OF msfi^. 
 
 BS24I2 
 
THE 
 
 LAWS OF THE KINGDOM. 
 
 J. OSWALD DYKES, M.A. 
 
 M^ uv eivofAts ©saw «X>.' ivvofca; Xpttrrov. — 1 COR, IX. 21. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS. 
 
 1873. 
 
ol'i 
 
 MT7EEAT AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, 
 PEINTEES TO HER MAJESTT's STATIONERT OmCE. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 These pages are designed to form a continuation to a small work 
 -ecently published on * The Beatitudes of the Kingdom. ' It is 
 proposed to devote a third volume to the treatment, in similar style, 
 f the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 P A K T I. 
 
 Relation of the New Law to the Old. 
 
 general peinciple : fulfilment, not destruction, 
 first illustration : sixth commandment, 
 §econd illustration : seventh commandment, 
 third illustration : oaths, .... 
 fourth illustration : lex talionis, 
 fifth illustration : who is my neighbour ? . 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 21 
 
 43 
 
 63 
 
 85 
 109 
 
 PART II. 
 
 The Law of Secrecy in Religion. 
 
 THE principle : before god, not MEN, 
 FIRST application : TO ALMSGIVING, , 
 SECOND APPLICATION : TO PRAYER, 
 EXCURSUS : THE MODEL PRAYER, 
 THIRD APPLICATION : TO FASTING, 
 
 133 
 151 
 173 
 193 
 217 
 
PAKT I. 
 
 EELATION OF THE NEW LAW 
 TO THE OLD. 
 
THE GENEEAL PEmCIPLE : 
 EULFILMENT, NOT DESTEUCTIOK 
 
Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the pro- 
 phets : I am not come to destroy, hut to fidjil. For verily I 
 say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle 
 shall in no wise pass from the law till all he fulfilled. Who- 
 soever, therefore, shall hreak one of these least commandments, 
 and shall teach men so, he shall he called the least in the king- 
 dom of heaven; hut whosoever shall do and teach them, the 
 same shall he called great in the kingdom, of heaven. For I 
 say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the 
 righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven. — Matt, v, 17-20. 
 
 Cf. Luke xvi. 17 : It is easier for heaven and earth to pass 
 than one tittle of the law to fail. 
 
THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE : 
 FULFILMENT, NOT DESTRUCTION. 
 
 IN the eight Beatitudes of the Kingdom with part l 
 which the Sermon on the Mount opens, the general 
 spiritual King has defined who they are whom He ^^^^^^'^^^^• 
 numbers among His subjects. Of aU who bear this 
 blessed character He says, ' Of such is the kingdom Matt. v. 3, 
 of heaven.' But the bulk of this inauc^ural address 
 
 o 
 
 of our Lord is legislation. Its main design was 
 to lay down the constitutional principles or legal 
 axioms of His spiritual kingdom. To this design 
 a description of its blessed subjects could be 
 only preliminary. Accordingly, the beatitudes 
 are followed up by a series of legislative para- 
 graphs, which, under several heads, cover the 
 main duties of the citizen in God's new or 
 Christian kingdom. 
 
 Of these legislative sections, the first and most Matt. v. 
 important is that Avhich fills the remainder of St. 
 Matthew's fifth chapter. It takes its form from 
 the necessity under which this new Legislator 
 found Himself to define His relation to the pre- 
 
 3 
 
4 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. ceding legislation of His nation. Jesus did not 
 GENERAL begin, no legislator ever does begin, to write His 
 
 PRINCIPLE. 
 
 law, as it were, on clean paper. It is impossible 
 for any religious reformer or founder to sweep tlie 
 ground quite clear of all previous systems, or to 
 begin to build up a system of his own without re- 
 spect to his predecessors' work. Jesus found the 
 Jewish people what the whole previous history of 
 their fathers had made them ; with a definite and 
 venerable code of laws, and a very minute and 
 pompous liturgy of sacrifice and praise. It was 
 impossible not to begin by defining how^ His new 
 kingdom stood related to the ancient theocracy 
 of Moses and the prophets. He spoke as a 
 Hebrew prophet to a Hebrew audience ; and the 
 very first question which met Him, or at least 
 which lay unexpressed in the thoughts of every 
 hearer, was this : You say you are come a teacher 
 sent by God to set up among us a new kingdom. 
 Other teachers we have had from God, who in 
 our fathers' days, from Moses to Malachi, did set 
 up our kingdom and gave us laws in abundance. 
 What must we understand you to make of all 
 this former revelation and these existing laws ? 
 
 To this question there was the more need to 
 give an immediate and explicit answer, because 
 already His audience was divided by a false con- 
 
Fulfilment, not Destruction. 
 
 ception on the point. It was rumoured, and part i. 
 several things gave colour to the rumour, that general 
 tlie new Prophet's teaching was essentially de- 
 structive — hostile to, and meant to subvert, the 
 good old system of law and rite delivered to the 
 fathers through the hand of Moses. Two parties 
 in the nation caught at this notion ; the one in 
 hope, the other in fear. While the mass of the 
 common people, busy with field labour or with 
 trade, were not ill-pleased to hear that the strict 
 discipline and intolerably minute rubrics of the 
 old law were to be relaxed ; a smaller section, 
 whose professional importance and reputation for 
 sanctity rested mainly on their exceptional ob- 
 servance of legal punctilio, resented the infrac- 
 tion of the written code, even in a 'jot or tittle,' 
 as sacrilege or apostasy. It was against this 
 two-faced misconception Jesus had to guard His 
 own position ; and it was this which determined 
 the two-faced form of His main statement : 
 
 ' Think not that I am come to destroy the law 
 or the prophets ; 
 
 ' I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' Ver. 17. 
 
 These very weighty words, which condense for us 
 this whole section of the discourse, are a protest, 
 on the one side, against the blind spirit of revolt, 
 the radical reaction, whose impulse is to tear 
 
6 
 
 TliG Leans of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. itself loose from all that went before, and to cle- 
 GBNERAL stpoj the good along with the evil in that which 
 
 PRINCIPLE. . 
 
 IS ; on the other side, against the rigid unpro- 
 gressive conservatism, which in its idolatry of the 
 past would arrest development, and which refuses 
 to ' fulfil ' the spirit of existing systems by a wise 
 superseding of their form. Though these words 
 were framed to meet the immediate prejudices of 
 a Jewish audience, they enclose the golden rule 
 of all progress. To the philosophic statesman 
 and to the religious reformer of every generation, 
 the best recommendation of what is new will 
 always be that it comes not to destroy the old, 
 but to fulfil it ; to understand its spirit, to realize 
 its purpose, to carry forward its work, and to 
 make every change an unfolding into higher 
 power of whatever truth or goodness had been 
 the living soul of systems which, through lapse 
 Heb. viii. 13. of time, are now grown old and ' ready to vanish 
 away.' 
 
 It was through no accident that Jesus Christ 
 held towards the Hebrew Old Testament this 
 relation of a fulfiller, any more than it was by 
 an accident that He Himself was born a Jew. 
 Judaism was the divine preparative for Chris- 
 tianity. From the call of Abram to the coming 
 
Fulfilment, not Destruction. 7 
 
 of Christ is one unbroken historical process, and paet i. 
 the special function of the elect people was to general 
 give birth to the new kingdom. It was out 
 of the womb of Judaism, and only out of it, 
 that, as its lawful offspring, Christianity could John iv. 22. 
 come. I take for granted, that when our Lord 
 spoke of ' the law and the j)rophets,' He used a 
 current phrase for the entire sacred literature 
 which held the Hebrew economy of revelation. 
 The writings, of course, are only of value as 
 embodying a religion or system of truth and duty ; 
 and the division into ' law ' and ' prophets ' cor- 
 responds to the two sides of the Hebrew religion 
 which were most characteristic of it : I mean its 
 aspect of command or literal injunction, most felt 
 by the least spiritual ; and its aspect of promise 
 or underlying hope, best seen by the most spiritual. 
 Of these, the former certainly found its chief 
 utterance in the Mosaic Pentateuch, the latter in 
 the later prophetic books. But of the entire 
 system from first to last, this was the great 
 peculiarity, that while, in the words of a New 
 Testament writer, ' the law made nothing perfect, Heb. vii. 19. 
 there was still the bringing in of a better hope.' ^ 
 
 ' Tliis is in substance Bleek's rendering {Hehraerhrief, ii. 350), 
 slightly but not materially different from the marginal reading 
 in our Authorized Version. 
 
The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. Imperfection was its first mark, and that attached 
 GENERAL itsclf mainly to ' the law : ' it perfected nothing. 
 Preparation was its second, and belonged more 
 to ' the prophets : ' there was the bringing in of 
 a better hope. Manifestly, these two are so 
 connected, that it conld not help being imper- 
 fect, just because it was preparatory. From 
 this point it becomes easy to answer the 
 vexed question about the completeness or per- 
 fection of the Old Testament system. Looked 
 at in the light of its end, in view of that for the 
 sake of which it existed, and towards which it 
 led the world, it will seem, on any candid and 
 liberal construction, to be a worthy product of 
 His wisdom Who designed it ; fit for its work, 
 and completely answering the design of His 
 gracious providence. But if any one will choose 
 to examine its parts out of all relation to that 
 which followed it, and to judge of them by a 
 perfectly independent standard, it will not be 
 hard to prove it in many ways faulty, defective, 
 and amiss. It cannot help being so. That 
 which is only meant to introduce something else 
 Cf. Heb. xi. and better, without which it cannot be made 
 
 40. 
 
 perfect, must of course look imperfect, and be 
 imperfect, so long as it stands alone. It may be 
 as sfood as it can be for the time and for its 
 
PEINCIPLE 
 
 Fulfilment, not Destruction. 9 
 
 purpose ; but it must be less good and less entire part i. 
 than the ' better thing ' for which it waits. It is general 
 idle, therefore, to claim for the Old Testament 
 such perfection as we claim for the ]S"ew ; or 
 labour to explain away the inferiority of Judaism 
 to Christianity. The Old stood in need, says 
 Jesus, of fulfilment. Look at the Law apart from 
 the Gospel : what is it ? An imperfect code ; a 
 handful of moral enactments, wdiich cover only a 
 fragment of human life, coupled with arbitrary 
 regulations about food and dress, and the colour 
 and size of buildings, and the ritual of religious 
 ceremony, which could only be kept in one very 
 small corner of Syria, and which even there look 
 absolutely puerile in themselves. The Levitical 
 code, unfulfilled, is a fragment, shapeless, and 
 without consistent meaning. Fulfilled in Chris- 
 tianity, it falls into its place ; it dovetails in with 
 its complement; it recovers its rationale ; it grows 
 intelligible. The whole Law, therefore, was in a 
 sense prophetic ; it foretold its fulfilment, for it 
 craved it. The Ten Words craved a more spiritual 
 interpretation, and the obedience which appeared 
 impossible. The liturgy craved to be read in the 
 light of a spiritual worship of atonement, offered 
 for men by a more effectual Priest, in the real 
 purity, not of white linen, but of a clean heart. 
 
10 
 
 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. The civil institutes of the little Shemitic com- 
 GENERAL iiionwealtli meant little for the earth, if there 
 never was to he any wide spiritual kingdom of 
 divine rule over all nations and the souls of all 
 men. In short, the whole Hebrew system stood 
 erect, with a finger pointing forward, as the guide 
 and tutor of earlier ages to lead men's eyes on- 
 ward to the world's better hope. Fulfilment was 
 that mighty something for which it waited, to be 
 the answer of its riddles, the supply of its wants, 
 the substance of its symbols, the fact filling out 
 its forms. That something was Jesus. When you 
 know how much it means, and how louGf mankind 
 had been kept waiting for it, there is sublimity 
 in the composure with which this simple preacher 
 of Galilee sets Himself forth as the Fulfiller : ' I 
 am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' 
 
 On the other hand, it must not be forc^otten 
 that all fulfilment of an imperfect by a more per- 
 fect stage of development involves what is a kind 
 of destruction. In so far as the Old Testament 
 was preparative of the N'ew, it was temporary or 
 destructible. It provided a perishable envelope 
 for truth, w^hich was as yet in the germ only ; it 
 threw athwart the world's path shadows from 
 
 Heb. X. 1, . . ^ 
 
 cf. ix. 11. ' good things to come ; ' it created a machinery 
 
 Cf. 1 Cor. . 
 
 xiii. 11. for human education which must pass away like 
 
Fulfilment, not Destruction. 11 
 
 childish things. Much about it, therefore, was part i. 
 destroyed by being fulfilled. As the shell general 
 breaks when the bird is hatched ; as the sheath 
 withers when the bud bursts into leaf ; as the 
 rough sketch is done with when the picture is 
 finished ; as the toys of boyhood are laid by in 
 adolescence ; as, in short, whatever is only pre- 
 paratory is evanescent, and perishes in the hour 
 of maturity : so it was inevitable, that whatever 
 portions of the old economy were educational and 
 introductory, should fall off when the Fulfiller 
 came. This destruction of outer form accom- 
 panies every rmfolding of truth. Is^othing lives 
 and abides save that eternal Word of God, Who 
 is the personal and perfect utterance of God Him- 
 self ; every word of man in which for a time this 
 Word of God is more or less fully uttered, like 
 every flower of grass in which a little of the l Pet. i. 24, 
 divine may be discerned, must wither and pass. 
 It is a thing never to be overlooked, that truth is 
 more than any form or expression of truth we 
 know. God is greater than His own revelation 
 of Himself. As the conceptions of men regard- 
 ing the Father and His relations to the world in 
 His Son, have otowu stronsjer and clearer, so have 
 they found for themselves new vehicles of utter- 
 ance and new symbols to reflect them. Truth 
 
1 2 The Laivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. may have many modes of exhibition ; each of 
 
 GENERAL them it shivers in succession, as a healthy oak- 
 
 shoot the pot which holds it. Shaking must follow 
 
 shaking, till all that is of the earth be shaken 
 
 Heb. xii. 27. off ; then shall remain only that which cannot 
 be shaken. Men's thoudits chano-e and widen : 
 but He abides, Who is God's perfect Word, ' the 
 
 Heb. xiii. 8. Same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.' In 
 Himself, Christ Jesus gathers up every broken 
 light of truth, each 'jot or tittle ' of true goodness, 
 which ever found expression in decalogue w^ords 
 or verse of prophet, or in any verse or word of 
 any man ; and in Him they find their just place 
 and supreme fulfilment : for in Him are hid all 
 
 Col. ii. 3. these treasures of wdsdom and knowledge. 
 
 This great word of the seventeenth verse is not 
 to be read in any sense narrower than the widest 
 which it will bear. It is as true of the pro]3hets 
 as of the law, that Jesus w^as not their destroyer, 
 but their fulfiller. It is true of all antecedent 
 systems and doctrines which had in them the 
 least soul of goodness or of truth, no less than of 
 Mosaism, that the Son of God came to ' fulfil.' 
 For, in fact, it belongs to the divine nature as 
 discovered to us in His character, that He hath no 
 love to destroy. God aims ever at fostering what 
 
Fulfilment, not Destruction. 13 
 
 is good, unfolding what is involved, ripening what part i. 
 is immature. Throughout physical processes, as general 
 in the rearing of spiritual manhood, we trace the 
 Divine Hand at this loving task ; making the 
 most of everything, educing good out of ill, 
 causing life to grow from the ashes of dead life, 
 and finding in each lower or evanescent form of 
 existence a step by which to rise to something 
 nobler. Is not this characteristic of His working. 
 Whose presence w^e detect throughout the universe, 
 that, where He comes. He comes not to destroy, 
 but to fulfil. But although, as His manner was, 
 our great Teacher dropped a word so wide and 
 endless in its truth as this word must be taken 
 to be, yet its immediate application was narrowed 
 in the next following sentence to the Mosaic law, Vers. 18-20. 
 and especially to its ethical element. Jesus was 
 about to lay down the moral duties of citizens in 
 His heavenly kingdom ; and what He was at pre- 
 sent concerned to show, was that His new code 
 of duty was not destructive of the traditional 
 Hebrew code, but a fulfilment of it. The law of 
 Moses was to the Jews whom He addressed the 
 highest expression which they knew of the eternal 
 righteousness of Jehovah as a rule for man's 
 behaviour. Were these commandments to be 
 broken or destroyed by the legislation of the new 
 
14 
 
 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 Ex. XX.- 
 xxiii. 
 Deut. xxi 
 
 XXV. 
 
