. They could only be saved from it by remem- bering that they had a Lawgiver and King always with them, who was seeking to separate the chaff from the wheat, that in them which desired right and truth from that which was cleav- ing to earth and nature, the divine seed from the evil seed which an enemy had sown in their hearts. Peter's confession. " When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, whom do men say that I the Son of Man am ? And they said, Some say that thou art John the 46 LECTURE I. Baptist, some Elias, and others Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom, say ye that I am ? And Simon Peter answered and said. Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." Thus far the accounts of all the three Evangelists are very nearly the same. The answer in St. Mark ix. 29, is simply, " Thou art the Christ ; " in Luke ix. 20, " Thou art the Christ of God." All the three agree in saying, " Then charged He His disciples that they should tell no man that He was Jesus the Christ." There can be no question in any one's mind as to the import- ance which each of the Evangelists attaches to this narrative, nor, I think, is there much difference of opinion as to the main object and interpretation of it. St. Peter, so all the Gospels in- timate, St. Matthew only with more clearness than the rest, had by some means arrived at a conviction which the people gener- ally, even those who had the highest notion of Jesus, did not entertain. They could believe that He was a prophet, even a miraculous person, the apparition of one who had been long dead, or John the Baptist returned from the grave with new powers.' But there was something which the did not admit. The idea of a Son of God, of the Christ of God, had not dawned upon them. They could not say He is this. And the narrative goes on to say, they were not to be told that He was this. The dis- covery was one which the Apostles were not to publish ; He straightly charged them that they should not : Why was this ? Was it not the very purpose of John the Baptist's coming to de- clare the Christ ? Was it not the object of the miracles, the parables, the life of Jesus? Assuredly; to declare the King who was ruling invisibly over men's hearts and spirits. And therefore while He was visibly among them, He was not to be prodaii7ied as the Christ. The whole power and mystery of the words would have been lost in such an announcement. In acts of healing love, in the Gospel to the poor, in his most trifling acts, in His countenance, the truth came forth as truth. It would have been turned outwards, it would have been made a falsehood by the carnal hearts to which it was addresseG^, if it TAKING UP THE CROSS. 47 had taken the form of a proposition. It was to take that form hereafter ; a time would come when this would be the main topic of the preacher, " Jesus is the Christ." Now he was to say, " Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand ; now he was to make the character and nature of this kingdom felt. If he did more it would be the kingdom of a Herod or a Caesar, not of a Christ, that he would be setting up. Every one will per- ceive how consistent the words of St. Matthew, " Flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven," are with this view of the case ; how equally consist- ent the reproof, " Get thee behind me, Satan ; for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men," when the same Peter who made the confession showed that it was still impossible for him to reconcile the King with the suf- ferer. I shall not, of course, go into the memorable words about the rock, because they constitute one of the peculiarities of St. Matthew. I shall not even allude any further to the censure of the Apostle who had just received so high a benediction, be- cause St. Luke does not speak of it. So much it was right to say on the subject, because the very next passage which is com- mon to a41 the Evangelists, and is connected by them all with the question at Caesarea Philippi, contains the essence and spirit of the rebuke. I hope I have shown, without introducing the least novelty into the explanation of the passage, that it proves the first three Evangelists to have been possessed by the feeling that the Kingdom of which they spoke was, in the highest sense, a spiritual one ; that they never thought of Jesus as other than the Son of God. TAKING UP THE CROSS. ''Then said Jesus unto His disciples. If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and fol- low me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and who- soever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own 48 LECTURE I. soul ? or what shall a man- give in exchange for his soul ? For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with his angels, and then shall He reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom." The agreement of the three Evan- gelists is clearer in this passage than in almost any other. The only important differences are, that in Matthew Jesus speaks to His disciples, that in St. Mark He calls the people unto Him with His disciples also, and that in St. Luke " He speaks to them all ;" the antecedent being apparently disciples; and that St. Mark and St. Luke introduce here the important words, " Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of My words, of him shall the Son of Man be ashamed ; " expressions which had already occurred in a somewhat varying form in the loth Chap- ter of St. Matthew. Though no passage is more frequently quoted than this, as if it were a solitary maxim or proverb, its meaning can hardly be ascertained, I think, if we forget the position which it occupies in all the Evangelists between the confession of Peter and the Transfiguration. There is something very emphatic i^ the man- ner in which the title. Son of Man, is introduced in each Gospel, when it is viewed in connection with the declaration, " Thou art the Son of God^ It appears to exhibit, more clearly than any language could, the very nature and essence of our Lord's own self-denial, and therefore to point out that which He is demand- ing of His followers. He receives His Apostle's confession, adopts it as true, rejoices that he has made it ; but He takes that very moment to show that the glory of the Son of God consists in renunciation of all self subsisting greatness, in choosing to have nothing of his own, in sharing the sufferings and the death of man. The harmony of this passage with the history of the Temptation, and the way in which it illustrates its relation to the Baptism, will, I think, commend itself to the conscience of every one. But the point to which I would chiefly diaw your attention is, the difference between the morality of the passage TAKING UP THE CROSS. 