 PAKT I. kingdom ? Jesus answers, at this point, as at 
 GENERAL evciy point : ' No, not broken, but kept ; not 
 PRINCIPLE. ^ggt^.Qygj^ 13^1- fulfilled!' 
 
 The illustrations which Jesus goes on to ac- 
 cumulate in the rest of this chapter, five in 
 number, will give us ample opportunity to exa- 
 mine His mode of dealins:? with the Hebrew law. 
 But before we descend to any of these particulars, 
 this seems the place to try if we can gather His 
 general principle of treatment. 
 Ex. XX. 2-17. The moral law of Israel, both as summarized 
 in the decalogue, and as amplified by many minute 
 statutes in Exodus and Deuteronomy, was a law 
 not of principles so much as of instances : that 
 is, it abstained as a rule from classifying actions 
 under wide ethical categories, and contented itself 
 with specifying particular acts. It forbade in- 
 dividual sins ; it commanded individual duties. 
 In its form it was a code of details, of prescrip- 
 tions for external conduct. It would lead me 
 too far aside to ask how this external form of the 
 law was rendered needful by its educational pur- 
 Gal, iii. 24, pose, on the one hand, as a ' pedagogue ' to con- 
 duct the race to Christ ; or, on the other, by the 
 fact that it was less a guide to personal virtue 
 than the statute-book of a civil society, the public 
 law of a commonwealth. I only note the fact 
 
 Greek. 
 
PRINCIPLE. 
 
 Fulfilment, not Destruction. 15 
 
 that it did prohibit this and that offence, pre- part i. 
 scribe this and that behaviour, and prohibited far general 
 more than it prescribed. All the while, the single 
 deep-lying principle of evil in the human heart, 
 from which every form of wrong-doing takes its rise, 
 as well as the one supreme condition of the heart 
 which is the spring of virtues, were left almost 
 unnoticed.^ Selfishness in the heart was that 
 which made each transgression of law to be a sin ; 
 love, what made an act of obedience to be a virtue. 
 But of love and selfishness the law had little to 
 say. The real principles of action, which in the 
 last resort make a ri^^ht act to be right, and a 
 wrong act wrong, lay beneath the surface of a 
 statute book which bristled in every paragraph 
 with Thou-shalts and Thou-shalt-nots. However 
 explicable such a phenomenon may be when we 
 knov/ its reason, and its adaptation to the wants 
 of the Hebrews, it was plainly an imperfection, 
 one. of those defects which called for fulfilment. 
 It even constituted a snare for shallow natures ; it 
 almost tempted people into a pharisaic righteous- 
 ness. The outward letter of the law could be so 
 easily kept ; and the law was nearly all outward 
 
 ^ Not altogether ; as such passages as our Lord (in Matt. 
 xxii. 37-40, and parallel passages) cites from Lev. xix. 18, 
 Deut. vi. 5, and x. 12, suffice to show. 
 
16 
 
 The Laios of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 GENERAL 
 PRINCIPLE. 
 
 letter. How could weak and tempted men, with 
 undeveloped consciences, be expected to read 
 beneath the words of the decalogue, or be harder 
 on themselves than God appeared to be, or see 
 that a law was not really kept in any sufficient 
 sense when its terms were formally observed, and 
 its spirit secretly defied ? It is true that in rude 
 times, a law which stayed the hand of violence 
 and shut the mouth of perjury might do much to 
 keep society sweet ; but it could hardly go very 
 far towards teaching rude men the evil of malice 
 or the beauty of truth. Nay, statutes of this 
 sort actually proved to be the occasion of a per- 
 nicious distinction betwixt righteousness and 
 goodness. If it was possible for a bad man to 
 keep within the terms of a statute, the eternal 
 distinction between goodness and badness would 
 seem rather to be obscured than insisted on. 
 Besides, the chance that a law is long observed 
 depends on the absence of any general desire to 
 break it ; a decalogue, therefore, which could not 
 stanch evil passion at its source proved a weak 
 embankment against its overflow. So it came to 
 pass, that in aU later and worse times of Hebrew 
 history, men's ideas of righteousness retreated 
 within those mere rules of ceremonial which any- 
 body could keep, and the bare prohibition against 
 
PRINCIPLE. 
 
 Fulfilment, not Destruction. 17 
 
 acts of murder, or theft, or adultery, proved no re- part i. 
 straint at all on violence, knavery, and lewdness, general 
 
 It is plain that laws of this sort never could 
 be ' fulfilled/ that is, filled full with their own 
 proper meaning and force, till some one should 
 draw forth to light the spiritual, far-reaching prin- 
 ciple of morals which underlay them, and should 
 show men that in that, not in the outward letter, 
 lay their real ethical value as a transcript of 
 God's own character. To draw out of each its 
 moral principle, and then to run all these moral 
 principles up into one royal law of love, was 
 much. To postulate such a royal law in the 
 heart, and then run it down through the details 
 of life and show how it would secure the fulfil- 
 ment, not only of each ' jot and tittle ' of com- 
 manded duty, but of ten thousand duties, which 
 no statute book could specify ; this was more. 
 Something like this, other men besides and be- 
 fore Jesus had in substance attempted. Hebrew 
 prophets and heathen philosophers had alike dis- 
 covered that virtue is not so much the observance 
 of a code, as the living growth of a loving heart. 
 One thing immeasurably greater remained to be 
 done, essayed by neither philosopher nor prophet : 
 to exhibit in practice a complete fulfilment of all 
 laws through the possession of perfect love, and 
 
 B 
 
1 8 TfiG Laivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 TART I. plant such love in others' hearts, that they too 
 GENERAL shall llve out righteous lives in obedience to no 
 prescriptions, but under the natural impulses of 
 a regenerated nature. To expound the law is 
 less than to keep it ; to keep it, less perhaps 
 than give others power to keep it too. In all 
 three ways is Jesus the only Fulfiller and ' the 
 Eom. X. 4. end of the law.' 
 
 To separate Jesus the moral teacher, from 
 Jesus the example and the saviour, of men, is to 
 misunderstand Him. If, as He sits and expounds 
 His nation's laws upon the hill, you see in Him no 
 more than a master of duty, a Hebrew moralist 
 more advanced than Moses, more spiritual than 
 Solomon, more practical than Isaiah ; you will 
 utterly fail to understand the power which this 
 Sermon on the Mount has wielded. To tell us, 
 as He does, that the spirit of even the decalogue 
 lies in a right love for God, and a love for all 
 men, like God's own love for them, and that 
 therefore the Old Testament code itself is fit, 
 when you understand it, to become a new code 
 for the kingdom of God, will not go far of itself 
 to make our world a good world, ^o ; but add 
 Phil. ii. 6-8. Only this, that the Speaker is God Himself under 
 His- own law, fulfilling in the guise of a servant 
 the duties which He lays on us. This divine 
 
Fulfilment, not Destruction. 19 
 
 King is King because He is tlie first of sitbjects, part r. 
 and Himself pays absolute respect to His own general 
 statutes. He is a Jew, circumcised to keep the ^^^^^^^^^^• 
 whole law. He is more — the Son of God, Whose 
 accepted business it is to fulfil all rioiiteousness. Cf. Luke ii. 
 
 49 • c. Matt. 
 
 So He walks in all outward ordinances of Mosaism iii.'i.5. 
 blameless ; with an observance of each ' jot and 
 tittle ' of ceremonial and oiyil duty more irre- 
 proachable than scribe or Pharisee. Yet how in- 
 finitely His righteousness exceeds the standard 
 of the most punctilious ! To Him the divine 
 law is a copy of His Father's character ; and 
 obedience to law is just a son's tribute of love to 
 his father. Eising, therefore, from the letter of 
 law to the mind of the paternal Lawgiver, this 
 Son kept the commandments in their spiritual 
 meaning, obeyed with the freedom of choice, and 
 served in the spontaneity of love. He Himself 
 it was Who practically translated the old legis- 
 lation into the new. Who so fulfilled the letter 
 as to turn it into spirit, and Who, w^hile faithful 
 to ' carnal ordinances,' liberated the principle of 
 righteousness, which is love, from its fleshly 
 envelope, and made it the principle of a new 
 kincjdom of God. His own life is the meetino-- 
 point of two economies ; the practical fulfilment 
 of the Old Testament, its practical elevation into 
 
2 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. a New Testament. The law was never so entirely 
 
 GENERAL ' magnified ' as when God's Son showed that, to 
 
 PRINCIPLE. ^ ^|- ^g j^ ought to be kept, meant to be per- 
 
 Isa. xlii. 21. ^ ^ ^ . . 
 
 Matt. V. 48. feet as God is perfect ; and by so keeping it, 
 realized in manhood the perfection of the God- 
 head. 
 
 By expounding its spirit, Jesus fulfilled the 
 law in its inherent and everlasting force as a law 
 of heart and motive. 
 
 By keeping the law in spirit as well as letter 
 to its last fibre of obligation, Jesus fulfilled it as 
 a condition of divine favour and everlasting life. 
 
 By enabling His brethren to love the heavenly 
 Father Who gave it, Jesus fulfils it as the rule of 
 life in all believing men. 
 
 ' I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' 
 
riEST ILLUSTEATION : 
 THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 21 
 
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, ' Thou 
 shalt not kill; and, ichosoever shall kill shall be in danger of 
 the judgment :' but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry 
 with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the 
 judgment; and ivhosoever shall say to his brother, *" Raca,' 
 shall be in danger of the council ; but whosoever shall say, 
 ' Thou fool,'' shall be in danger of hell-fire. Therefore, if thou 
 bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy 
 brother hath aught against thee ; leave there thy gift before the 
 altar, and go thy way ; first be reconciled to thy brother, and 
 then come and offer thy gift. Agree with thine adversary 
 quickly, ivhiles thou art in the way with him ; lest at any time 
 thy adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver 
 thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say 
 unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast 
 paid the uttermost farthing.— Matt. v. 21-26. 
 
 22 
 
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 I 
 
 PEOCEED to consider tlie first of those five part i. 
 examples by wliicli our Lord at once defines first 
 
 and illustrates the relation of His New Testament 
 leoislation to that of the Hebrews. That rela- 
 tion, as we have seen, is not destruction, but ful- 
 filment. The moral law of Moses, like every 
 other part of the Old Testament system, held in 
 germ the perfect law of Cliristian ethics ; but it 
 enclosed that germ within a temporary envelope 
 of external civil statutes. The work of the Eul- 
 filler must therefore be to search for the spirit of 
 the law beneath its details, and to set free from the 
 mere letter of it those moral principles on which 
 it rested. In doing this, Jesus struck at two 
 errors, which, though opposed, did equally ' break cf. ver. 19. 
 these commandments, and taught men to break 
 them:' the error of popular antinomianism ; and 
 the error of pharisaic legality. 
 
 The sixth commandment of the decalogue, as Ex. xx. 13. 
 graven by God's finger on the granite of Horeb, 
 stood in the brief and pungent style of that code 
 
 23 
 
24 The Laws of the, Kingdom. 
 
 PART r. thus : ' Thou shalt not kill.' If you approach 
 FIRST this prohibition in the temper of a jurist, who 
 
 ILLUSTRATION • •■ .i i r- ^i " . ^• 
 
 sees no more m it than a law lor the protection 
 of society against criminal violence to the person, 
 you will not find it a hard command to keep. 
 Hold your hand from bloodshed, and you are 
 within the law. This juristic style of interpreta- 
 tion, however, will not bear to be carried into the 
 province of morals. Eead the word of God defin- 
 ing human duty as you would a police regulation, 
 and instantly you create a false morality; you 
 breed self-righteous moralists. If what God for- 
 bids on this branch of conduct is no more than 
 such acts of violence as can be dealt with by the 
 sentence of a court of justice ; then we may feel 
 very safe and righteous, who never lifted our 
 hand to slay, and may be as severe as we please 
 on our unhappy brother who has lifted his. Such 
 was the line of interpretation adopted by the 
 Jewish expositors, who appended to the sixth 
 commandment the rider quoted by our Lord. 
 Addressing the people, who, in an age of few 
 books, were indebted for their knowledge of Scrip- 
 ture to the public reading of it with rabbinical 
 glosses in the synagogue. He said : ' Ye have heard 
 that it was said by [or to] them of old time. 
 Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill 
 
Tlie Sixth Commandment. 25 
 
 shall be in danger of the judgment ; ' that is, part i. 
 shall be liable to the jurisdiction of the local first 
 bench of magistrates, who in each Jewish town 
 had the power of capital punishment. 
 
 But you may approach the sixth command- 
 ment in another spirit, and find a very different 
 interpretation possible. Let it be viewed as em- 
 bodying a moral principle for the regulation of 
 the individual life; let conscience face it in an 
 earnest and religious mood, to find out what it 
 has to tell of God's character, and how He would 
 order the relation of man to his fellow-man : then 
 the words will be felt to cover by implication far 
 more than meets the ear. Morality is an affair ,! 
 not of overt a ct, but of motive . The judgment of ' 
 God searches the heart ; and the earnest or devout 
 interpreter will ask, in front of a law like this. 
 What is that state of the criminal which makes 
 killing a crime ? No Jew could help seeing 
 that the mere act of taking life was not always 
 murder. The Mosaic system even recognised 
 the old vendetta, or feud-ven^eance, — swift, red- Ex. xxi. 
 
 ^ ^ 12-14 ; c. 
 
 handed retaliation by a next-of-kin, — though it Josh. xx. 
 laboured to moderate the barbarism of that cus- 
 tom. The voice of God certainly had sealed with 
 express sanction every writ for the legal execu- 
 tion of criminals ; and the law punished a num- 
 
2 6 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 TART I. ber of crimes with death. All Hebrew history, 
 FIRST moreover, viewed Jehovah as sustaining the cause 
 ^ of justice in the last ordeal of battle, fighting as 
 the Lord of Hosts and the Captain of a people 
 armed in a righteous quarrel. ]^ay, the law did 
 in so many words exempt from blame accidental 
 homicides; and the ground on which it did so 
 made it as clear as terms could make it, where 
 Dcut. xix. 4-6. the guilt of killing lay. It said, ' Whoso killeth 
 his neighbour ignorantly' is ' not worthy of death, 
 inasmuch as he hated him not in time past.' Not 
 the blow, therefore, but the hatred, was the sin 
 of the sixth commandment, even as a civil statute. 
 Killing, on the principles of Mosaic teaching, 
 might be no murder. It might be blameless ; it 
 was often righteous; sometimes it was even praise- 
 worthy. When justice armed the executioner or 
 the warrior, bloodshed became his duty. But 
 hateful passion prompting the fierce and sudden 
 blow, or still more, fed into a grudge in the heart 
 — this was the sin against God and God's image 
 in man which made manslaughter to be a crime, 
 and fiUed with moral force the bald hard word, 
 'Thou shalt not kill.' J^or was this a mere in- 
 ference from the law. For, in fact, the Pentateuch 
 offered to one's hand its own key, when it bore 
 upon its pages words like these : ' Thou shalt not 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 27 
 
 liate thy brother in thine heart. . . . Thou shalt part i. 
 not avenge nor bear any grudge against the first 
 children of thy people ; but thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself/ I quote these words from 
 Leviticus, in order to show that our Lord neither Lev. xix. 17, 
 
 ' 18. 
 
 made a new law nor put a new sense upon an 
 old one, when, to the superficial juristic reading 
 of the scribes, He opposed a more spiritual inter- 
 pretation. The fact is, that the pharisaic reading 
 could only have been hit on by men of shallow 
 nature and cold hearts, in a time when formalism 
 had slain morality ; whereas the dee]3er exegesis 
 of Jesus was actually suggested in the Mosaic 
 books themselves, was involved in the whole 
 prophetic period of the Old Testament, and had 
 been recognised by earnest and honest Hebrews 
 in every age. The one was in reality the destruc- 
 tion of the commandment, the other its fulfihnent. 
 Our Lord was not content to set aside the 
 flimsy rider which later tradition had attached 
 to the sixth commandment, and to fall back on 
 that older and more scriptural interpretation 
 which read in it a condemnation of hatred and 
 unjust anger. He did more. He tracked this 
 sinful passion from its concealed presence in the 
 heart, onward to the confines of murderous act. 
 To each degree He affixed a deepening penalty; 
 
2 8 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. but to mark how far the divine outruns in its 
 FIRST severity all human justice, He attached to the 
 
 ILLUSTRATION ^ , -, jy • j_i 
 
 lowest grade of passion the same supreme sen- 
 tence which human jurisprudence reserves for 
 the highest; 
 
 Three grades of guilt short of murder in 
 the breach of this sixth commandment are in- 
 stanced by our Lord : causeless anger, provocation 
 to hasty speech, and deliberate insult. There are 
 three degrees of penalty to correspond, borrowed 
 from Hebrew jurisprudence : the judgment, the 
 council, and Gehenna. But the lowest degree 
 of judgment meted out to suppressed anger is 
 the same as in rabbinical procedure formed the 
 penalty of murder. By so much is heavenly 
 justice in God's new kingdom stricter and more 
 exigent than Hebrew law. A little elucidation 
 of the text will be needful to bring this out. 
 First let me try to explain the three degrees of 
 guilt. The first is : 
 
 Wlwsoever is angry vnth his hrothcr ivithout 
 a cause. — As all killing^ is not murder, so all 
 anger is not hatred. It is even one mark of a 
 noble and pure nature, to be susceptible of that 
 just and honest anger which is the recoil of the 
 generous against the base, of the true man against 
 the liar, of the chaste against the lewd, of all 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 29 
 
 manly virtue against villany and shameless out- part i. 
 rage. Even when it is the injured person him- first 
 
 ILLUSTRATION 
 
 self in whose cheek this passion flames, it may 
 be quite noble ; for oppression can turn even weak 
 women and cowardly men for the time into moral 
 heroes. Much more when high - spirited men 
 resent the wrong done to others ; or better still, 
 the wrong which every injury inflicted by the 
 strong upon the weak does to the majesty of 
 justice, and to Him AVho is the avenger of the 
 right. It would be well for us if at this hour in 
 England we had more of that public indignation 
 which makes each citizen the guardian of his 
 fellow, which represses the cruelty of domestic 
 and social tyrants by the civil sword, and which, 
 when it strikes at criminals, strikes not for the 
 advantage of society only, but as well for right- 
 eousness and for God. In such indignation there 
 is no hatred. It is clear from malign breath, as 
 the steel sword of justice. It is at its core 
 charitable, for it springs from the love of the 
 good; and against the bad it bears no ill-will, but 
 a most tender and pure pity. 
 
 From it stands as far removed the causeless 
 anger in which all breach of the sixth command- 
 ment begins, as darkness stands apart from light, 
 or love from hate. It matters little whether this 
 
3 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. word rendered ' without a cause ' stand part of 
 FIRST the original text, or is (as it may be) a gloss 
 iLLvsTRATiox g^f^g^,g(j ^q ^reep in at a very early date.^ In 
 either case, it carries the sense of the passage in 
 it. Guilty anger is guilty, because it is not 
 moved by an adequate ground in the conduct 
 of the offender ; finds no sufficient moral justi- 
 fication for itself ; and draws its warmth, therefore, 
 not from the justice of the case, but from per- 
 sonal passion. Such anger as a man is stung 
 into by his neighbour's misconduct, not because 
 right is wronsjed or God offended, but because 
 
 C> CI ' 
 
 his own interest or feelings have suffered : this 
 is anger without cause. It is blind, because 
 it will not look at the justice of the case. It 
 is vindictive, for it is a personal wound which 
 has to be atoned for. It is hasty, for it is 
 heated and cannot pause to grow cool. It is 
 spiteful, bent on returning evil for evil. It is 
 the mother of hatred and the first secret fount 
 of murderous violence. Who of us does not 
 know by frequent experience what it is to be 
 provoked by some sudden wrong, or the crossing 
 
 * It has against it tlie autliority of the Vatican and Sinaitic 
 ■manuscripts, as well as of some old versions, and is rejected by. 
 Tischendorf, Lachmann, Meyer, and (though on internal grounds 
 only) Tholuck. If a corruption, it must have found its way 
 into the text within the second century. 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 Tlie Sixth Commandment. 31 
 
 of our pleasure, into this heedless, bitter, hot- part i. 
 hearted temper, which forgets itself, and loses first 
 sight alike of mercy and of fairness ? Who has 
 not felt its restless, fiery workings ? "Wlioso, 
 saith Jesus, is thus angry with his brother, has 
 broken already the sixth commandment. 
 The second degree is thus expressed : 
 Wliosoever shall say to his brother, ' Raca' — 
 ' Eaca ' was a slight colloquial exclamation, used 
 by the Jews when annoyed or irritated. It pro- 
 bably meant nothing, and therefore cannot be 
 translated ; or if it had originally some slang 
 meaning of contempt, it had ceased to suggest its 
 first idea, and was muttered by the provoked or 
 ill-tempered man without thinking what it signi- 
 fied. It is thus a specimen of a class of angry 
 expletives, common enough in all languages, 
 which serve as what may be called a safety 
 valve or harmless outlet for irritated feeling. 
 But„irritated feelinoj ouc^ht to be denied all out- 
 let. lU-nature which is kept under control by 
 the restraint of principle or one's better feelings, 
 is not so bad as ill-nature which finds vent in a 
 word, even in a word so slight and meaningless 
 as this ; ay, though we mumble it through our 
 clenched teeth. Our Lord therefore sets His 
 mark upon such discharges of irritation, as not 
 
1 LLUSTRATION 
 
 32 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. only bred by a passionate and spiteful heart, but 
 FIRST as betraying a lack of control, a passion which 
 breaks, though no more than breaks, into utter- 
 ance ; a thing worse for us, and for our neigh- 
 bour, than to endure the pent-up throes of unjust 
 provocation in one's own breast. 
 • There is a still worse stage : 
 Whosoever shall say, ' Thou fool' — In the 
 Palestine vocabulary of abuse, this word meant 
 a great deal more than the last. It conveyed, 
 when used in passion, a charge of senselessness 
 and wickedness at once; and was the bitterest 
 epithet ill-will could compass when in fuU ex- 
 plosion.-^ As ' Eaca ' marks the lowest stage of 
 spoken displeasure, where anger just passes into 
 half-involuntary scolding ; so ' Fool ' seems here to 
 mark the last stage, when anger is on the point of 
 passing beyond speech into intemperate act. No 
 man could permit himself to address his brother 
 
 ^ I need hardly say that of course the word might ^6' ed, 
 and innocently used, where no utterance of temper wai oived 
 at all. As an expression of just indignation, our Lord Himself 
 applied this, with still harder terms, to the pharisaic party 
 (Matt, xxiii. 17 ; cf. ver. 33 and Luke xiii. 32). With sorrowful 
 earnestness, He addressed it to His two disciples at Emmaus 
 (Luke xxiv. 25). Apostles were not afraid to follow so high 
 an example. (Gal. iii. 1 ; Jas. ii. 20). But it is Quaker-like 
 childishness to press the outward letter of the Lord Jesus, where 
 the spirit in which the word is used is so opposite. This is to be. 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 33 
 
 man in a deliberate term of serious insult who part i. 
 had not lost all self-command ; unless, indeed, first 
 habitual explosions of temper had made the em- i^^^'^^^^^'^^*^^ 
 ployment of abusive speech easy to him. When 
 self-respect, justice, and kindly feeling are all 
 trampled in this way under the hoof of animal 
 rage, what is left, save cowardice, to hold back 
 the hand from a blow ? Our Lord has tracked 
 the evil temper from its beginnings in unjusti- 
 fiable resentment to the very verge of that open 
 violence at which even pharisaic morality, like 
 our public justice, was compelled to deal with it. 
 To each stage in this ascending breach of the 
 sixth commandment our blessed Lord has at- 
 tached a penalty. There is no satisfactory way 
 of reading these penalties, save to understand 
 them as implying degrees in God's punishment 
 of sin, but degrees of an unknown divine penalty 
 expressed in terms borrowed from the criminal 
 iu-is'^kidence of the Jews. Two of the words 
 used' are certainly so borrowed. ' The Judgment ' 
 was the title of a local or municipal bench of 
 justices, which sat in every little town of over 
 one hundred and twenty of a population, and had 
 the power to sentence criminals to death by be- 
 heading with the sword. ' The Council ' is a com- 
 mon name for the supreme court of the Sanhedrim, 
 c 
 
34 
 
 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. 
 
 FIRST 
 ILLIJSTRATIOX 
 
 2 Kings 
 xxiii. 10 ; 
 2 Chron. 
 xxviii, 3, 
 xxxiii. 6; 
 Jer. xix., 
 xxxii. 35, 
 
 Matt, xxvii. 
 6-10; c. 
 Acts i. 18, 19. 
 
 Isa. Ixvi. 24. 
 Quoted in 
 Mark ix. 44, 
 etc. 
 
 wMcli sat in Jerusalem, had exclusive cognizance 
 of the gravest offences, as treason or blasphemy, 
 and could sentence to death by stoning. The 
 third word is the ' Gehenna of fire,' which can- 
 not here mean, as it sometimes did, the place of 
 final woe, for that would be a most inconsequent 
 third to two Jewish forms of civil trial. The 
 verse becomes intelligible when w^e simply read 
 ' Gehenna,' not as a type for hell, but in its own 
 proper sense, as the name of that terrible and 
 ill-omened ravine of Tophet in the valley of the 
 Sons of Hinnom just under Mount Zion, which for 
 so many a Hebrew age had been held accursed ; 
 which from the times of the evil kings, who there 
 burnt hideous sacrifices of infant life to Moloch, 
 down to the day when Judas went to it to hang 
 himself, had been a receptacle for the foulest 
 refuse of the city ; where, too, were sometimes 
 flung, after their execution, the unburied bodies 
 of the worst criminals ; where (in Isaiah's awful 
 words) the worm never died, and the fire was never 
 quenched. It may be true that murderers were 
 never cast out after death to lie unburied in that 
 foul dell ; as little were they stoned by the San- 
 hedrim; but none the less did these words of Jesus 
 mark to Jewish ears an ascending series of shame 
 and horror in the punishment of the criminal, tiU 
 
The Sixth Commandment. ' 35 
 
 the last aggravation known to Jewish law or prac- part i. 
 
 tice should be reached. It was impossible that first 
 
 these three modes of capital punishment could be illlstration 
 
 taken literally. No Jewish tribunal could deal 
 
 with that heart-anger with which He began His 
 
 series ; angry words could not be so punished by 
 
 earthly judges ; no such division of jurisdiction in 
 
 cases of violence was known to Hebrew usage. 
 
 The three graduated modes of execution are simply 
 
 borrowed as images of those unknown penalties 
 
 which await the prisoners of divine justice beyond 
 
 this life ; and the stern lesson of the passage 
 
 concentrates itself in this thought, that at the 
 
 Almighty's awful bar, and before His face Who 
 
 searches hearts, the secret indulgence of unlawful 
 
 malicious anger counts as murder does in earthly 
 
 courts. Higher degrees of sin in respect to 
 
 temper there are, and for higher sin God reserves 
 
 a higher penalty : but so infinitely more rigorous 
 
 is the moral code of the new than of the old 
 
 kingdom, that where Israel's civil jurisprudence 
 
 ended, the spiritual penalties of God begin ; and 
 
 the lowest grade of what He calls murderous 
 
 passion runs parallel in His eye to that supreme 
 
 act of violence which men call murder. It is by 
 
 this law of the new kingdom we must be tried. 
 
 In two directions it exceeds in severity the civil 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 3 6 ' Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART r. law of commonwealths. First, it judges all uu- 
 FiRST justifiable irritation, however slightly expressed ; 
 nay, even when it is not expressed at all. It 
 goes down into the bosom of every angry man, 
 and sentences him for his unrighteous anger. 
 Next, for the passionate heart or hasty word, it 
 has a penalty as much more terrible than civil 
 death, as spiritual and eternal penalties transcend 
 those which are temporal. We are bound to a 
 righteousness which is inward, spiritual, intensely 
 moral; and we are bound to it by penalties 
 which are of the world to come. Surely this 
 law is not destroyed ; it is fulfilled. 
 
 Who of us can keep this law ? Searched by 
 a test so penetrating as this, there is no con- 
 science clear. We are all at times too hasty, 
 short of temper, or unreasonably provoked. We 
 all do vex one another by irritability ; we now 
 and then wrong one another by causeless ill-will. 
 Every one of us, therefore, has cause to be thank- 
 ful to Jesus that He added to His law words of 
 hope, to tell us how, when we have broken the 
 sixth commandment, we may still escape the 
 judgment of Heaven. The last four verses of the 
 passage are a long but most needful appendix, 
 which in two separate forms sets forth one lesson. 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 37 
 
 The angry man, who is angry without cause, and part i. 
 in his anger has spoken rash and wounding words first 
 
 no 1 T-Ui-l, Jl,-lil, ILLUSTRATION 
 
 or offered open slight, has wronged his brother. 
 It may be that the offended brother complains of 
 the wrong before God or men ; it may be he does 
 not : no matter. In either case, the angry man 
 has made an adversary of the Most High. God 
 is the Avenger of the wronged ; and the object of i Thess. iv. 6. 
 your injurious displeasure or your abusive speech 
 is under the shield of the Almighty. Punishment 
 waits for you at His bar, to be averted only by 
 confession at His altar now. But before confes- 
 sion at the altar of divine mercy can save you 
 from sentence at the divine bar at last, the con- 
 fession must be made, not to God only, but to 
 your injured brother ; reconciliation must be won 
 with man first, and then with Heaven. This 
 single lesson, which an apostle summed up after- 
 wards in these words, ' Confess your faults one Jas. v. 16. 
 to another, and pray one for another, that ye may 
 be healed,' is illustrated twice over by our Lord 
 in a vivid popular form. The first scene turns on 
 the altar of mercy ; the second on the bar of judg- 
 ment : the first is a drama ; the second a parable. 
 
 A Jewish worshipper is already in the temple Vers. 23, 24. 
 court, waiting till his turn comes for the officiat- 
 ing priest to present his sacrifice to Jehovah. As 
 
38 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. he stands before God to confess liis faults and 
 FIRST ask for mercy, there naturally rises into memory 
 an -unacknowledged breach of this sixth com- 
 mandment. By some angry word or injurious 
 deed he has wronged his neighbour. What shall 
 he do ? He is in act to sacrifice, about sacred 
 duty, offering propitiation to offended God; yet 
 there is an earlier and more urgent duty. Wor- 
 ship can better wait than reconciliation. Apology 
 and restitution are sweeter offerings to God than 
 Ps. li. 17. a lamb, for they are the sacrifices of a broken and 
 a contrite heart. Nay more ; worship is vitiated, 
 
 cf. isa. i. sacrifice is refused, prayer and incense are abo- 
 il— 17 
 
 mination, so long as the offender is unreconciled 
 
 to the offended. ' Go, then, on the instant ; stand 
 not on ceremony, but leave thy gift, and go : first 
 be reconciled by becoming acknowledgment, and, if 
 need be, by reparation, to thy brother ; then, with 
 a clear conscience and a tearful but lightened 
 spirit of sweet and lowly penitence, return to offer, 
 in all joyful confidence, thy gift of atonement, 
 with confession and with prayer, to the no longer 
 averted face of the Eternal Judge.' 
 
 A child can read that lesson ; and the proud- 
 est of men are they who need it most. But be- 
 cause there are those who never go to God's altar, 
 and would never be reminded by their baffled 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 39 
 
 search for reconciliation to the Father that they part i. 
 needed first a brother's pardon, Jesus puts the first 
 
 , . , i. J 1 • J ILLUSTRATION 
 
 same lesson into more urgent and alarming words. 
 All men do not approach God's footstool of grace ; 
 but all men know that they are drawing near to 
 God's seat of justice. The imagery now is from a Vers. 25, 26. 
 civil action at law, where a plaintiff sues a defen- 
 dant for a debt. The road of life is for all of us a 
 road with a tribunal at the end of it ; and he who 
 travels towards his grave in company with fellow- 
 men whom he has hated, miscalled, or aggrieved, 
 against whom he has been angry without reason, 
 is like a debtor who walks side by side with 
 his creditor on their way to court. A few steps 
 further, and both parties will have passed into 
 that awful judgment hall together — into the 
 place where already the Judge of all the earth 
 sits and waits for us. Well did these Galilean 
 peasants who heard Jesus, know that once they 
 carried their petty disputes before the stern Sad- 
 ducean face of a local justice, their chance of com- 
 promise or private composition was over. It was 
 good advice for a debtor to agree with the plain- 
 tiff while they were on the road, and to do it 
 quickly ; lest, if the creditor handed him over to 
 the court, the judge should commit the insolvent 
 to the of&cer, and the ofiicer to gaoL But the 
 
40 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. words of the Preacher swell and grow weighty 
 FIRST with an infinitely more solemn and awful signi- 
 ficance, when He adds, with His usual trumpet- 
 Ver. 26. note of Warning : ' Verily I say unto thee, Thou 
 shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast 
 paid the uttermost farthing.' 
 