49 when it is thus looked at, or when it is considered as an inde- pendent maxim, enjoining Christ's disciples to take care of their souls, and not to consider any thing so precious as they are. That the effect of obeying our Lord's words in their true and fullest sense is, that the soul is saved, that the effect of forgetting them is, that the soul is lost, no one who reverences Him can venture to deny. But we cannot overlook his express language in order to bring out the result of it more quickly according to a notion of ours. We are told in this very passage, that he who saveth his soul shall lose it. I do not say in what way we are to con- strue il'uyji ; but I do say that as it is construed in one part of the paragraph so it must be in another. We cannot make it ani- mal life where our Lord speaks of losing it, and something wholly different from animal life, something opposite to it, where He speaks of saving it. In some sense or other. He tells us that every thing which belongs to us, animal life, intellectual life, spiritual life, our own very selves, are to be given up and lost, if we would have them saved, or if we would be His disciples. To make this passage the ground for continual exhortations to men, simply and nakedly to be seeking after the security of their souls, must involve a perilous contradiction, must put us in hazard of setting at nought the letter as w^ell as the spirit of the Divine command. Whereas, if the whole context is considered, if Christ, the King of men and the Son of God, is really regarded as the great self-denier, not because these glories did not belong to Him, but because they did, and because He could only assert them and set them forth as they were by glorifying His Father and giving up Himself, the self-denial of his disciples is seen to consist likewise in the giving up of every thing which is individ- ually theirs, the acknowledgment of it as altogether their Lord's, as realized, possessed, enjoyed only in Him. 4 50 LECTURE I. THE TR,\XS FIGURATION. " And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them. And his face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with Him. Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here : if Thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles, one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them ; and, behold, a voice out of the cloud, which said. This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased ; hear ye Him. And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid. And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid. And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only." However commentators may have striven to ar- range the Gospels according to some theory of passovers, and of our Lord's journeyings to and from Galilee, it has been impos- sible for them not to perceive that the event recorded in these verses, though of so strictly a supernatural kind, is one of the great landmarks in the writings of the three Evangelists, one of those events which all felt themselves bound to record ; and which they looked upon, not as standing out of the histor}-, but as explaining what goes before and what follows it. No wonder the Straussian should seize such an event as this, as demon- strating the mixture of mythical with ordinary earthly narrative. Upon the hypothesis with which he starts, it must be at once thrown aside as having nothing whatever to do with the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as being only one of the superb inventions in which the human spirit has expressed its sense of its own dignity, has glorified and deified itself. Only this question will occur to any one who has followed me through the inquiry on which I have entered, whether ever}- single narrative which we have con- sidered hitherto does not rest upon the same principle as this THE TRANSFIGURATION. 5 I one, and must not stand or fall with it. And this further ques- tion will occur to those who study the narrative itself, without any prepossession in favor of the Straussian scheme or of mine, whether the human spirit ever found out so strange a method of expressing its veneration either for itself, or for a favorite hero, as that which comes forth in these verses. No pomp of words in one Gospel or in the other, no attempt to excite the reader's astonishment by the starts of the writer ; the language orderly, calm, simple to nakedness, yet such a description as the highest painters have felt embodied an awe and reverence which they might dare with a trembling pencil to express through their art; a vision preceded by words speaking of humiliation and nothing- ness, followed by words and acts of the same import — a vision in its outward form transitory, almost momentary, leaving be- hind it only the words which were heard at the Baptism, " This is my beloved Son," with those others which betokened that His Word, which spake to the inward heart and spirit, was mightier, diviner tlian tha^ countenance shining as the sun, than the gar- ments shining as the light: yes, that it was the invisible, inward glory which produced that transformation of the bodily form which the eye could scarcely behold. If this passage were one of those exaggerated deviations from the ordinary story which the Straussian supposes, it is strange by what art the vulgar and blundering Galilaeans, the earthly sense-ridden Hebrew, con- trived to preserve so entirely the style of his common discourse, to abstain from all inflation and exaggeration ; stranger still that he seems afraid to dwell upon this transcendant outward manifestation, eager to prove that the greatness of the Son of God could establish itself by higher proofs than these. But if we admit that the setting forth of the Son of God is the purpose of all these narratives, that He is declared throughout them all as possessing a power which, beginning from the inmost region, was meant to penetrate and pervade the most outward and sen- sible,— renewing and transforming the human form, and ulti- mately the whole earth with the heavenly life which was poured into it. — then the omission of a passage like this would be a sign 52 LECTURE I. of weakness and incompleteness ; the heart would ask for some- thing which it did not find, the Gospels would not be truly and fully Gospels of the Kingdom of God. THE EPILEPTIC BOY. " And when they were come to the multitude, there came to Him a certain man, kneeling down to Him, and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son ; for he is lunatick, and sore vexed ; for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him. Then Jesus answered and said, Oh ! faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you ? How long shall I suffer you ? Bring him hither to me. And Jesus rebuked the devil, and he departed out of him, and the child was cured from that very hour." The exquisite instinct of Raphael perceived at once the necessity of combining this event with the seemingly incongruous one of which we have just spoken. He felt that the unities of space and time were both to be sacrificed for the sake of the deeper and more mysterious unity which all the three Evangel- ists had perceived, and which had compelled them to exhibit the earthly crowd and faithless disciples at the bottom of the mount, as part of the same picture with the still and awful scene upon its summit. The painter, if he transgressed the formal rules of his art, will be admitted, I should conceive, to have done so in submission to a higher principle of art ; not for the sake of a broad and glaring contrast, but that he might give a reality to our feeling of the Transfiguration, that he might connect it with ourselves, he made his daring experiment. All laws of art rest, I suppose, on some ground deeper than themselves, which they indicate, but cannot touch. Certainly the theological truth which this meeting of contraries embodies is one which belongs to the very heart of Christianity, one which words cannot express, which is never seen fully but in the life of Christ, which we can only apprehend, even in the faintest degree, when we acknowledge that the fellow-sufferer with man, the deliverer of man, is prima- THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 53 rily and in His inmost being the well-beloved Son of God. This illustration of the principle I am seeking to enforce is too re- markable to be passed over. But as I have already spoken of our Lord's miracles in general, I have no excuse for dwelling in detail upon this one, striking and memorable as the circum- stances of it are. PROPHECY OF THE PASSION. With this narrative is connected another of our Lord's pro- phecies, of His death and resurrection, which is preserved by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and apparently referred by all to the same time. " And while they abode in Galilee, Jesus said unto them, The Son of Man shall be betrayed into the hands of men, and they shall kill Him, and the third day He shall rise again. And they were exceeding sorry." The language of all the evan- gelists, St. Mark and St. Luke even more than of St. Matthew, leaves us no room for doubt, that the Transfiguration seemed to them the appointed prelude, not to a single discourse, but to a series of discourses on this topic ; that from this time forth, in fact, it became the leading subject of our Lord's teaching when He was among His own disciples ; that so they were prepared for His final entrance into Jerusalem. Any one who compares the short passages which refer to this time will have no doubt, I think, that, even for the chronology of the Gospels, they are the most important which we can find. I do not profess to throw any light upon that chronology, but I am persuaded that the light must come where commentators have looked for it least, from the portions of the narratives which have the most evidently supernatural and celestial character. THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. "The same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying. Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven ? And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, 54 LECTURE I. Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth Me." The parallel passage in St. Mark is at the 33d verse of the ninth chapter. There the occasion of the discourse is stated some- what differently. " Being in the house He asked them. What was it that you disputed among yourselves by the way? And they held their peace ; for by the way they had disputed among themselves which of them should be the greatest." St. Luke, ch. ix. ver. 46, follows St. Mark with a slight variation, "Then there arose a reasoning among them which of them should be the greatest ; and Jesus perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child," etc. The discourse in St. Matthew beginning from the face of the little child, flows on for some time with many windings ; it is terminated speedily in St. Mark and St. Luke by the words of St. John, " Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy Name, and we forbade him," etc. Allusions both to the dis- pute of the disciples and to the subject itself, occur, I need not say, often in the Evangelists — a very memorable one in St. Luke's account of the Paschal Supper. But the face of the child proves that these three narratives refer to the same conversation, even if all circumstances of time and place were not in accord- ance. That the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, had been the proc- lamation of John, of our Lord, and of the disciples whom he sent forth. Every one would expect such an announcement to act powerfully upon the minds of those who had heard it, still more of those who had uttered it. The Kingdom of Heaven has been for a long while at hand, is it not now actually coming ? The Transfiguration preceded by the words, " Verily I say unto you, there are some standing here who shall not taste of death till they see the Kingdom of God coming with power," must have mightily increased the expectation of its speedy appearance, the warnings which the Apostles found it so impossible to under- THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 55 Stand respecting the rejection and death of their Master, would only in a slight degree allay it. Hence every one has per- ceived in the evangelical narratives indications of a growing im- patience in the minds of the disciples to knov/ when the promise should be fulfilled, and what their places, when the new reign commenced, should be. Nearly all, I say, have perceived this, and have perceived that the character of our Lord's discourses, especially when He set his face to go to Jerusalem, were directed especially to this feeling in the hearts of His followers. But the point specially deserving of notice is, that He never for a moment changes the language which He had before employed. He never intimates that it is not a Kingdom in the strict ordi- nary sense of the word, which He has come to set up. He only .disabuses the minds of His Apostles of certain vulgar but per- fectly natural notions respecting a kingdom, which they, in com- mon with the majority of their countrymen, of Pharisees as much as Publicans, in common with the majority of men in every age and country, were cherishing. With the idea of a kingdom they connected the triumph of the few over the many, rivalship among those few^, the ascendancy of one. All these have been no doubt the accidents of every earthly kingdom, but they had been the destructive accidents of it. No kingdom subsisted by the ambition of the few, by the wealvness of the many, by the rivalship of the great among themselves, by the ultimate tyranny of the sagacious or fortunate chieftain. It subsisted by the power which it possessed of resisting these influences, that were always working to overthrow it, by the higher and nobler impulses and objects which stirred in the minds of even its selfish citizens, and led them to seek its prosperity even at the sacrifice of their own. If the rule of the single tyrant was felt to be better than the anarchy which led to it, the reason is that the tyrant was less selfish than the multitude, that he did more work for the whole, was more the servant of the whole. The law then that the great- est of ail is the servant of all, had been really the law of all society, had been implied in its very existence. All confusion and wrong had come from the transgression of 56 LECTURE I. it. The fondness for that transgression, the readiness to rec- ognize it as the principle of human life and fellowship, was precisely the lie of the evil nature, the lie of the evil spirit, that which all tyranny and falsehood sustained itself upon, that which the Son of God must come to cast out. When then he took a child and set him in the midst of his disciples, He did not say that He was going to found a kingdom, which should be called the kingdom of Jesus, or the Christian kingdom, and which should have a right to set itself up, and boast itself that it was different from all kingdoms, that it came to subvert them ; but He did say, in consistency with all that he had said hitherto, that He came to reveal that kingdom which lay beneath all other kingdoms, which was implied in the existence of all, that the true King, who was the true servant of all, had appeared to show what He was, what the meaning and nature of His own government had been, and to make a portion of those who ruled under him conscious of their own true position, conscious that true rule implies subjection, conscious that all seltish rivalship in.- volves a contradiction ; ready therefore, to feel with Him, that the becoming little children, the abandonment of supremacy, the acknowledgment of weakness, is the one method of making that government which he is exercising through them, feared, loved, and obeyed. > DIVORCE. " And I say unto you. Whosoever shall put away his wife, ex- cept it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery ; and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth com- mit adultery." This sentence is connected in St. Matthew and St. Mark with a discourse on marriage ; in St. Luke it comes in very remarkably between the parable of the unrighteous steward and that of Dives and Lazarus. I may examine hereafter, when I speak of the differences between the Evangelists, in what rela- tion it stands to these discourses. I will only remark here, that the Pharisees, in St. Luke, as well as in St. Matthew and St. Mark, called forth the observation, and that in all three it bears DIVORCE. 57 upon the nature and object of the Law. " Moses suffered us to give her a writing of divorcement, and to put her away," say the Pharisees in two of the Evangelists ; and our Lord answers, " For the hardness of your hearts he gave you this precept ; but from the beginning it was not so." St. Luke says, " The Law and the Prophets were until John ; since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it. And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass than one tittle of the law to fail. Whosoever putteth away his wife," etc. This then is evidently set forth as a notable case, illustrating the relation between the Law of Moses and the Kingdom of Heaven. The Pharisees, who often accused our Lord of depart- ing from the strictness of the Law, suspected that in one in- stance He exceeded it in strictness. He does not deny the charge. He denounces the use of a privilege-which they had allowed themselves, and which Moses had permitted. And He does this in perfect harmony with the principle He had laid down in the case of the sabbath, respecting which laxity had been imputed to Him so continually. There was no laxity in one instance or in the other. He asserted the principle and idea of the sabbath, as it was set forth in the commandment which enforced it. He insisted upon the observation of that meaning and principle as essential to the keeping of the com- mandment. When that was forgotten, it was not kept, though no single ear of corn was plucked upon the day. In like man- ner, He asserted the principle and meaning of marriage, which was implied and presupposed in the very law that sanctioned divorce. The permission was on account of the hardness of their hearts, a provision for an evil emergency which the Phari- sees, mistaking decrees and statutes for laws, had confounded with one of the primary inviolable institutes of society. People were pressing into the Kingdom of Heaven, in hopes of finding an easier yoke than that which the letter-worshippers had im- posed upon them. They would find it easier, because it was that yoke which the heart and spirit of man were created to wear, a yoke which is the pledge of freedom and not of servitude. They 58 LECTURE I. would not find it easier if they were seeking for mere licenses and exemptions. It would not cause one tittle of the Law to fail. It brought to light, re-established, placed on its deepest ground whatever belonged to the true order and constitution of human- ity. The right acts which laws through their infirmity could not compel, would come forth out of the life of the Lawgiver. The irregularities which it was obliged to tolerate he would under- mine. BLESSING THE LITTLE CHILDREN. " Then were there brought unto Him little children, that He should put His hands on them, and pray. And His disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me ; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. And He laid His hands on them, and departed thence." There is a kind of sentimental interest attached to this record which I should be sorry were separated from it; and which I could wish had a more solid foundation. It is thought that the Evangelists, one and all, felt themselves constrained to introduce it because it was such a proof of the human sympathy and tenderness of Jesus. Such assuredly it was. And the higher our idea of Him, the more precious all such tokens of His actual humanity become. But we have no right to put an- other construction upon the object of these writers, than their own words express. They tell us that He said, " Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." Because he said so, the incident de- serves to be recorded in a record of the life of the Son of God upon earth. The blessing of little children was a part of the revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven. Of such would it con- sist, that is to say, not of men affecting the airs of little children, pretending to become children by giving up all the intellectual energies of men, pretending to be simple, and therefore being in the most inward and essential sense artificial ; without any of the frankness, openness, trustfulness of children, full of craft and subtlety, because they will not, and dare not, be manly. Not such, but little children in very deed, ready to receive, and open- THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE RICH MAN. 59 ing every pore and avenue of the spirit that they may receive, full of wonder, "full of the sense of ignorance, craving for knowl- edge and light; believing that all treasures are intended for them, all treasures of earth and heaven, even the infinite wisdom and love of God Himself. As has bee 1 so often said, the man of profoundest science is, and must be, a little child'; he must cease to see himself reflected in the things about him, he must be content to see every thing as it is revealed by its own light, not as it is measured and colored by his light. Of such then must be the Kingdom of Heaven ; only those who can take every thing as a gift, who think of the object, not of their own sight or faith, of Him who works in them, not of their own acts, can be the real brethren and fellow-citizens of Him who glorified not Himself, but His Father who sent Him. THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE RICH MAN. " And, behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life .? And He said unto him. Why callest thou me good ? There is none good but One, that is, God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto Him, Which ? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honor thy father and thy mother, and. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The young man saith unto Him, All these have I kept from my youth up : what lack I yet ? Jesus said unto him. If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven ; and come, follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful : for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus unto His disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, ^ than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God When the disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who 60 LECTURE I. then can be saved ? And Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With man this is impossible, but with God all things are pos- sible." There are very few important variations in the accounts which the three Evangelists give of this interview, and of the re- marks which followed it. All readers have felt that the narrative occupies a most important place in the evangelical history. Much has been said about it ; but its meaning has surely not been exhausted ; it will still bear to be examined in its connec- tion, and in its details. Most persons, I think, must have been struck with the con- nection between the form of the young man's question, and the weakness which our Lord brought to light in him. " What good thing shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life ? " This was pre- cisely the thought of one who had been wont to try every thing by the standards of the market, and who naturally, inevitably adopted its language when he spoke of life, or of the kingdom of heaven. Our Lord's answer, " Why callest thou me good ? There is none good but One," was surely addressed to this state of mind. He takes advantage of a phrase which the )oung man used in a mere conventional way, to set before him that which he really wanted, that which could not be measured by any of his standards, " There is none good but God," He is the good. To know Him is the life thou seekest. But how was that good, that life to be obtained ? Here came in another humbling les- son, "You have got the commandments. These are given you for that end. They tell you of the things which keep you from the knowledge of God, of the acts and tendencies which put you at a distance from Him. Keep these, remember these, hold them fast in