 In this species of debt to one another we are 
 all insolvent. No brother may have formally 
 lodged complaint against us in the supreme court, 
 or appealed for justice against our violence and 
 
 Kom. xii. 19 ; wrath. But there is One Who undertakes every 
 
 xiv. 9-13. . . "^ 
 
 cause ; and with Him, not with our brethren, 
 
 we have in the last resort to do. Who of us 
 
 can say, before His face, that we were never 
 
 angry without a cause, have never vexed a heart 
 
 by peevish passion, nor ever spoken the words 
 
 that bite, nor nursed a dark, malignant, envious, 
 
 or hateful temper within our breast ? Who 
 
 of us goes clean-handed to be tried by Christ's 
 
 version of the sixth commandment ? And shall 
 
 we risk by obduracy the sentence of that Judge ? 
 
 Are we in wrong against any man, and dare we 
 
 travel, impenitent and unpardoned, towards death ? 
 
 Think : your brother dead, past hearing of youi' 
 
 too late repentance ! or you dead, snatched un- 
 
 shriven from his presence ! Ah, let no man live 
 
 his uncertain days in an unreconciled feud ! All 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 41 
 
 along the road of life there is possible for us a part i. 
 continual confessing and atoning and reconciling, f^t 
 a making up of differences, and apologizing for 
 wrongs, and healing of hurts ; and with that 
 mightier Plaintiff behind, he who has won his 
 brother's pardon may also be reconciled at the 
 altar of Immanuel's sacrifice. A few more steps 
 only ; and we may stand before a bar where there 
 is no forgiveness and from which there can be 
 no appeal I 
 
SECOND TLLUSTEATION : 
 THE SEYEXTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 43 
 
Ye have heard that it ivas said hy them of old time, ' Thou 
 shalt not commit adultery:'' hut 1 say unto you, That who- 
 soever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed 
 adultery with her already in his heart. And if thine eye offend 
 thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee : for it is prof table 
 for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that 
 thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand 
 offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee : for it is profit- 
 able for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not 
 that thy whole body should be cast into hell. It hath been said, 
 ' Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writ- 
 ing of divorcement:'' but I say unto you, That whosoever 
 shall put away his wife, swing for the cause of fornication, 
 causeth her to commit adultery : and whosoever shall marry 
 her that is divorced committeth adultery. — Matt. v. 27-32. 
 Cf. Matt. xix. 3-9, and parallels; also xviii. 8, 9, and 
 parallels; Luke xvi. 18. 
 
 44 
 
THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 
 
 UE Lord's first example to show that His re- part i. 
 
 lation to the law of Moses was fulfilment, second 
 
 . 1 • 1 T P ILLUSTRATION 
 
 not destruction, was the sixth commandment ot 
 the decalogue ; His next is the seventh. The 
 former was the law of temper, regulating offences 
 between men ; this is the law of marriage, regulat- 
 ing the relation of the sexes. 
 
 Our Lord cites this law precisely as it stands 
 in the original Mosaic code. It was not needful 
 to quote any pharisaic gloss, because it was now 
 evident that they would read these words, as they 
 had read the words of the sixth, literally. To 
 their literal understanding of the words, 'Thou 
 shalt not commit adultery,' our Lord is content 
 briefly to oppose a deeper interpretation. Exactly 
 as, in the former case, He had gone back from the 
 act of killing to the passion of unjust anger, in 
 which killing takes its rise ; so here He goes 
 back from the act of adultery to the unlawful 
 lust which is its cause. The marriage law differs, 
 indeed, from the law against malicious anger in 
 
 45 
 
46 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. this, tliat it places a restraint which may be called 
 SECOND arbitrary npon a natural appetite. There is an 
 
 ILLUSTRATION , ,.,..,, ,, 
 
 anger also which is righteous as well as an anger 
 which is wicked ; only in this case the distinction 
 lies in the very nature of the anger itself, and 
 would have been felt by the untutored conscience 
 apart from external statutes : whereas it is the 
 express ordinance of God which makes sexual love 
 within the marriage bond a lawful and pure thing, 
 and outside the marriage bond a sinful and defiling 
 thing. It is true that this primeval ordinance has 
 its roots very deep in the constitution of the race. 
 For, first of all, God created the two sexes so, and 
 so balanced their numbers, that each filled out 
 and made up the complement of the other, with 
 this evident design, that one man and one woman 
 should be in everything the helps and counterparts 
 of one another, and by their union realize the 
 perfect condition of human life. Besides, God 
 placed the appetites of the body under the con- 
 trol of reason and of the higher social affections ; 
 so that a man feels himself degraded if his love 
 for a woman is more animal than moral in its 
 character ; that is, if the higher elements in it are 
 subordinated to the baser. These two facts in 1 
 human constitution — the complementary relati 
 of the sexes, and the preponderance of moral a 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 4t7 
 
 social affections over brute instinct — are facts part i. 
 which lie at the basis of marriage: they make second 
 chastity, that great virtue and beauty of character ^^^^ •"''tp-^tiun 
 which is not possible for other creatures, whether 
 above us or below us, possible for men ; they 
 form the preparation which God the Creator laid 
 for the marriage ordinance of God the Legislator. 
 Still, the marriage ordinance sets a fence round 
 about the relations of the sexes which is in a 
 sense arbitrary, because it rests immediately on 
 the command of God. The command is primeval. 
 It dates from Eden. It has survived, not the 
 fall only, but the dispersion, the migrations, the 
 disintegrations, the embrutement, of the races of 
 men. It has undergone almost endless corrup- 
 tions. It has had to tolerate polygamy, concu- 
 binage, polyandry, lax divorce, the acquisition of 
 wives by violence or barter, the holding of them 
 as chattels, the use of them as slaves. Among 
 barbarous tribes and in rude as^es, all these and 
 other abuses have modified or overlaid the blessed 
 marriage law ; but they have not cancelled it. 
 In the worst cases, marriage has somehow and in 
 some shape survived ; and upon the passions of 
 the most savage and debased it has always im- 
 posed a certain check. 
 
 iSTow, wherein lies the essence of this marriage 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 48 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. law ? It aims at keeping the relation of man 
 SECOND and woman pure, by permitting intimacy only 
 within a given guarded bond betwixt one man 
 and one woman. But these relations are not 
 kept pure by merely controlling the outward 
 behaviour of the sexes to each other. The re- 
 lation of man to woman is a relation of inward 
 feeling, of passion ; and unless the marriage 
 law can control the desires and passions of the 
 sexes, it fails to secure purity. Therefore our 
 Lord reads the seventh commandment as virtually 
 a commandment for the government of the heart. 
 He distinguishes, in fact, three stages in the 
 breach of it. The first and outermost is that 
 which the law expresses : adultery. From this 
 consummated breach of the marriage bond. He 
 goes back upon the earliest voluntary expression 
 of criminal desire. That earliest voluntary ex- 
 pression is, the gaze. For, when He says, ' to 
 look on a woman to lust,' He does not mean any 
 involuntary excitation of passion through a casual 
 sight or presence of its object. It is through the 
 eye primarily that passion enters ; but if the eye 
 be turned away, and the moral j)^rity of the heart 
 expel the intruding movement toward sin, then 
 the law is not broken ; on the contrary, it is kept. 
 It is when the criminal impulse is so far indulged 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 49 
 
 that the eye is purposely directed to rest with part i. 
 pleasure on the exciting object, that the earliest second 
 act of unchastity is committed. Even this is not 
 yet the beginning of adultery. To look at a 
 woman in order to lust after her is the earliest 
 bodily manifestation of the sin ; yet it is not so 
 much the perpetration of the crime, as the first 
 proof that a man has perpetrated it. Before that 
 look, there came the inward indulgence of desire ; 
 the consent to a forbidden appetite ; the surrender 
 of the soul's pure and loyal protest against unlaw- 
 ful relations. ' Already/ therefore, says our Lord, 
 tracking the sin inward now to its real seat, 
 ' already the man has committed adultery in his 
 heart : ' for he has submitted his will, and, with 
 liis will, one at least of his members, to the 
 dictation of an unhallowed desire. Henceforth 
 it is occasion, or impunity, and not desire, which 
 fails him ; it is not the consent of his will, but 
 something else, which hinders the prosecution of 
 the crime into adulterous act. 
 
 Beneath a law so scrutinizing, so subtly pene- 
 trative, which expects our loyalty for the sanctities 
 of marriage to be so scrupulous, which demands 
 that the soul's purity shall repel the very first 
 approach of prohibited desire, and calls the 
 briefest impure glance a crime, — beneath such a 
 
 D 
 
6 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. law, who shall say there is any one chaste ? Dare 
 
 SECOND any of us have the secret history of his heart 
 
 ILLUSTRATION ^^^g^^^^^ ^ This moralist on the mount is to 
 
 be our Judge. How shall we answer Him for 
 the imaginations which have defiled our private 
 hours, for the prurience to which we gave house- 
 room, for the warmth of look, the desire which 
 dared not betray itself by a gesture ? The purest- 
 minded of youths or maidens may fitly suffer these 
 words of Jesus to bear upon the conscience, in 
 order to warn each one against the insidious 
 approaches even from afar of dishonourable and 
 unhallowed affection. There is no one who does 
 not need to dread its entrance into those secret 
 recesses of the nature which ought to be the 
 home or shrine for God's most pure Spirit. 
 
 To His brief exposition of the spirituality of 
 God's law on this delicate subject, our Lord sub- 
 joins virtually two appendices. 
 
 The first appendix runs parallel to the practi- 
 cal exhortation appended in the preceding case 
 of the sixth commandment. In that case He 
 bade the man who had given his neighbour 
 offence by hasty wrath, leave the holiest duties 
 of religion on one side until he had cleared the 
 way for God's forgiveness by ' first being recon- 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 51 
 
 ciled to his brother.' To repair the wrong of part i. 
 angry passion by at once apologizing for it, second 
 was a natural lesson to be learnt from the law 
 against murder. Till the innocent sufferer by 
 injurious anger has been pacified, nothing is 
 done. The sin of unchastity is not less exigent. 
 To rid oneself of it, is quite as pressing as 
 to repair a wrong. Only, in its early stages, it 
 is not another who is injured by it ; it is the 
 spiritual nature of the sinner himself which 
 suffers most. 'Every [other] sin,' as St. Paul 
 explains, ' that a man doeth is without the body ; 1 Cor. vi. 18. 
 but he that committeth fornication sinneth against 
 his own body.' The evil is already done when 
 impurity is suffered to rest for an instant in the 
 heart ; for then the heart and inward nature of cf. Tit. 1 15. 
 the man is defiled. ^ATien impurity passes into 
 act, when it directs one movement of the hand, 
 or so much as a glance of the eye, the body 
 also is debased from its legitimate functions and 
 prostituted to unholiness. For a sin which so 
 instantly and fearfully avenges itself upon the 
 doer of it, in soul and body, no ex post facto 
 atonement provides any remedy. A man cannot 
 apologize to himself for the lewd imagination 
 which has for one permitted moment turned his 
 soul into a sty. He cannot make up by subse- 
 
5 2 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. quent confession for the debasement Ms own 
 
 SECOND nature has suffered. Eemedies after the act do 
 
 ILLUSTRATION ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ Prevcntion is the only cure. 
 
 Hence all moralists have prescribed for those who 
 
 are tempted to this sin, not resistance, but flight. 
 
 1 Cor. vi. 18. ' Flee fornication,' says St. Paul. Job made a 
 
 Prov. V. 8. covenant with his eyes. ' Eemove thy way far 
 
 off,' said Solomon, 'and come not nigh.' So the 
 
 Eccius. ix. wise son of Sirach : ' Gaze not,' . . . ' look not 
 
 3-9 
 
 round about thee in the streets,' ..." turn 
 away thine eyes.' It is in the same line that 
 this Divine Teacher insists on the most ruthless 
 self-denial and mortifying of fleshly appetite, as 
 the only way for the passion-tempted and en- 
 Matt, xviii. dangered soul to escape defilement. On another 
 occasion Jesus used these same vehement images 
 — the amputation of our most useful member, 
 the right hand ; and the excision of the most 
 pleasant, our right eye — to express in a more 
 general sense the stern and painful need under 
 which men lie to sacrifice everything to the 
 avoidance of any sin. Here there is a pecu- 
 liar propriety in them. The particular sin re- 
 ferred to is a sin of the body. The ordinary 
 and innocent enjoyment of bodily pleasures is 
 that very line along which danger to chastity 
 meets the young and hot-blooded. It is plea- 
 
The Seventh Commandinent. 53 
 
 sant to see pleasant and fair society, but there part i. 
 is a certain society into which a young man second 
 cannot enter without perilous excitement. There 
 is a class of books which, though some may, 
 others cannot, read without catching a stain 
 from fascinating but doubtful passages or indeli- 
 cate innuendoes. There are objects of art which 
 to the pure indeed are pure, but on which some 
 eyes cannot look without a suggestion of impro- 
 priety. What then ? Let no man judge his i Cor. x. 29. 
 fellow's freedom, or erect his own evil mind into a 
 censor upon the good of better men. On the other cf. isa. m. 
 hand, let no man trifle with his own safety, or try in 2 Cor. vi. 
 
 17 
 
 how he can touch pitch and keep his fingers clean. * 
 To restrict one's pleasures and pursuits to the 
 limit which is safe, will mean self-denial. It 
 will entail effort. It may be a loss of advantages 
 which others can reap without harm. It may 
 even prove to be such self-inflicted martyrdom as 
 that buffeting and bruising of the body, for the 
 sake of masterini:^ it, of which St. Paul wrote to 1 Cor. ix. 
 
 25-27. 
 
 the licentious Corinthians. No matter. Better 
 a thousand times to forego all use and joy of sight 
 or touch ; better to have neither eye to see with 
 nor hand to toy with ; than be decoyed by loose 
 glances and soft touches into that habit of im- 
 purity which entangles a man, body and soul, in 
 
5 4 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. such meslies of lust as no Samson can break 
 
 SECOND through, which drags the self-despising, despicable 
 
 iLLUbTRATioN yj^,^^-^ q£ j-^^g ^^^ indulgcncc down that road of 
 
 deepening abomination which ends in the hell of 
 the licentious, the foulest circle in the whole 
 Inferno. 
 
 ]^ot, of course, that any literal violence, such 
 as earnest but misguided men have now and then 
 practised upon their bodies, can touch the seat of 
 this moral plague. Surgical modes of cure would 
 not be too painful, nor the disfigurement of 
 amputation too shameful, could they only pur- 
 chase that purity which is the life of the soul. 
 But the virus of lust, sharper and more deadly 
 than any poison, works too deep for surgery. 
 When all foreseen occasions or provocatives to 
 sin have been manfully cut away, and every care 
 taken not to rouse the evil which slumbers in 
 the heart, there will still remain the real battle 
 of conscience and reason and modesty against 
 appetite ; a battle to be fought at last within the 
 secret soul of each tempted man, and for which 
 help is to be found nowhere but on one's knees. 
 To forego pleasures which other people call inno- 
 cent, to tear yourself from the gayest company, 
 to impose on yourself the sharpest fasts or self- 
 displeasing, would be a cheap recipe for the 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 55 
 
 eradication of this sin, were it only an effectual part i. 
 one. Yet despise not these outward helps and second 
 
 ,.,. , .p . , r. ILLUSTRATION 
 
 conditions to a cure, if you are m earnest lor 
 purity. Call not this asceticism ; if it is, it is 
 the asceticism which is rational and Christian. 
 Everything is right, and not right only, but need- 
 ful, which will cut off the occasion of images that 
 are unclean, and desires that are beyond control. 
 Our Master is no Puritan, but He is the most 
 thorough and the most severe of all moralists. 
 