your mind, mould yourself according to them, and you will be in the way to the knowledge of Him who gave them, to the perfect Good, to the true Life." But all these the young man had kept from his youth up. Was he wrong in this asser- tion ? Was it a lying boast? We are not told so. Every thing would lead us to the opposite conclusion. He had kept them, but not with a view to that end which our Lord set before him. He had kept them from his youth up habitually, instinctively ; THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE RICH MAN. 6 1 and as he became more conscious of a purpose, as he began more deliberately to seek one, he kept them with a view to that result which he hoped our Lord might assist him in procuring. He thought obedience to them would buy him so many blessings in a future life, or would rescue him from so many punishments in it. Still he felt that more was wanted to give him the re- quisite security. Unquestionably he never put the thought dis- tinctly before himself, that he was bargaining with the Almighty. His gentle and graceful, even gracious, mind would have revolted at such language. But this was his misfortune. He did not set the case clearly before himself; he was living in a' dim twilight, not distinctly aware of his own feelings or objects, ignorant how entirely his thoughts of heaven were shaped and colored by his earthly circumstances. He was therefore willing to give so much over and above his observation of the commandments for the sake of making his title to the felicity of which he dreamed, and to a deliverance from the terrors of which his conscience spoke, absolutely clear and undoubted. Our Lord takes him at his word. " Thou wilt give up much to ob- tain heaven. Go, sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and come, follow me. You feel there is some hinderance to being all that you ought to be, all that you wish to be. You are right ; there is such a hinderance. There is something which turns all your thoughts about right and good awry, which gives them a false direction and a false object. Give up the thing which thou lovest better than God, and thou wilt know what He is ; thou wilt have treasure in heaven." Here was the test. He had never known before what his heaven was ; now he found it out. The life he was seeking was the earthly life, though he called it eternal life. By eternal, he meant the indefinite prolongation of that kind of good which he had been here dwelling in. It is not the Evangelist's business to give us the issue of the story. One cheering hint they do give us, upon which we may build plausible conclusions respecting the history of the young man. He went away sad. He had learnt to know himself as he had never known himself before, to have a discontent with himself 62 LECTURE I. which he had till then never experienced. All good may have come out of that sadness. His past keeping of the command- ments, the gracious dispositions which St. Mark says, "our Lord beheld and loved," may not in any sense have been wasted. If he could not break his own idol to pieces, God may have broken it for him ; or he may have been afterwards one of those who learnt to call nothing their own, to bring all their goods and lay them at the Apostles' feet. Of him we know nothing. This fragment of his history is recorded, because upon it our Lord grounded the remark, " How^ hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of God." Why was this so hard? The Apostles were astonished beyond measure, for who then could be saved ? 1 he rich man had time to devote to the service of God. He had money to give for the help of the poor. If he could not fulfil the duties, practice the virtues, earn the prizes of the Divine Kingdom, who could ? If the Kingdom of Heaven were not altogether something different from that which the young ruler, or the Apostles themselves at that time, were ac- knowledging, how perfectly natural and reasonable were his thoughts and theirs ! If it was a kingdom such as John had spoken of, such as our Lord in all His parables and miracles had set forth, a kingdom nigh at hand, having its throne in the heart and spirit of every human being, the kingdom of the Son of God over the creatures who were made in his image, how cer- tain it was that every thing which led them to seek in the world without for the treasures which were stored in Himself, were hinderances to the confession of His dominion, hinderances which it was impossible for man, though it was possible for God, to overcome. If the Kingdom of Heaven were a universal king- dom, into which all of every degree were to be admitted, how obvious it was that the external possessions which made one man think himself above another, and unwilling to take up his posi- tion among his brethren, were also all but insurmountable bar- riers. Unless the rich man could become in the most inward and essential sense poor, he could no more shrink into the dimensions which would fit him to enter the strait gate, than a camel could go through the eye of a needle. THE TEMPTATION OF THE POOR MAN. 63 THE TEMPTATION OF THE POOR MAN. " Then answered Peter and said unto Him, Beliold, we have forsaken all, and followed Thee ; what shall we have therefor? And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, that ye which have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit in the throne of His glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.- And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my Name's sake, shall receive an hundred-fold, and shall inherit everlasting life. But many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first." The words respecting the regeneration and the Son of Man sitting on the throne of His glory, are peculiar to St. Matthew, and as such will demand our consideration hereafter. The particular form of St. Peter's phrase, " What shall we have therefor .''"' also belongs to him. Hence, I apprehend, arises the difference in the rest of the passage. A great part of the emphasis of the whole story in St. Matthew evidently rests on the last verse, which is the text of the parable of "the Husband- men and Laborers in the Vineyard." St. Mark does not give the same selfish form to St. Peter's demand ; he merely says, " Then Peter began to say, Lo, we have left all, and followed Thee." But as he had used the same phrase in the 8th Chapter, when Peter called our Lord to account for the prophecy of His humil- iation, and when he received his great rebuke, I conceive he did mean to imply nearly what is intimated in the other Evangelists. Although therefore he omits the parable, he introduces the w'ords, " Many that are last shall be first, and the first last," in the same significant way. In St. Luke we read merely, "Lo, we have left all, and followed Thee." By him. the words, " Many that are first shall be last," are omitted. They occur in the 13th Chapter of St. Luke, in connection with the great answer to the question, " Are there few that shall be saved ? " These remarks could not so well be introduced in speaking of 64 LECTURE T. the direct differences of the Evangelists. They may serve to "^ explain how apparently accidental omissions or additions in narratives that are substantially the same, bring out the meaning which is common to them. There can be no doubt, I imagine, from the language of all the Evangelists, that our Lord meant to tell Peter that the blessing of those who really left all for the Gospel could not be exaggerated. If they had left all and fol- lowed Christ, there were houses, lands, persecutions, friends, mothers, brothers, sisters, everlasting life^ in store for them. It is intimated as clearly, that while he was still asking " what shall we have therefor t " he had not left all. He was bargaining for wages, wishing to get more than others