 The second appendix to our Lord's brief expo- Vers. 31, 32. 
 sition of the law of marriage bears upon divorce. 
 It looks at the first glance like a fresh example 
 of how Jesus fulfils in His new kincfdom the law 
 
 o 
 
 of the old ; for it opens with a similar formula : 
 * It hath been said,' and it opposes to the tradi- 
 tional divorce law of the Jewish scribes a regu- 
 lation which might be called original. The law 
 regulating divorce, however, must be, from the 
 nature of the case, a corollary from the great law 
 of matrimony, when rightly understood; and 
 therefore I read it as simply an appendix to the 
 teaching of the twenty-eighth verse. Jesus' 
 attitude to the divorce customs of His time forms 
 a curious chapter, sufficiently large and difficult 
 to deserve handling by itself. The question 
 came before Him more explicitly on a later occa- 
 
5 6 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. sion, when it received at His hands a fuller treat- 
 
 sEcoND ment. Here I can only resume His teaching on 
 
 r..^. . the point as it bears upon those views of the 
 
 Cf. Matt. XIX. ^ ^ 
 
 3-12, and marriage tie which are here in hand. 
 
 parallels. 
 
 Moses found the original law on marriage con- 
 siderably relaxed, and a practice prevalent which 
 permitted the husband to dismiss his wives on 
 almost any pretext. The reasons for so loose a 
 usage run back, through the Egyptian servitude, 
 to the polygamy of patriarchal times and the 
 relation of rich sheiks to their slave concubines. 
 At any rate, the liberty of divorce was one which, 
 at the giving of the law, it was not possible or 
 prudent to abolish. Legislation sought to reduce 
 its licence by sundry restrictions. Thus, divorce 
 was by Moses prohibited, except for some disco- 
 vered ' fault of uncleanness,' as the phrase went ; 
 and even then was not to be legal unless regis- 
 tered in a formal written document. The divorced 
 parties, moreover, could not re-marry with one 
 another. Had these rules been honestly kept, 
 the discreditable laxity springing out of poly- 
 gamy would have been modified into something 
 like a tolerable system for a civilised common- 
 wealth. But at this point again came in the 
 wretched system of juristic quibbling. The phrase 
 * matter of uncleanness ' was elastic as well as 
 
Tlie Seventh Commandment. 57 
 
 obscure, and the lawyers stretched it to cover the part i. 
 most frivolous pretences. One school of Jewish second 
 doctors in Jesus' time^ had come to teach that 
 a trifling neglect of household duty, immodesty 
 in dress, or even the arbitrary preference of a 
 capricious husband, formed ground enough for 
 dissolving the marriage tie. Of course, no sanctity 
 could attach to a union which, on such slender 
 pretexts, could be legally broken; and against 
 this scandal the great Teacher of Galilee sternly 
 opposed Himself. But Jesus went much further. 
 Instead of making the Mosaic legislation His I 
 
 basis. He went back upon the original meaning I 
 
 of wedlock as a primitive ordinance of God. ^ 
 
 Founding on the words of God at the creation 
 of Eve, as recorded in the earliest document of Gen. ii. 24 ; 
 
 quoted 
 
 revelation, Jesus taught that, in the purpose of Matt. xix. 
 the Creator, the two sexes were made for each 
 other ; that each mutually completed the other's 
 deficiencies, so that both together made up the 
 ideal of humanity ; that the holy bond of matri- 
 mony was the recognition of this fact in human 
 nature ; and that it effected a perfect imion be- 
 tween one man and one woman, a union so 
 sacred as to be inviolable, so perfect as to be 
 permanent, a union which left them, in fact, no 
 
 1 The school of Hillel. 
 
5 8 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. longer two, but one flesh. Starting from this 
 SECOND most blessed and sacred thought of the Almighty 
 
 ILLUSTRATION • .t n i- ±- P 1 J r 1 
 
 m the nrst creation oi male and lemaie, — 
 a thought which must always lie at the very 
 base of society, of home, and of all social and 
 domestic sanctities, — our Lord inferred the in- 
 separableness of the marriage tie. He declared 
 the Mosaic law of divorce to have been merely 
 a temporary and unavoidable lowering of the 
 original standard, an exceptional concession to 
 
 Matt. xix. 8. special circumstances. ' For the hardness of 
 their hearts,' He said ; because a more rigjorous 
 enforcement of the bond would only have exas- 
 perated a rude, untrained people, and made the 
 .evils worse which it was meant to mend. Since 
 such facilities for divorce were not the true law 
 of matrimony, but a regrettable limitation of it, 
 they behoved to fall away when the final and 
 perfected economy came, of a Christian kingdom, 
 in which the great FulfiUer interprets the divine 
 will in its integrity, and enables His subjects to 
 keep it in its spirit. Clad with divine authority 
 to republish the law of God, Jesus proclaimed, as 
 the guarantee of wedded rights and the sanction 
 of wedded duty within His Christian kingdom. 
 
 Matt. xix. 6. this principle : ' What God hath joined together, 
 let not man put asunder.' 
 
ILLUSTKATION 
 
 The Seventh Commandment 59 
 
 The solitary exception whicli He allowed, is part i. 
 an exception in appearance rather than in reality. second 
 For if the union of the two sexes into one flesh 
 forms the essential characteristic of marriage, then 
 adultery is not so much a reason for dissolving 
 that union, as the virtual dissolution of it by 
 the formation of another. It lies in the nature 
 of the case, that a tie which is by anything else 
 indissoluble, is by the mere fact of unfaithful- 
 ness dissolved. 
 
 No apology is required for setting in as clear 
 a light as possible the lessons of the Lord Jesus 
 on this subject. Our Lord never spoke more ex- 
 plicitly on anything than He did on this ; on no 
 subject is it of greater moment for the well-being 
 of society that His deep words should be revered 
 and understood. The social state of any people 
 will be found ultimately to hinge on the purity of 
 its homes and the place which it gives to woman. 
 The jealous separation of the sexes in Asia, leading 
 to brutality in indulgence and to indehcacy in re- 
 serve ; the unmentionable vices of classical Greece ; 
 the exaggerated worship of celibacy in debased 
 Christianity, with its painful reactions from the 
 fourth century to the present; these examples 
 teach how much depends on sound popular con- 
 ceptions of the relation between the sexes. If one 
 
6 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. were asked to name that brancli of public morals 
 SECOND on which the teaching of Jesus has wrought the 
 most wholesome reformation, this should be the 
 one. Whatever modern Protestant Europe knows 
 of household peace and the sanctities and confi- 
 dences of home life ; whatever consecrates the 
 hearth into an altar, makes a Bethel of the house, 
 or gives to manhood a chivalrous loyalty and to 
 woman pure-heartedness with innocent freedom, — 
 all that we owe to the precious words of this 
 stainless Man of Nazareth. It was His teaching 
 on the marriage law which first cut down by their 
 roots the widespread abuses of concubinage and 
 polygamy ; which elevated chastity to the front 
 rank among virtues ; which exposed the essential 
 criminality of every unhallowed breath; which 
 raised woman to her rightful place, and secured 
 her respect and liberty by throwing around her 
 the shield of love. If for any one thing, in the 
 present condition of English society, we have 
 reason for the devout thankfulness which has in 
 it no evil pride, it is for this, that in England 
 home is a sacred place. It is for young men 
 before all others to keep it so. Let them learn 
 the pure and manly lessons of Jesus Christ. Let 
 them reverence their own bodies as the temples 
 of God. Let them fear to lower, even by a look 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 61 
 
 or word, the fence wliicli God's hand has reared part i. 
 around the honourable and holy estate. Let them second 
 shrink from no severity to chasten, and control, illustration 
 and subdue themselves. Above all, let them seek 
 the moral strength and love for the pure which 
 come through vital union to the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 Let them wear, not on their breast, but in their 
 heart, the red cross of that blessed Son of Man, 
 the whitest of the sons of men : so shall they 
 conquer the flesh, and emulate in a nobler contest 
 the purest and manfuUest of the knights of old/ 
 so shall they attain to walk with Christ in the 
 white armour of an unsoiled and guileless cha- 
 racter. Into His eternal city of transparency 
 ' there shall in nowise enter anything that de- Rev. xxi. 27 ; 
 fileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination.' cf. xiv. 4. 
 May He blanch us all into perfect chastity, and 
 preserve in us blamelessness of heart and life ! 
 
 ^ Cf. Tennyson's * Sir Galahad ' {Poems), and his treatment 
 of the same legend in The Holy Grail 
 
THIED ILLUSTEATION 
 OF OATHS. 
 
 63 
 
Agai7i, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old 
 time, ' Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shall perform unto 
 the Lord thine oaths.'' But I say unto you, Swear not at all; 
 neither by heaven, for it is God's throne ; nor by the earth, 
 for it is His footstool; neither by Jerusalem, for it is the city 
 of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, be- 
 cause thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let 
 your communication be, ' Yea, yea ; ' ' nay, nay : ' for ivhatso- 
 ever is more than these cometh of evil. — Matt. v. 33-37. Cf. 
 Matt, xxiii. 16-22. 
 
 64 
 
OF OATHS. 
 
 IN two examples we have already seen how p-^Rt i. 
 Jesus' teaching fulfils the Jewish law. In third 
 
 _.,.,. 1 • 1 • 1 1 • ILLUSTRAT 
 
 His thircl instance, which is the law against per- 
 jury, He does not quote, as in both the former, 
 from the decalogue ; for false swearing is a com- 
 pound sin, breaking at once two of the ten 
 commandments. It is, for one thinc^, an act of 
 profanity, in breach of the third commandment : 
 ' Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy Ex. xx. 7. 
 God in vain ;' it is also an extreme act of false 
 witness, in breach of the ninth : ' Thou shalt not Ver. 16. 
 bear false witness against thy neighbour.' Of 
 course, it does not exhaust by any means the 
 breach of either commandment ; for there is much 
 profanity on the one side, and much lying on the 
 other, which do not take the form of an oath. 
 Perjury lies at the point where these two sins 
 overlap one another : it includes the guilt of 
 both. We are accustomed, in a loose use of 
 words, to apply the terms ' oath' and ' swearing' 
 to very many forms of profane language besides 
 
 E 
 
6 6 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. perjury ; we apply them popularly to curses, to 
 THIRD blasphemy, to ribald exclamations, to the use of 
 over-strong epithets, and so forth. It is there- 
 fore important to make it clear what the swear- 
 ing of an oath strictly and properly means. 
 
 It is, to begin with, a form of witness-bearing. 
 Every man who states what he means to be 
 taken for a fact is a witness. He bee * ' 
 mony to something which he professes 1 
 and which his hearer is supposed not 
 His statement is either a true testimoi 5 
 
 own knowledge and belief of the fact, or 
 Behind all such witness-bearing — that i I 
 
 every word which a man afiirms with tl 
 tion of being believed — there is to be u i 
 
 one other Witness, always present, "V s 
 
 everything. Who knows what I know, h t 
 
 I say, and judges whether what I say 1 3 
 
 what I know. This heart-searching 5, 
 
 Eev. iii. 14. ' the faithful and true,' is the final 'f 
 
 appeal betwixt him who testifies and o 
 
 whom the testimony is borne. His u d 
 
 knowledge and absolute veracity form i- 
 
 mate test of human truthfulness. I .e 
 
 supreme defender or vindicator of the true — 
 supreme avenger of the false. If I am true, His 
 infallible testimony will in the end corroborate 
 
Of Oaths. 67 
 
 and justify, however my testimony may be now part i. 
 contradicted by false witnesses, or enfeebled by third 
 
 T^P T- ^ 1 1- T ILLUSTRATION 
 
 suspicious appearances, it i am lalse, nowever i 
 may win credit for the time, my lie must in the 
 end be shattered before the manifestation of His 
 avenging truth. Always, therefore, when men 
 speak in seriousness to a fact, there is this awful 
 background to be understood. There is One Who 
 knows, and Who will one day declare, the truth. 
 Always, men speak under correction of the Om- 
 niscient. But when the speaker expressly recalls 
 to his own and his hearer's remembrance this 
 tacit appeal ; when he calls in as corroborative 
 testimony the invisible and infallible Witness ; 
 when he solemnly invites the testing judgment 
 of Almighty God to attest his own suspected 
 veracity, then he swears an oath. To swear truly 
 is to bear honest witness, and back it wdth the 
 sanction of a religious invocation. To swear 
 falsely is to lie, and profanely to endorse the lie 
 with the awful name of the most true God ; it is 
 to make the authority of the Almighty and men's 
 fear of His judgment vouchers to gain belief for 
 falsehood. 
 
 The prohibition of this compound sin Jesus 
 found in these words of the national statute-book : 
 ' Ye shall not swear by My name falsely,' which Lev. xix. 12. 
 
6 8 Tlie Laivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. He quotes briefly thus, ' Thou shalt not forswear 
 THIRD thyself.' To this, which is all that stands in 
 .LUSTRATION j^g^i^i^^^g^ jje appeuds the rider of the Jewish 
 doctors. One would have thought it difficult to 
 evade by any gloss the force of a law so explicit ; 
 the ingenuity of Hebrew casuistry accomplished 
 it. In another book of the Pentateuch, there 
 was found a statute on the subject of vows, which 
 Num. XXX. ran thus : ' If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, 
 xxiii.*2i. ' or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond, he 
 shall not break his word.' This is a more limited 
 law than the former. It refers to one class of 
 oaths only — oaths which vowed some voluntary 
 religious service to Jehovah. But the jurists 
 applied this narrower statute to limit their inter- 
 pretation of the more general one ; and then read 
 the larger law against perjury, as if it ran thus : 
 ' Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt per- 
 form to the Lord thine oaths.' The ' but' is em- 
 phatic ; for the latter clause is meant to circum- 
 scribe the former : only the breach of oaths to 
 perform some religious service is to be reckoned 
 perjury. The words ' to Jehovah ' are also em- 
 phatic ; for if the oath is not made expressly 
 by His sacred and mysterious name, to break it 
 is counted no forsw^earing. Thus, at last, in the 
 hands of quibbling and unscrupulous pedants. 
 
Of Oaths. 69 
 
 God's broad proliibition of false oaths of every part i. 
 class dwindled into this surprising shape : ' That third 
 which thou hast expressly sworn by Jehovah's 
 name to do unto Jehovah, that thou shalt perform 
 on pain of perjury, and no more.' Well might 
 the indio'nant voice of Jesus declare that a sta- 
 
 o 
 
 tute-book which had been wrested out of shape 
 
 and emptied of moral meaning by such casuistry 
 
 as this, had been ' made of none effect by their Matt. xv. 6. 
 
 tradition.' 
 
 Of course, teaching of this sort bore wretched 
 fruit. Since no oath was thought binding unless 
 made in the express name of Jehovah, a crowd of 
 minced oaths grew into practice, which came near 
 that sacred name without actually pronouncing it. 
 Lies, backed with these sham oaths, bred a system 
 of wholesale and almost sanctioned perjury in 
 common life. The intercourse of man with man 
 lost all regard to truth, when the holiest safe- 
 guards of truth w^ere habitually travestied or 
 defied ; and the people sank, as the Bedamn 
 of the present day have sunk, into a ' nation of 
 universal liars.' ^ Profanity, too, kept pace with 
 falsehood. If an oath was no guarantee for 
 truth, but the accepted garnishing for a flat un- 
 truth, what sanctity could attach to any words ? 
 1 Thomson, The Land and the Booh (Lond. 1859), p. 383. 
 
7 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. Liberal indulgence in the frivolous or profane 
 THIRD use of sacred things and names could hardly be 
 blamed, so long as they kept clear of that one 
 unmentionable Name, round which it seemed 
 that all sacredness had superstitiously gathered 
 itself At that day, therefore, as to this day, in 
 Syria, the reckless incessant abuse of the most 
 awful words was probably next to universal in 
 common speech. ' No people,' says Dr. Thom- 
 son, ' that I have ever known can compare with 
 these Orientals for profaneness in the use of the 
 names and attributes of God. The evil habit 
 seems inveterate and universal.' ^ Long before 
 Christ's day, a Hebrew moralist had found it 
 Eccius. xxiii. needful to say, with all emphasis, ' Accustom 
 
 9-13. -^ ^ 
 
 not thy mouth to swearing, neither use thyself 
 to the naming of the Holy One. . . . There is 
 a word that is clothed about with death : God 
 grant that it be not found in the heritage of 
 Jacob.' 
 
 It was not enough, however, to censure, as 
 others had done, the false morality which bore 
 such profane fruit. Our Lord fulfilled the law 
 by disclosing those principles which deeply under- 
 lay it. 
 