by his sacrifices. At the end of the day, if such a habit of mind continued, he would be angry when the great Householder admitted those who he thought had toiled less, to the same blessing as himself. The instruction therefore to the poor fishermen is essentially the same as that to the rich ruler. The discourses cannot be separated. They were still in a measure self-seekers as he was ; in a measure, I say, for no one can suppose that they had really followed Christ upon a calculation. They were drawn after Him by a power, a love, which they could not resist. They clung to Him, and lost themselves in Him : so far they were already in seed and germ what they afterwards became. But the habit of mind which belonged to their country, which belongs to the evil nature of every man, which was encouraged by the pharisaic religion, and almost constituted it, still hung about them. They were still fancying as the ruler did, that certain measurable sacrifices would secure a certain measurable felicity. The associations of the market were not banished from their contemplation of eter- nal life. One great lesson comes out of the answers to them, that the mistakes of men are not treated by the Divine teacher according to the rule of the great human teacher, that a stick which has an inclination to bend one way, must be turned the other. On the contrary, He, both in dealing with the ruler and with His own disciples, goes all lengths with them ; He admits that eternal life is to be obtained by sacrifice, and only THE GOING UP TO JERUSALEM. 65 shows them how the selfishness of their minds is really making sacrifice, in any true sense of the word, impossible. THE GOING UP TO JERUSALEM. I have spoken already of two announcements of the Passion, especially of that which followed the Transfiguration. But the passage which follows immediately after the discourse with the ruler and with Peter, in all the three Evangelists, is introduced so significantly — little phrases in each indicate that it left so deep an impression upon the disciples — as to forbid that we should pass it over, under pretence of its being a mere repetition of what has gone before. " And Jesus going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples apart in the way, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem ; and the Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests, and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gen- tiles, to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify Him ; and the third day He shall rise again." What I wish to fix your attention upon is, that the emphasis in this passage is made, by each Evangelist, to rest on the words, '" Behold, we go up to Jerusalem." Our Lord had already spoken of His passion and resurrection in connection with His own character as the Son of God. There was another aspect in which they must be viewed, in connection with the holy city, with the people who would reject Him. St. Luke, perhaps, makes us feel with more clearness than the other Evangelists how continually this thought was present to the mind of our Lord Himself. But the more diligently we study both the others, the more we shall find how much the entry into Jerusalem is by them also regarded as the crisis in the liistory of their nation, and therefore in the history of all nations. Never for a moment have they lost sight of an approaching judgment in their view of the great Deliverer, never have they forgotten that a baptism of the Holy Ghost is also to be a baptism of fire. We shall feel how needful this consideration is when we come to the next step in the narrative. 5 66 LECTURE 1. THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT OF OLIVES. " And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two dis- ciples, saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her : loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, the Lord hath need of them ; and straight- way he will send them. All this was done, that it might be ful- filled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. And the dis- ciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, and brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set him thereon. And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way ; others cut down branches from the trees, and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the Son of David ; Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord ; Hosanna in the highest. And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying. Who is this ? And the multitude said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee." This is one of the narratives which belongs to the fourth Gospel as well as to the first three. I am not now to consider St. John's reasons for introducing it. Every one has felt how important a place it occupies in those which are called the syn- optical Gospels. Every one also, I suppose, has perceived that the passage is meant to describe a royal entrance into the city of David, an entrance for which there had been a long previous preparation, which even at the time the immediate disciples ot our Lord, deriving their impression from Himself, regarded as the beginning of a series of great and solemn events. What would come of this to Him quite unusual method of announcmg His dignity, why He who had been merely the prophet among fishermen in Galilee, should court the vengeance which he THE DESCENT FROM THE MOUNT OF OLIVES. 6/ seemed to expect in the capital of his enemies, why, if He must enter the city towards which he had so long set his face, he did not more carefully than ever before eschew any conduct which might excite the suspicion of the Roman Governor, or furnish the Pharisees with a new and valid pretext against Him ; this the disciples might in vain try to guess. But that this entry did stand in some very close relation to that Kingdom of which He had been speaking in all His parables, which He had been illustrating by all His miracles, they could not doubt. If He wished them to think that He was not a king, or one only in some imaginary, metaphorical sense, why seize just this moment and just this manner of conveying an impression to their minds, which all after events could not efface, but must deepen ? This is the kind of question which we should naturally urge upon those w^ho are wont to read the Gospels with perfect faith in their genuineness and their inspiration, but only as the his- tory of a Divine Teacher, not chiefly or primarily as the history of a Divine King. Those who look upon the Evangelists as vulgar men united by the superstition of their country in the common belief that Jesus was coming to depose the Caesars, and restore the dynasty of David in Judsea, will of course eagerly grasp at this evidence in favor of their conclusion. And surely they are entitled to any benefit which they can derive from the most exact meaning which can be attached to the words of the Evangelists ; they have a right to demand that no vague uncriti- cal signification shall be attached to the description of an event evidently so important in the eyes of the writers, the one from which they date the last and greatest period of their history. If upon an attentive consideration of the words which I have quot- ed from St. Matthew, the Ebionite Evangelist, as w^e are told he is, the one in whom, after all later excisions and spiritualizations, there is said to remain the most marked traces of old judaical materialism, it shall be found that there is any thing whatsoever which is inconsistent with that idea of a kingdom, of a real, ac- tual, present kingdom, a kingdom which was the real fulfilment of the one David established, but because real, present, imme- 68 LECTURE I. diate, Davidian, Jewish, therefore in the deepest sense spiritual, lying at the root of things, existing in the person of One who had from the first upheld all things by the word of His power ; if there is one phrase in St. Matthew's narrative which after the severest examination is found to interfere with the impression which all his previous history has left upon us, then I admit, not merely that the story of the descent from the Mount of Olives is a perplexing passage in itself, but that it perplexes all which pre- cedes and follows it. But there is no such word. Every thing here is royal, but there are none of the trappings of royalty. He calls for the ass, and the owner feels that it must be yielded up, because the Lord has need of it. The ass is the ordinary Beast upon which the judge of old rode, yet it is the symbol of lowliness. He is wel- comed with branches of palm-trees, and with hosannas ; but the honors are paid Him by a band of insignificant followers. Turn the narrative which way soever you will, consider the general im- pression which it produces, or look into its minutest details, and there is every thing to bear out the impression of quiet invisible power which will make itself to be felt, but which will not come with observation, which claims the homage of human hearts as the highest it can receive, before it shows to what master those hearts which refuse the homage are surrendering themselves. This is precisely the teaching which we have received from every passage we have studied hitherto in these Gospels. If there were a history composed of such passages, if the scene of it was laid in the land of Judaea, if every step of it was connected with an approaching crisis in the history of the land, and of its chief city, should not we look for this consummation, should we not feel that there was a blank in the story if it was wanting ? All Christendom has felt, the conviction has been expressed in the language of art and in the language of books of devotion, by those who were meditating the Scriptures for their own spiritual profit, by those who were looking upon them as documents for the history of the world, that the meekest and lowliest of men did enter Jerusalem to say, " I am your Ruler and Lord. Will JESUS GOING INTO THE TEMPLE. 69 you own me in that character ? If 3^ou do not, the stones of your city will cry out. The real invisible bond which keeps them together will be destroyed ; in a little time not one will be left upon another." I appeal to the existence of this conviction which has struck such deep roots, and has found for itself such manifold expressions, in proof of my original assertion, that I am not maintaining any novel hypothesis respecting these Gos- pels, but am merely bringing out the truth which the conscience of modern Europe has implicitly recognized, and showing that instead of its being grounded on some symbolical or mystical interpretation, it is the only one which is compatible with the literal understanding of these books, the only one which explains the connection of their different parts. What has been wanting, I conceive, to give this belief its full power and consistency, has been a more full and frank acknowledgment that Christ is the King of Men, and not merely the King of that particular portion of men who were permitted to call themselves by His Name. Our selfishness has robbed Him of more than half Plis glory, and threatens at last to deprive us of the blessing which we have refused to share. But I am anticipating future observa- tions. JESUS GOING INTO THE TEMPLE. If the last passage contains one of the few coincidences be- tween that part of St. John's Gospel which precedes the history of the passion and the narratives of the other three Evangelists, the passage which follows contains almost the only memorable instance of a strong apparent disagreement between him and them. He seems to place the story of our Lord's entrance into the Temple to cast out them that sold and bought in it, at the passover which followed His first miracle ; they are unanimous in connecting it with His final entry into Jerusalem. St. Mat- thew's account of the event is essentially the same with that of the rest. " And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew 70 LECTURE I. the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them. It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer ; but ye have made it a den of thieves." Every one of the three Evangelists intimates that this act produced a great impression upon the chief priests ; every one of them seems to connect with it the question, " By what authority doest thou these things ? " and the parable to which that question gave rise. St. Matthew and St. Mark introduce the miracle of the barren fig-tree, a miracle which all have felt to be in so close a connection witl? the withering of the Jewish nation, as part of the narrative ; St, Luke, who had spoken of his beholding the city and weeping over it just before, translates as it were the miracle into words. But why should going into the temple and assuming a right to cleanse it, seem to the priests so audacious an act of authority .'' Why should it be linked in the minds of the Evangelists to deeds and words which beto- kened an approaching catastrophe ? The whole after narrative I believe will explain these feelings. If the entrance into Jeru- salem on an ass was an assumption of that kingly honor which he seemed previously to have disclaimed, the entrance into the temple was a no less significant assumption of the character of the divine Son which His disciples had acknowledged, but which as yet they were forbidden to proclaim. The one act was evi- dence for the charge before Pilate, the other was demonstration to the chief priest that he must be condemned as a blasphemer by the Sanhedrim. What, call the Temple His Father's house, claim a right to drive out the invaders of it because it was such ! Was not this the highest proof that He had committed that of- fence for which the law had appointed stoning ? Accordingly the parable which I have considered already apart from its con- nection, and merely in illustration of the parables generally, has the most direct and obvious bearing upon this especial act. The Son was come to claim the fruits of the vineyard from the hus- bandmen ; the stone had been brought in, which was the ground and corner-stone of the Temple, that it might be seen how the builders would deal with it. THE BAPTISM OF JOHN. 7^ THE BAPTISM OF JOHN. I must not, however, pass over the words common to all the three Evangelists, which introduce the parable. " And when he was come into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came unto him as he w^s teaching, and said, By what au- thority doest thou these things ? and who gave thee this author- ity ? And Jesus answered and said unto them, I also will ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I in like wise will tell you by what authority I do these things. The baptism of John, whence was it ? from heaven, or of men ? And they reasoned with them- selves, saying. If we shall say, From heaven ; he will say unto us, Why did ye not then believe him ? But if we shall say. Of men ; we fear the people ; for all hold John as a prophet. And they 'answered Jesus, and said. We cannot tell. And he said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things." One part of the value of this passage consists, as all hav^ perceived, in the witness which it bears to the general law that those who have not profited by a preparatory dispensation contract an incapacity for a higher one. But it must not be for- gotten that the chief priests are here especially spoken of, in dis- tinction from, even in contrast with, the people at large ; nay, in St. Matthew's Gospel with the grosser part of the people, with the publicans and harlots. The passage then must be compared with