 The perfect idea of human speech is, that 
 
 ^ Ut supra, p. 191. 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 Of Oatlis. 71 
 
 simple assertion and simple denial have in wit- part t. 
 ness-bearing the force of an oath. If both the third 
 speaker and the hearer were, as God is, perfect 
 lovers of the truth, and if the speaker always 
 spoke, as he ought to speak, in the presence 
 and under fear of the all-knowing Witness ; then 
 everything beyond the bare words ' It is,' or ' It 
 is not,' would be superfluous. A perfectly truth- 
 ful witness obviously needs no oath to bind him. 
 He is always ' on his honour,' and ' tells the truth 
 as he shall answer to God at the great day of 
 judgment.' For the present, indeed, this ideal 
 state is so utterly and hopelessly an ideal, that 
 the whole practice of social and juristic language 
 must proceed on another assumption. Each man, 
 according to his experience of human nature, will 
 fix for himself the extent to which he believes what 
 he hears, or the kind of asseveration which he 
 will demand as a pledge of veracity. I fear most 
 men get incredulous as they get older, and make 
 a larger and larger discount on their neighbour's 
 language for wilful or unconscious falsehood. At 
 any rate, society has to guard itself against the 
 lie by every safeguard, where public interests are 
 involved. The cumbrous phraseology of the law, 
 its system of witnesses, registrations, oaths, and 
 deeds, its penalties for perjury and forgery, are 
 
72 Tlie Laios of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. only so many testimonies to the ruin of linman 
 THIRD honour, and the facility with which men lie at 
 the bidding of cupidity and of fear. But it is 
 the work of Jesus Christ to recall humanity to its 
 ideal, and in His church to educate men at least 
 towards the perfected condition. The condition 
 in which oaths shall be needless, and speech be per- 
 fect with a ' Yea,' ' Nay,' is at least an approach- 
 able condition, even if it is not under existing 
 circumstances an attainable one. In general 
 society, or in business, as in the commonwealth, 
 it may not be always possible to dispense with 
 the oath ; but within the church or select society 
 of men who have learnt the truth as it is in 
 Jesus, it ought to be quite possible. Within the 
 church, therefore, or new spiritual kingdom, and 
 between men who address each other as fellow- 
 subjects of Jesus Christ, the old law, ' Do not for- 
 swear thyself,' has been superseded by the deeper 
 law, ' Do not swear.' Thus, at a single stroke, 
 Jesus sweeps away from His inner realm of puri- 
 fied hearts, along with the whole system of strong 
 language, those modes of paltering with truth by 
 which men have always tried to give their neigh- 
 bour a guarantee for veracity, and yet to deceive 
 him. Evasive or minced protestations, white 
 falsehoods, prevarications, concealments which 
 
Of Oaths. 73 
 
 affect to conceal nothing, roundabout and double part i. 
 phrases, all shabby cloaks in which falsehood third 
 hides its nakedness, and the winding, underhand 
 tricks of s^^eech by which words are made to hide 
 or to pervert thought, — all these flee away before 
 the face of an honest man ; and in their room 
 He bids us put a plain, straightforward, earnest 
 ' Yes ' and ' No.' One round unvarnished truth 
 routs a host of cowardly falsehoods. It is an 
 unspeakable advantage for the world, that here, 
 in the midst of our smooth conventions, our im- 
 pudent puffs of trade, our sneaking fibs, our big 
 and windy asseverations by which bluster tries to 
 win credit for a lie, there stands now continually 
 this Kino; of Truth. In this true Israel, unlike Gen. xxxii. 
 
 . 28 • cf 
 
 His first ancestor who wore the name, there is john i. 47. 
 no guile. His open, frank, sincere eye is a re- 
 buke to the world's duplicity. Before the world, 
 which barely believes in truth at all. He holds 
 up from age to age the noble and severe ideal of 
 an earth in which each man shaU utter, and each 
 man shall beheve, the very truth, and nothing 
 but the truth. To those who name Him as their 
 Lord, and who, banded in His name, profess to 
 exhibit some faint forecast of what this earth 
 shall be when all men own His sway. He gives 
 but this most plain word to keep among them- 
 
74 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. selves and before the world : ' Let your commu- 
 THiRD cation be, " Yea, yea/' " Nay, nay." ' 
 
 ILLUSTRATION p i . -r -i 
 
 ine secret of such veracity as Jesus thus re- 
 quires in His kingdom, — such veracity, I mean, 
 as makes an oath needless, because it reckons its 
 ' yea ' to have the force of an oath, — lies in the 
 abiding fear of God. What a witness who swears 
 gives me as a guarantee for his truthfulness is, 
 that he expressly invokes the presence and judg- 
 ment of Almighty God. That is to say, he gives 
 me just such assurance as his faith in God 
 and fear of Him when in most intense exercise 
 can give, be it much or little. The measure in 
 which the swearer feels religious reverence is the 
 measure in which I can trust his oath. Now, 
 suppose a man to stand ahvays consciously in 
 the presence and beneath the eye of God, and to 
 have habitually upon his mind that reverential 
 apprehension of the Almighty which the swearer 
 summons up for the moment; is it not evident 
 that such a man's naked word is of the very 
 essence and nature of an oath ? If, with his lips 
 in words, the true man never needs to pledge 
 his religious dread of the Almighty Detector and 
 Punisher of falsehood, it is because in his heart 
 he is always speaking under that tacit dread of 
 Jehovah. The state of religious reverence which 
 
Of Oaths. 75 
 
 makes swearing solemn and gives it value is the part i. 
 state in which a Christian ought habitually to third 
 be. Hence, the more you bring people into a illustration 
 condition of mind to feel the sanction of an oath 
 and to dread false swearing, the nearer you come 
 to abolishing oaths altogether. This new law of 
 Christ : ' Let " Yea," " Nay," be like an oath,' is 
 just the supreme fulfilment in its spirit of the 
 old law : ' Do not perjure thyself 
 
 It is further to be observed, that the same 
 religious reverence for God which so effectually 
 cures false witness that it abolishes all need for 
 serious oaths, cures also the profanity of frivolous 
 swearing. We saw at the outset how the sin of 
 perjury embraces both falsehood and profanity. 
 The falsehood Jesus condemns in its roots, by 
 making every word as sacred as an oath. The 
 profanity He tracks through every minced or 
 meaningless utterance of sacred words. People 
 who have no reverence for God have often a 
 superstitious dread, like the Jews, for His name ; 
 and when they use a flippant or insincere oath, 
 they cajole their conscience by putting in its 
 stead some word which sounds less holy. Such 
 people care only for the husk of the law, and 
 welcome any subterfuge which will let them 
 break it in its spirit, while they keep its letter. 
 
7 6 The Lcavs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. They sliun to ' take the name of God in vain ;' 
 THIRD but they will profane anything in His heaven or 
 iLLiJbTEATioN ^^^^^ witliout compunctlon, and coin new, puerile, 
 or unmeaning oaths, for the mere pleasure of 
 being profane. Of such oaths Jesus gives ex- 
 amples to illustrate two different classes. 
 
 In the first, the swearer substitutes for the 
 divine name something more or less connected 
 with God, which stands, at first at least, as His 
 representative. Of this class are the current 
 Hebrew oaths cited by our Lord — by heaven, 
 earth, or Jerusalem ; the current English oath — 
 ' by heaven ;' Eoman Catholic oaths by the cross, 
 and the saints, and the ansjels, and the Viroin ; 
 and more remotely those modern oaths, which 
 have the distinction of being stupid as well as 
 profane — ' by Jupiter,' and the like. For it has 
 been reserved for us moderns since the Eenais- 
 sance to make our irreverence contemj)tible, by 
 substituting divinities we do not believe in, for 
 Him whom we still call our God, yet choose 
 circuitously to insult. In this last case, the thing 
 sworn by has no sacredness, for it has no existence. 
 But wherever a man swears by anything he does 
 revere, the oath is reaUy by the Eternal Himself ; 
 for all venerable things are venerable only through 
 their connection with Him. Heaven is sacred, 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 Of Oaths. 77 
 
 says Jesus, quoting from the splendid page of 
 Isaiah, for it is His throne ; and earth, because 
 it is His footstool ; saints, because they are His 
 
 ' -^ . Isa. Ixvi. 1. 
 
 holy ones ; and the temple, because He dwells in 
 it. To a heathen who saw in the breeze and the 
 forest, the stream and the sun, symbols or shrines 
 of a separate indwelling divinity, these natural 
 objects were truly divine, and fit to be sworn by. 
 The Greek who swore by them, heathen as he 
 was, swore devoutly. For us, there is no less 
 sanctity about each part of God's earth and heaven 
 because we see in each not a local and secondary 
 deity, but Him Who ' filleth all in all,' Who speaks Eph. i. 23. 
 
 Ps. xxix., 
 
 in thunder, and rides upon the cloud, Who bids civ. 3 ; 
 
 ... ^ , Isa. xix. 1 ; 
 
 the sun to know its rising, and counts the num- job ix. 7 ; 
 ber of the stars. Let us fill our hearts with 
 reverence for the everywhere present Father, as 
 His glory has filled the earth; and we shall find 
 nothing common or unclean enough to be the 
 subject of an idle or irreverent oath. 
 
 Perverted oaths of the second class are of 
 the nature of imprecations. In every oath the 
 swearer exposes himself, in case of falsehood, to 
 divine judgment. But instead of exposing him- 
 self, he may devote to judgment some minor 
 forfeit, something of his own which he puts, as it 
 were, in pawn to attest his veracity. This is the 
 
78 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. character of the last Hebrew oath quoted by our 
 THIRD Lord: 'Neither shalt thou swear by thy head;' 
 
 ILLUSTRATION „„ i i - 1 • i i • i 
 
 as when men swear by their honour, kings by 
 their crown, soldiers by their sword ; or when 
 people stake their life, their soul, or some such 
 dearest thing, in pledge of sincerity. However 
 thoughtless protestations of this sort may be, the 
 underlying reference always is to God : for as it 
 is He Who alone can decide on our veracity, so it 
 is He alone Who can dispose of what is thus 
 rashly submitted to His decision. If the forfeit 
 of a false word is to be one's head, or soul, or 
 credit ; who is the lord of these, to take them or 
 confirm them, but God ? No man can ' make one 
 hair of his own head white or black.' And the man 
 who fears God as God ought to be feared, will 
 have too profound a sense of God's sovereignty, 
 and too awful an apprehension of God's judg- 
 ments, to imprecate his Maker's intervention 
 either to sustain a lie or to decide a bagatelle. 
 There is, in fact, no cure for either false or flip- 
 pant swearing, but devout reverence for God. 
 Fear God, and you will fear to lie. Fear God, 
 and you will count each serious word sacred as 
 an oath. Fear God, and you will feel that there 
 is no oath but one ; since all swearing, however 
 diluted or whitewashed, runs up into an appeal 
 
Of Oaths. 79 
 
 to the Almighty and Omniscient. Fear God, part i. 
 and you will think twice before you let slip a third 
 random adjuration or a rash imprecation : for ^^^u^t^^^'tio.n 
 every oath must be, if irreverent or needless, a 
 profanity ; if false, a perjury. Therefore ' swear 
 not at all.' 
 
 "We are now, I think, in a position to judge 
 how far our Lord's teaching forbids all adminis- 
 tering and taking of oaths whatsoever. It cannot 
 surprise us that many have drawn that conclusion 
 from such sweeping words as are here employed. 
 We associate the refusal to take a judicial or 
 allegiance oath with Quakerism ; but in fact there 
 has rarely been absent in any age of the church 
 a small section of Christians who held this ground, 
 and numbers of the best fathers of christian So Chrysos- 
 learning have spoken strongly in its favour, lact,' Jerome, 
 Moreover, it is unfair to deny that our Lord does 
 set it before His church as the true ideal of His 
 kingdom, that veracity and trust among His fol- 
 lowers should make everything beyond ' yes ' and 
 ' no ' superfluous, and because superfluous, wrong. 
 That christian heart which does not beat quicker 
 at the thought of such a golden future, of such a 
 realm of truth kept through the fear of God, has 
 little sympathy with Christ. Yet such a super- 
 seding of oaths can only come from within, through 
 
80 The Laius of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. the spiritual elevation of men at large into trutli- 
 THiED fulness and trustworthiness ; not at all by any 
 ILLUSTRATION external prohibition. To forbid oaths by arbi- 
 trary edict, before you have made men honest 
 enough to be able to do without them, would be 
 to gain nothing. To keep such an edict in the 
 letter of it, would be to repeat the Hebrew fault of 
 legalism, even though the edict issued from the 
 lips of Christ. Christ trusts us to understand 
 Him so well, that we shall care as little as He 
 cares for any mechanical observance of His own 
 rules, but shall care as much as He cares to see 
 them kept by the inward inspiration of the Spirit. 
 The New Testament is full of evidence that even 
 within the Christian Church the time had not 
 yet come for the abolition of oaths as super- 
 Matt, xxvi. fluities. Jesus Himself responded to a solemn 
 judicial adjuration by the high priest in council, 
 w^hen He would respond to nothing else. St. 
 Paul in various passages thought fit to use both 
 2 Cor. i. 23, the full form of oath : ' I call God as a witness 
 
 Greek ; 
 
 Rom. i. 9 ; upon my soul,' and abbreviated phrases which 
 
 Phil. i. 8 ; , ' . ^ ^ 
 
 1 Cor. XV. 31. meant the same thing. One of the latest acts of 
 revelation is to record the awful oath of the 
 
 Eev. X. 6. angel who announced that time should be no 
 longer. Nor can these cases appear strange to 
 any man who recalls with such solemn thankful- 
 
Of Oaths. 81 
 
 ness as befits the occasion, how it has pleased the part i. 
 Eternal Truth, the ' I Am/ to stoop to our weak- third 
 ness of faith, and, because He could swear by no ^^^^^^^^^"^^^^ 
 greater, to put His own existence in mysterious See Gen. 
 pledge for the confirmation of the promises of quoted m 
 His grace to mortal men ; in order that His awful ^ ' ^" 
 oath might put an end to all strife of doubt and 
 alarm within our sinful hearts, and bring to us 
 ' strong consolation,' and a hope made doubly 
 sure by ' two immutable things.' If ever a bare 
 word ought to have been enough, Jehovah's 
 ought. Through our sin of suspicion, it was not : 
 and Jehovah sware. A man's bare word ought 
 always to be enough. Through our sin of lying, 
 and the distrust which lying has bred, it is not : 
 and true men on fit occasions may swear. Tor 
 in truth, as we have seen, all witness-bearing by 
 a true man is tacitly done under a solemn sense 
 of the highest sanctions ; and when he swears, 
 he only expressly states for others' security what 
 that is which — oath or no oath — has bound him 
 always to speak the truth. Still, ' it cometh of Ver. 37, 
 the evil.' Sadly as well as solemnly will a 
 thoughtful man swear ; for to make such a con- 
 cession to the dishonesty and incredulity of man- 
 kind, as to assert in what awful presence, beneath 
 what judging eye, I bear my witness to the 
 
 F 
 
82 Tlu Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. truth, is to testify the humiliation of my kind. 
 
 THIRD Yet is it to be done frankly and fearlessly when 
 
 ILLUSTRATION ^^^^ -^^ j^ y^o\M be but a vain stickling at a 
 
 word were we to sacrifice truth itself, and certi- 
 tude, and justice, and the very ends of witness- 
 bearing and of speech, to a superstitious dread of 
 saying out like men what all the while we hide 
 reverently in our hearts, that God is our witness 
 before Whom we stand. Verbal Quakerism is but 
 iCor.xiv. 20. Pharisaism over again. 'In understanding' let 
 us * be men.' 
 
 ' Howbeit,' in falsehood as well as malice, let 
 us 'be children.' The mean and cowardly sin of 
 wilful unveracity infects the society, and especially 
 the trade, of England, to an extent which some 
 tell us grows from year to year, and threatens to 
 rob us of what was wont to be an Englishman's 
 boast among the nations. One does not need to 
 be a prophet, to see that as the living faith in a 
 personal Deity, before Whom we shall be judged, 
 and by Whom we shall be punished, decays 
 (for it seems to be decaying) out of the heart 
 of our people, the best safeguard for truthfulness 
 will decay. When one knows that, alongside of 
 this decay of the fear of the living God, the 
 reasons for seeking gain, and the pressure of 
 business competition, and the facilities for knavery 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 Of Oaths. 83 
 
 in trade, are all increasing round about us ; how part i. 
 is it possible to look forward without a fear lest third 
 the word of an Englishman may come to be as 
 little trusted as any word spoken on the exchange ? 
 It is for Christians to set their faces like a flint 
 against all the current forms of false witness ; to 
 prize and guard the perfect fair form of truth. 
 Let them be for their own part transparent as the 
 floor of heaven; and when occasion offers, let 
 them expose, and scorn, and flout the baseness of 
 every imposture. 
 