the words in which St. John addressed the Scribes and Pharisees when they came out to his baptism ; " Oh generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come ? l^iink not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father ; for God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." The whole sin of the Pharisees is brought out in that sentence, the height and the meanness of their ambition. They were proud of being Abraham's children ; they did not think it possible that the benefit of that position could be ever taken from them ; they did not care to be God's children. To have the lower honor to themselves was better than to have the 72 LECTURE I. higher honor shared with those whom they looked upon as mere stones. They were therefore wrapped up in a reh'gious atheism, satisfied without feeling that they stood in any relation towards God. Of this sin, which was a proof that they had for- gotten the blessings of their own covenant, John called on them to repent. They were to turn from Abraham to the God of Abraham ; not to glory in their strength or in their wisdom, but in this, that they might know Him who executed righteousness and judgment upon the earth. If they did that. He would re- veal Himself to them. There was One among them who would baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire. The chief priests had not heeded that call; therefore they could not know by what authority Christ did these things. They wished to be rulers themselves in the temple, when He whose it was had sud- denly come to refine and to purify it. They did not know who He was, but they had an instinct that He was one whom they ought to obey, therefore they said, " Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours." PAYING TRIBUTE TO C^SAR. " Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their dis- ciples with the Herodians, saying. Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man : for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou ? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not ? But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said. Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites ? Shew me the tribute- money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them. Whose is this image and superscription .? They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them. Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's ; and unto God the things that are God's." The parallel passages to this are in the twelfth chapter of Mark, from the 13th to the i8th verses, and in Luke the twentieth chapter, from the 19th to the 27th verses. PAYING TRIBUTE TO C^SAR. "J^ The differences between the three Evangelists here are very slight. The most considerable is that St. Matthew introduces the parable of the king making a marriage for his son between the parable of the husbandmen in the vineyard and the sending forth of the spies ; that St. Mark and St. Luke refer that meas- ure directly to the stricken conscience and bitterness of the chief priests, who perceived that these words had bedn spoken against them. Probably, if we consider the ^second parable attentively, we shall not feel this difference to be a very weighty one. It is closely related in spirit and purpose, even in form, to the other, and may well have deepened and sharpened the rage which it excited. I need not enlarge much on the question respecting the tribute-money; it will not escape, and has not escaped any, even the most superficial reader, that it bears upon our Lord's pretensions as a king, and was meant to prepare the way for the destruction of His reputation with the people, or for an accusa- tion before the Roman Governor, Nor has it ever, as far as I know, been suggested that our Lord, in His answer to the ques- tion, renounced or explained away, even in the slightest degree, the dignity which He had seemed to assert when He entered the city. What I would chiefly complain of in the interpreters of the passage is, that they have led their readers to admire a kind of dexterity in our Lord's answer, as if it were indeed an evasion of the question, as if it did not carry out the whole meaning of His previous teaching, and present it in a new and striking ap- plication, as if it were not full of the most solemn reproof to the Pharisees and Herodians, and the profoundest lesson to the whole Jewish nation respecting the secret of its slavery. What was the deliverance the Pharisees dreamed of, and sought for.? A deliverance from the payment of tribute to Caesar. And why was that the great, cause of their lamentation .? Because their hearts were in bondage to covetousness, because they knew noth- ing of any more ignominious service than that which was signi- fied by the presence of the publican, any emancipation greatei than that which was implied in his exaction being withdrawn. But whose is this image and superscription on the tribute- 74 LECTURE I. money ? Is it not Caesar's ? Why should it not go to him ? Whose is the image in which you are made ? What superscrip- tion is written on your hearts ? Render them to the invisible God, claim Him for your King, and your chains drop off ; you are slaves no longer. Christ then did not merely say by this answer, " I am not come now to disturb the government of the Caesars," but He showed why He was not come to disturb it, why He could not effectually deliver the nation by setting them free from tribute. He was come to reveal the Kingdom of God to them, to tell them that they were God's servants, and not Cae- sar's ; He was come, therefore, to accomplish all that the people expected from Him, if they had known what they expected ; He was come to undermine the tyranny of the Caesars, the tyranny of the Pharisees, all other tyranny in the world. Pharisees, He- rodians, Romans, had a right to be suspicious of Him. He was far more really dangerous to them, and they were beginning to know it, than all the incendiaries who had ever exhorted the Israelites to throw off their yoke. THE SADDUCEES AND THE RESURRECTION. "The same day came to him the Sadducees, which say that there is no resurrection, and asked him, saying, Master, Moses said. If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother. Now there were with us seven brethren ; and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his broth- er : likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh. And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resur- rection whose wife shall she be of the seven ? for they all had her. Jesus answered and said unto them. Ye do err, not know- ing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrec- tion they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying. I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, THE SADDUCEES AND THE RESURRECTION. 75 and the God of Jacob ? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And when the muhitude heard this, they were as- tonished at his doctrine." ' It was clearly intimated in our Lord's observation respecting the leaven, that there was a habit of mind which was common to the opposing sects of the Jews. It is not enough to say that their common dislike to Him proved the existence of this radical similarity ; it was quite certain that in the course of their opposition the inward nature of it would discover itself. Here was an occasion in which the Sadducees took up the line of argument which would at other times have brought them in most direct collision with the Pharisees. They strove to embarrass our Lord with a case which must have served for the topic of many a debate, and many a jest, when they were, refuting the doctors of the other school. And yet here our Lord detected a temper of mind very closely akin to that which He had just exposed in the men who asked Him whether it was l