FOURTH ILLUSTEATION: 
 
 LEX TALIONIS. 
 
 85 
 
Ye have heard that it hath been said, ' An eye for an eye, 
 and a tooth for a tooth:'' but I say unto you, That ye resist 
 not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn 
 to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, 
 and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And 
 whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. 
 Give to him that askeththee; and from him that would borrow 
 of thee, turn not thou away. — Matt. v. 38-42. 
 
 But I say unto you ivhich hear, . . . Unto him that smiteth 
 thee on the one cheek, offer also the other ; and him that taketh 
 away thy cloak, forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every 
 man that asketh of thee ; and of him that taketh away thy 
 goods, ask them not again. — Luke vi. 27-30. 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 LEX TALIONIS. 
 
 THE three illustrations of Christ's relation to part i. 
 Hebrew law wliich we have hitherto con- fourth 
 siclered, were of a different character from the 
 two last which we now approach. The laws 
 against injurious anger, against lust, and against 
 perjury, are merely prohibitory laws. They for- 
 bid distinct acts of crime ; and although Jesus 
 has taught us that they cannot be kept by simply 
 avoiding overt acts, but must have a root of 
 obedience in the heart, it is, after all, only a 
 negative species of virtue which does no more 
 than keep the passions under control, and the 
 conversation truthful. To the positive side of 
 christian ethics our Lord now turns ; and in the 
 two instances we have still to consider. He pushes 
 His demand for positive beneficence or brotherly 
 love to the loftiest and most divine extreme. 
 
 Here, as before, however, this new moralist 
 attaches His precepts to earlier legislation. He 
 still appears as the Lulfiller of the old ; correct- 
 ing the narrow and unkindly interpretations 
 
 87 
 
8 8 Hu Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. which Jewish casuistry had put upon the primi- 
 
 FouRTH tive text, and reading beneath its lines deeper 
 
 ILLUSTRATION p^^ij^^^ip^gg ^f ^^^^^^ thau they had been able to 
 
 detect. Both the instances which He selects are 
 limitations which had been unduly put upon 
 the duty of mutual kindness betwixt man and 
 man. In the first, a principle of public juris- 
 prudence had been supposed to arrest the opera- 
 tions of private charity. In the second, a spirit 
 of national or selfish particularism had been 
 suffered to narrow its range. Both restrictions 
 are by Jesus' larger love swept away. Tor in- 
 juries we are to return, not judgment, but mercy ; 
 while the objects of our charity are to be, not 
 some men, but all men. 
 
 The verses we have now before us correct and 
 read backwards a misused principle of public law 
 — the so-called y-z^s talionis. 
 
 The criminal code which God gave to the free 
 
 Hebrew people fully recognised the principle of 
 
 Lev.xxiv.i9, equivalent retaliation. It enacted as follows : ' If 
 
 20 
 
 a man cause a blemish in his neighbour, as he 
 
 hath done, so shall it be done to him ; breach for 
 
 breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.' Nay, it 
 
 Deut. xix. went further in the later recension of it : 'If a 
 
 Ex.xxi.22ff. false witness rise up against any man to testify 
 
Lex Tcdionis. 89 
 
 aojainst him tliat wliicli is wrons^, .... tlien part i. 
 shall ye do unto him as he had thought to have fourth 
 done unto his brother, . . . and thine eye shall 
 not pity ; life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, 
 hand for hand, foot for foot.' 
 
 It must be carefully remembered — what the 
 Jewish lawyers forgot, and their forgetting it ex- 
 plains their whole blunder — that this statute was 
 part of the criminal code of a commonwealth, and 
 had for its end the satisfaction of public justice. 
 It was no rule for private revenge. It put no 
 licence to retaliate into the hand of any private 
 person. The law of the state only, acting for 
 public ends of justice and through its own officers, 
 exacted this stern retribution. JSTor did the law 
 exact this quid yro quo for the sake or advan- 
 tage of the injured party, but solely for the vindi- 
 cation of justice. When one man injures another 
 in person, estate, or reputation, there is, of course, 
 a claim to recompense in the shape of damages or 
 solatium to the plaintiff. This our English law 
 allows, and this the Hebrew law allowed. Such 
 civil damages the Old Testament knows under 
 the name of ' restitution.' Tor theft, for acci- cf. Ex. xxii. 
 dental fire-raising, for trespass on private grounds, 
 for the loss of borrowed goods, and other descrip- 
 tions of injury, Hebrew law awarded restitution, 
 
9 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. which was to be of equal value, or double, or 
 FOURTH fourfold, or even fivefold, according to the case. 
 But the jus talionis, or principle of retaliation, 
 which I have cited, is quite different. It belongs 
 not to civil, but to criminal law. It deals with 
 misdemeanours, not injuries. It awards, not 
 damages, but punishment ; and therefore (which 
 is the vital point) it is a rule, not for private 
 plaintiffs, but for the public prosecutor. The 
 mistake of the Pharisees' interpretation, which 
 our Lord combated, was a very gross one. 
 They read the criminal law of the realm as if it 
 had been a moral rule binding on the individual 
 conscience. Because the law held an aggressor 
 liable to suffer a loss equivalent to that which he 
 had inflicted, therefore they thought every in- 
 jured person might lawfully desire and claim a 
 like retaliation. This was simply to legahze the 
 vendetta, the oriental blood-feud. It was nothing 
 less than the elevation of revenge into a right, if 
 not into a duty. 
 
 Such a perversion of moral princij)les could find 
 no favour from Christ. But it does not follow 
 that, because He censured the transference of 
 retaliation to private life, therefore He meant to 
 censure its application to criminal jurisprudence. 
 I suspect that, in point of fact, the right of re- 
 
Lex Talionis. 91 
 
 taliation lies at the basis of all sound criminal paet i. 
 jurisprudence. It is plain enough, of course, that fourth 
 to carry out such a right, as Mosaic law did, with 
 literal harshness, — maiming a prisoner, for example, 
 in the member which his violence had maimed, — 
 was possible only in a barbarous or a very simple 
 state of society. This was but the grim expres- 
 sion then found for that rude sense of retributive 
 justice which lay in the hearts of men. In the 
 awards of more advanced ages, as in our Lord's 
 day, some proportional commutation of loss or 
 suffering, in the form of fine, imprisonment, exile, 
 or hard labour, has always been substituted for 
 the literal ' eye for eye,' and ' stripe for stripe.' 
 It ought unquestionably to be added, that those 
 more humane laws, which have been dictated 
 by the christian spirit to modern christian 
 nations, have aimed (with what success it is not 
 for me to say) at other ends rather than at 
 punishment in the strict sense. At present, 
 criminal legislation seeks, and rightly seeks, 
 partly to reform the criminal, and partly to 
 deter others from crime. But I am not at all 
 sure that we do well to make these the exclu- 
 sive designs of punishment, so that punishment 
 shall only be felt to be justified when it secures, 
 or at least tries to secure, one or both of these 
 
9 2 The Laivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. ends ; that, in other words, we are on safe ground 
 FOURTH when we strip civil justice of that more awful 
 
 ILLUSTRATION ^ TTi -• c i. •^ t.- ^ ' ^ 
 
 and godlike prerogative oi retribution which was 
 once its most dreaded sanction. The supreme 
 Magistrate of the universe has planted His own 
 white throne upon this primitive axiom of equity : 
 Lev.xxiv.i9; ' As he hath done, so shall it be done to him.' 
 
 cf. Matt. vii. 
 
 2. It seems to me that in every human heart He 
 
 has embedded an ineffaceable sense of the fitness, 
 that is, of the justice, of this rule. When it shall 
 come to the last judgment on all of us, we are 
 Rom. xii. 19, taught in the Sacred Book, as well as by natural 
 vii. 10, * conscience, that God will pay sinners back accord- 
 Gal, vi. 7'; ing to their sin, and make each man reap as he 
 6ff. ' ■ has sown. It is a rude way, but it is a way, 
 of putting the same thing, to say : ' An eye for 
 an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' To make this 
 principle of retaliation, therefore, a basis for our 
 treatment of public criminals, is at least to rest 
 ourselves on the very base of the divine dealing 
 with transgressors of His spiritual laws. If it 
 should be thought that this is venturing too far 
 into the most delicate and awful privileges of the 
 last great Judge, let it be remembered that 'the 
 powers that be are ordained ' by Him, that they 
 Eom. xiii do not bear in vain the sword with which He 
 hath girt them, and that they are His ministers 
 
Lex Talionis. 93 
 
 for this very end, ' to execute wrath on him that pajit i. 
 doeth evil' To me it seems clearly enough fourth 
 taught in Scripture, that to magistrates there has illtjstratioi^ 
 been delegated a limited portion of this most 
 sacred and solemn function of judgment for the 
 avenging of wrong and the vindication of right, 
 not simply for ends of correction or prevention. 
 Were state government an arbitrary device of men, 
 drawing its sole sanction from the voluntary con- 
 currence of the community and aiming solely at 
 mutual protection, one could understand how its 
 penalties might have no better justification than 
 this, that they tended to keep person and property 
 safe from individual passion. But if the state is, 
 according to the older and, as I think, biblical 
 view, a divine institute ; if magisterial authority 
 is lent of God ; if He must always be felt as the 
 unseen King by Whom kings reign, the ultimate 
 and real Sovereign of every realm, then each 
 earthly throne and seat of judgment may well 
 repose upon no meaner stay than the same 
 stern maxim of just recompense on which stands 
 His own ; and His vicegerents, clothed about with 
 a more awful majesty than man could give, may 
 have something to do even with this supreme 
 function of justice, with discharging upon the 
 criminal, all consequences apart, the naked venge- 
 
94 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. ance of outraged law. When the judge speaks, 
 FOURTH and the officer of law strikes, they strike and 
 speak, not in the name of the people, but in the 
 name of God, Who is the King of kings. 
 
 In such retaliation, however, there is no hatred. 
 As God punishes without malice, in a just ^vrath, 
 which is free from personal irritation, and forms 
 only the shadow-side of His love ; so His civil 
 ministers, who execute justice, ought to be too 
 impartial and unimpassioned for any revenge to 
 stain the purity of their ermine. It is quite 
 otherwise with private and individual retaliation. 
 Men cannot be trusted to do justice in their own 
 quarrel, for personal retaliation generally means 
 spite. When Jewish moralists taught that the 
 injured might claim eye for eye from the ag- 
 gressor, they found no support in the Old Testa- 
 ment. The same statute-book which had said, 
 
 Lev. xix. 18. ' Eye for eye,' said also : ' Thou shalt not avenge 
 nor bear any grudge against the children of thy 
 people.' This was also the teaching at a later 
 
 Prov. XX. 22, day of the royal proverb-maker : ' Say not thou, 
 " I will recompense evil ; " ' ' Say not, " I will do 
 so to him as he hath done to me." ' It was there- 
 fore no new commandment which our Lord op- 
 posed to the legalized revenge of His contem- 
 poraries, when He forbade them to resist evil ; 
 
Lex Talionis. 95 
 
 but a primitive Mosaic principle of morals which part r. 
 He only rescued from neglect and set afresh in fourth 
 the forefront of social duty. His words, ' Eesist ^^^^^^stration 
 not evil,' contrast curiously with the terms of an 
 apostolic command, ' Eesist the devil ; ' and the Jas. iv. 7. 
 contrast helps us, I think, to understand them 
 both. The Evil One and all e\T.l ones are cer- 
 tainly to be strenuously withstood by every 
 honest man, when he can in any wise hinder 
 by his resistance their doing of evil. So long 
 as evil to ourselves or others is only intended or 
 on the way of being inflicted, so long is the time 
 for resistance, ' striving?,' as one savs, ' even unto Heb. xii. 4. 
 blood.' But once the evil act has been done, 
 further resistance becomes no longer self-defence, 
 but vengeance. Deeds done are in God's keep- 
 ins^. To strive that evil should not be wroudit 
 is no more than loyalty to God, Whose soldiers 
 we are in this war : but it is soldiers we are to 
 be, not executioners ; and when no other end can 
 be served by opposition but repayment of evil on 
 the evil-doer and vengeful requital, private men 
 may not usurp His prerogative Who hath said : 
 ' Vengeance is mine ; I will repay.' To forget Rom. xii. 19. 
 this, is to open the door for unlimited indulgence 
 in mean spite, unjust contention, endless feuds, 
 and all uncharitableness. 
 
9 6 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. So far, then, I understand Jesus to do no more 
 
 PouRTH than correct a current misuse made of the Mosaic 
 
 ILLUSTRATION (jp-[j^jj^g^]^ jaw, by opposing to it a forgotten prin- 
 ciple of Mosaic morals. This, however, is far 
 from exhausting His reading of human duty. To 
 restrain the hand from returning a blow is nega- 
 tive virtue. Jesus adds, on the other hand : 
 ' But I say unto you.' What He says unto us is 
 
 1 Cor. xii. 31. the ' more excellent way' of a diviner love. It 
 is a new and backward reading of the misread lex 
 talionis. 'Eesist not evil; but whosoever shall 
 smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the 
 other also.' These will always be strange words. 
 When He spoke them, they were very novel 
 words. They were spoken by the Son of a 
 heavenly Father, right out from the heart of the 
 perfect love. He has need of the new birth into 
 the sjime Father's likeness by a Spirit That is of 
 a better world than this, who would understand, 
 who would do anything else than caricature, 
 words so purposely dark as these. Nevertheless 
 let us try to see a little way into them. 
 
 I shall suppose that my brother has done me 
 wrong. Judgment says : Let it be so done to 
 him. But as between him and me, two brothers, 
 what have I to do with judgment ? There is One 
 Who judge th. What I, his brother, owe him is 
 
Lex Talionis. 97 
 
 not judgment, but brother's love. If love re- part i. 
 
 taliate at all, it must be for public justice, fourth 
 
 never from private feeling ; and with public i^^^^^^tration 
 
 justice, I, as an individual complainant, have 
 
 no immediate concern. I ought to be willing, 
 
 therefore, to bear the wrong without prejudice 
 
 to my brotherliness. Yes, and then ? Why, 
 
 then, love on as before, so as to be no whit 
 
 less ready to bear a second wTong than I was to 
 
 bear that first one ; or, which is better, to do him 
 
 in return, not as much evil, but as much good, as 
 
 he has done me evil. If my loss has been his 
 
 gain (for he surely thought so at least when he 
 
 wronged me), love bids me be well content that 
 
 he should gain at my expense. Love bids me, if 
 
 it will do him good, be content to lose as much 
 
 again for him. Eepay his evil with evil ? I 
 
 should rather repay him with good. 'Eye for 
 
 eye ' — his for mine ? Better he should have both 
 
 of mine, if they will serve his turn. It was clearly 
 
 an injustice that my loss should have been his gain; 
 
 for that injustice he clearly owes as much as 
 
 he has unjustly taken. But private love waits not 
 
 on general justice. So far from that, love takes 
 
 her debtor's righteous debt of ' eye for eye ' on 
 
 her own head, and pays ' the just for the unjust' iPet, m. 18. 
 
 Herself she punishes, as it were ; for she loses 
 
 G 
 
9 8 The Lav^s of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. what the aggressor should have lost, suffers what 
 
 FOURTH the evil-doer should have suffered. Once love 
 
 ILLUSTRATION g^g'gj.g^j ^j^ ^q offeuder's hands, when he sinned 
 
 against her ; a second time she chooses to suifer 
 
 in his stead, when she pays his forfeit. Is it not 
 
 clear that this is just the old law of retaliation 
 
 , turned inside out, read after a quite new and 
 
 nobler fashion ? Instead of an equivalent exacted 
 
 Prov. XXV. from the evil-doer, there is a redoubled kindness 
 
 Eoin.'xS?20. shown him, like coals of fire ! The iron law 
 
 of legal justice is transmuted by this magic of 
 
 love into a golden rale of vicarious sacrifice. 
 
 The sufferer is he who repays, not the aggressor. 
 
 Love bears in its body the sins of its enemies ; 
 
 1 John iv. 8, and ' God,' it is written, ' is love.' 
 
 This exquisite and, as one thinks, superhuman 
 virtue our Lord teaches, after His manner, by four 
 concrete examples. Of course, when an instance 
 is in this way selected to illustrate a principle, 
 the instance is usually an extreme or next to 
 impossible one ; both because a principle is best 
 seen when pushed to its ultimate application, and 
 also because there is less chance of people blindly 
 copying the example when its extravagance drives 
 them to search for some inner meaning in it. It 
 is conceivable that circumstances might occur in 
 which wise love would counsel a man even to 
 
 16. 
 
Lex Talionis. 99 
 
 offer his other cheek to a blow, though the cir- part r. 
 cumstances in which Jesus' own face was struck fourth 
 before the Sanhedrim did not ; and sometimes it ^^^^^^^^'^^^^^ 
 is better to suffer spoliation, as St. Paul advises, i Cor. vi. 7. 
 rather than go to law with a brother. But no 
 sane man can imagine it to be kindness to give 
 to every ' sturdy beggar ' or every lazy scoundrel 
 who wants to borrow. Our Lord, like all popular 
 moralists, takes for granted that people bring their 
 common sense at least to His words ; and the very 
 impossibility of keeping them to the letter is, I 
 repeat, a hint that men should look to their 
 hidden spirit. If ever man's words were, Jesus' 
 are, ' spirit and life.' It needs only a little skill John vi. 63. 
 to see that, in all these four examples, our Lord 
 is lookinc^ throusjh to the feelin<^ of love in the 
 heart; that is, to the utter absence of all per- 
 sonal revenge, and the willingness, on the con- 
 trary, to suffer, not this injury only, but as 
 much more, for the offender's good. That is the 
 essential moral state aimed at by these injunc- 
 tions. Once that is secured, it must be left to 
 christian sagacity to discover in each case, and in 
 view of many qualifying circumstances here left 
 out, how the offender's good may be best attained, 
 and the desire of a true, forgiving, and patient 
 charity most successfully accomplished. 
 
ILLUSTRATION 
 
 100 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. Our Lord's four instances begin with the highest 
 
 FOURTH injuries, and descend to the lowest. 
 
 1. By general consent, a blow on the face is 
 the extreme of personal insults ; hardly ever given 
 in ancient times but to slaves ; peculiarly resented 
 by an Oriental ; only to be wiped out, according 
 to the code of modern honour, by blood. It can 
 hardly be doubted that our Lord's words flatly 
 condemn the system of duelling, and those ideas 
 of honour on which it rests. But the spirit of 
 these words is not open to the suspicion of being 
 a craven spirit. It is this suspicion, more, I 
 fancy, than anything else, which is apt to dis- 
 credit the teaching of this text with generous 
 men. Yet here, as always, it is sin, not love, 
 which is the real coward. Duelling declined 
 from the day when men discovered that it was a 
 practice which came easier to the bully than to 
 the valiant gentleman. It is only needful to push 
 this discovery to all parallel cases, to see that 
 he who best obeys the rule of Jesus will be the 
 bravest man. To curb temper; to govern the 
 spirit of revenge, even under insult; to place 
 what is better than life, personal honour, under 
 the control of a love which is patient just because 
 it is strong — stronger than passion : this is true 
 valour and true honour. Jesus makes manhood 
 
Lex Talionis. 101 
 
 manlier by making it godlike, and teaches us a part i. 
 chivalry more noble than that of knighthood, by fourth 
 
 , ,. ,, . j_i 1 1 1 J. ILLUSTRATION" 
 
 putting the cross, not on the sword-pommel, but 
 on the heart. 
 
 2. Spoliation, whether under forms of law, as 
 St. Matthew gives the next case, or by private Matt. v. 40. 
 violence, as in St. Luke's version, is a less serious Luke vi. 29. 
 wrong, because it only affects property. Our 
 Lord urges His hearer to be prepared, before the 
 case of extortion goes to court, to yield not merely 
 the cheap linen under-tunic which is claimed, but x'-^i>^- 
 over and above, if needful, the large outer plaid i>«««. 
 which is the Oriental's chief article of dress, both 
 by night and by day. The verse is Eastern in 
 colouring and concrete in form ; but it really 
 covers the whole principle which rules the litiga- 
 tion of Christians. It is under all circumstances 
 not perhaps wrong, but at least a defect of charity, 
 to go to law either for mere personal pique, or 
 for the single end of private selfish gain. When 
 this has been said, there remain plenty of con- 
 siderations which in a multitude of cases will 
 justify lawsuits. The protection of society 
 asrainst similar fraud, the interests or risjhts of 
 one's family and dependants, the dignity of one's 
 office, the mere assertion of rio^ht agjainst wronsj, 
 nay, the very credit of religion, may enter so 
 
102 Tlu Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. clearly into a case as not only to justify a man 
 
 FOURTH in invoking the aid of public law, but even to 
 
 .LUSTRATION j,g(^^^^j.g JjIjj^ ^^ ^^ g^^ ^g ^\^q l^gg^; expTcssion for 
 
 an enlightened and upright love. Only it must 
 be at the bidding of motives which not only jus- 
 tice sanctions, but love commends, if it is to be 
 worthy of the christian citizen. 
 
 3. ' Compelling a man to go a mile ' alludes to 
 the practice of impressing runners or waggoners 
 or guides into the transport and postal service of 
 government. Despatch-bearers in ancient Persia, 
 as throughout the East, were relieved, like mes- 
 sengers of the fiery cross in the Scottish High- 
 lands, by committing their errand to fresh men, 
 who were compelled to forward it to the next 
 stage without delay. The custom gave origin to 
 a happy proverb for any species of compulsory 
 
 Mark XV. 21; scrvicc ; such as that of the rustic who met the 
 26. procession which escorted our Lord Himself to 
 
 crucifixion, and was forced to turn and bear His 
 cross behind Him. Servants and other inferiors 
 Tinder harsh, troublesome, or exacting employers 
 are perhaps the nearest parallel in modern society ; 
 and to render willingly what is ungraciously ac- 
 quired is the closest fulfilment of this law which 
 modern conditions usually admit. 
 
 4. In the case of beggars, and especially of 
 
Lex Talionis. 103 
 
 borrowers, the injury done descends to the lowest part i. 
 possible. Of course, the begging or borrowing fourth 
 must be both unreasonable and vexatious, other- ^^^^^^^^'^^on 
 wise there would be absolutely no injury at all ; 
 but even when it is so, there is no compulsion, 
 except a moral one, upon the person solicited. 
 In this case, it is not refusal to give or to lend 
 which is prohibited ; for refusal may be, and very 
 often is, a duty. It is such refusal as proceeds 
 from unwillinmess to obli^-e, or is caused or aG^crra- 
 vated by impatience and irritation. Such refusal 
 is wrono:, because it indicates a want of endurance 
 or of self-denial in one's love ; and plainly, giving 
 may be so done as to argue exactly the same want. 
 To give, as the unjust judge did, merely because Lukexviii. 
 the petitioner's pertinacity teases you, or because 
 his presence offends you, not only may be no 
 charity, but may actually argue as great a lack 
 of charity as refusing would. There are few de- 
 partments of social duty in which it is harder for 
 us to be wisely kind than in this. On the one 
 hand, beggars may be worthless and borrowers 
 cheats, so that it is difficult to give and not do 
 harm by giving: yet even in the worst of our 
 cities there are deserving poor ; and we have all 
 need to hear the old words of the son of Sirach: 
 ' Eefuse not the prayer of the wTetched, and turn Ecclus. iv. 4-6. 
 
104 Tlic Laics of tlic Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. not thine eyes from the needy, lest he complain 
 FOURTH against thee ; for He Who has made him heareth 
 his petition, when with sorrowful heart he com- 
 plaineth against thee/ On the other hand, it is 
 as hard to withhold alms with the firm and un- 
 provoked temper of true kindness, when beggars 
 are teasing and borrowers shameless : yet even 
 the rude, the whinino:, the dishonest, and the 
 thankless, are our brothers ; and if we owe it to 
 them not to encourage vice by heedless liberality, 
 we also owe it to them not to let our refusals be 
 dictated by annoyance or embittered by surliness. 
 It ousjht to be easier than it is for comfortable 
 people to bear with the starving and friendless 
 poor, even when their mendicant cry is an un- 
 seasonable interruption to business or sport ; even 
 though they are a little too eager to tell, and too 
 slow to cease, the voluble story of their distress. 
 It is often our duty to refuse ; but it is a duty 
 of which love should take all the pain, making 
 it to them as painless as possible in the doing 
 of it. 
 
 Thus, with intimate knowledge of our common 
 life, does Jesus trace the workings of revenfreful 
 irritation down from the buffet which burns upon 
 the cheek, to the neighbour who only pesters us 
 with his borrowing. Ever}'T\'here He bids us 
 
Lex Talionis. 105 
 
 substitute for the passion which calls for retalia- part i. 
 tion, that nobler charity which repays evil with fourth 
 good. Shallow or selfish hearts are apt to say illustration 
 this is to put a premium on aggression, and meekly 
 invite a repetition of it. No doubt there are 
 foolish ways of yielding a literal obedience to 
 this law, which w^ould have no better effect than 
 to provoke a second blow on the other cheek. 
 Yet love is wise, not foolish ; and often wiser in 
 its generous confidence than selfishness in its cal- 
 culating suspiciousness, which it terms prudence. 
 God has made human souls more susceptible, on 
 the whole, to kindness than to any other moral 
 force ; and such kindness as this, which can not 
 only forgive, but suffer, offence, is fit to melt the 
 rock and to tame the brute. Good, by the simple 
 and lovely strength of its own goodness, does in 
 the end overcome evil ; or if it does not, it is 
 because evil cannot be overcome. At all events, 
 when a patient lover of men is trying, by un- 
 affected meekness and unrequited generosity, to 
 wear out the evil-doino^ of the bad and shame 
 them into penitence, he is only taking the course 
 which both God's wisdom has prescribed and 
 God's own love has followed. It is not by His 
 words only, but much more by His acts, that 
 Jesus has fulfilled this law which substitutes 
 
106 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. generosity for revenge. In His person we see 
 FOURTH the supreme example of His own rule. We see, 
 
 ILLUSTRATION . f, , ^. , . 
 
 m lact, the Divinity descending to repay the 
 injuries of His creatures, not with just vengeance, 
 but with the self-sacrifice of love; taking not 
 only our buffet, but the penalty for the buffet 
 too ; and trusting to draw all hearts unto 
 Himself through no charm but the charm of 
 love lifted up for us on its self-chosen painful 
 cross. 
 
 suffering Son of God ! Best Interpreter of 
 Thine own law ! We have made Thee to serve 
 with our sins ; yet Thou hast taken the form of 
 a servant, and ministered to our necessities. We 
 sought to rob Thee of Thine honour ; but Thou 
 didst make Thyself poorer still for us, and of no 
 reputation. We smote Thee on the right cheek 
 by our sins ; and Thou hast turned the other also 
 to the chastisement of our peace. Daily we come 
 to importune Thee by endless petitions and calls 
 for mercy ; but to every one who asks Thou 
 givest liberally without upbraiding, and from 
 the guiltiest Thou turnest not away. So hast 
 Thou heaped upon all our heads Thy coals of 
 fire ! 
 
 Teach us, dear Lord, the might of Thy love, 
 
Lex Talionis. 107 
 
 and persuade our cold, unloving hearts to dare part i. 
 to copy Thee in Thy magnanimity and in the fourth 
 ventures of Thy generosity : being to each other illustration 
 as meek and patient and imwearied in service as 
 Thou hast been to all of us ; for Thy Name's glory, 
 and Thy Kingdom's sake. Amen. 
 
FIFTH ILLUSTEATION : 
 WHO IS MY KEIGHBOUK? 
 
 109 
 
Ye have heard that it hath been said, ' Thou shalt love thy 
 neighhour, and hate thine enemy:' but I say unto you, Love 
 your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that 
 hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and 
 persecute you ; that ye may be the children of your Father 
 Which is in heaven : for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil 
 and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. 
 For if ye love them ivhich love you, what reward have ye f 
 do not even the publicans the same ? And if ye salute your 
 brethren only, what do ye more than others ? do not even the 
 publicans so ? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father 
 Which is in heaven is perfect. — 31att. v. 43-48. 
 
 But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good 
 to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray 
 for them which despitefully use you. . . . For if ye love them 
 which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love 
 those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do 
 good to you, what thank have ye f for sinners also do even 
 the same. And if ye lend to tJiem of whom ye hope to receive, 
 what thank have ye f for sinners also lend to sinners, to re- 
 ceive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, 
 and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall 
 he great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for He 
 is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. Be ye therefore 
 merciful, as your Father also is merciful. — Luke vi. 27, 28, 
 32-36. 
 
 no 
 
WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR? 
 
 npHESE verses form our Lord's fifth and clos- part i. 
 -^ ing example of His general principle, tliat fifth 
 
 -U-. ,,., . -, r-pini ILLUSTRATION 
 
 His relation to previous laws was one of fulfil- 
 ment, not of destruction. Substantially, ttiey 
 deal with the same subject as the verses last 
 considered. It is still the law of love which 
 Jesus vindicates in its breadth against pharisaic 
 limitations. It is still the duty of returning 
 good for evil which He urges against the selfish- 
 ness of mankind. But the limitation against 
 which He now protests is not the same as the 
 limitation against which He has just been pro- 
 testing. Last time, the mistake lay in this, that 
 private love was limited as to its action by a 
 principle of criminal law. This time the mis- 
 take is, that private love was limited as to its 
 objects through a policy of national separatism. 
 In the former case, the question was : When 
 does my neighbour deserve to be treated with 
 severity, not kindness ? Here the question is : 
 Who is my neighbour ? This will appear if 
 111 
 
112 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. we examine the popular rule quoted and criti- 
 FiFTH cised by our Lord. 
 
 When the Hebrew doctors said, ' Thou shalt 
 love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy/ they 
 took the first half of this rule from a golden 
 Lev. xix. 18. sentence in Leviticus : ' Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself.' The New Testament makes 
 a great deal of that summary of duty. No fewer 
 Matt. xix. than three several times do we find our Lord 
 
 19, xxii. 39 ; 
 
 Luke X. 27, appeal to it as embracing the pith of the whole 
 
 second table of the decalogue ; and after His 
 
 Eom. xiii. 9 ; example it is twice cited in the letters of St. 
 
 Gal. V. 14 ; ^ 
 
 Jas. ii. 8. Paul, and once by St. James. Of course, thought- 
 ful students of the Hebrew canon must always 
 have felt it to be one of its profoundest ethical 
 axioms. But the current teaching of our Lord's 
 day broke down the force of the glorious old 
 saying, not only or so much by forgetting the 
 important words 'as thyself,' which made man's 
 selfishness the very measure of his charity, as by 
 narrowing that area of neighbourliness within 
 which charity is commanded. The question of 
 casuistry by which entangled consciences sought 
 to evade a duty far too wide for them, was the 
 
 Luke X. 29. question a lawyer put once to Jesus : ' Who is 
 my neighbour ? ' There was a great deal in the 
 historical attitude of the Hebrew people to sug- 
 
Who is my Neighbour ? 113 
 
 gest such a question. Every small, vigorous, and part i. 
 united people within which the sense of clanship fifth 
 
 . J 1 J. 1 r • 1 J i. ILLUSTRATION 
 
 IS strong, and whose struggle lor independent 
 national life has forced it to look on surrounding 
 nations as hostile, is tempted to read the law of 
 kindness as binding only between fellow-country- 
 men. With the Hebrew, this temptation was 
 stronger than in the case of any other race. Israel 
 was always a people apart. The condition of its 
 national existence was isolation. So much was 
 this the case, that in the original statute ' thy 
 neighbour ' meant simply ' thy brother Jew.' 
 Not because it excluded Gentiles of purpose, but 
 just because, being given to Jews as a Jewish 
 code, it took no notice whatever of foreigners. A 
 special clause, indeed, was added, bringing within 
 the scope of this law of love every stranger who 
 dwelt with them in the land as a proselyte Lev. xix. 34. 
 from heathenism to Judaism. But as to their 
 private relations with foreigners who were not 
 proselytes but heathens, the law gave no such 
 instructions, simply because it forbade them to 
 have relations with heathen foreigners at all. It 
 contemplated, as the normal condition of Israel, 
 an entire seclusion of the Jew from any private 
 social intercourse with the uncircumcised. The 
 individual Jew was to have no ' neighbours ' save 
 
114 The Laws of the Kingdom, 
 
 PART I. Jews. Even the commonwealth was, as far as 
 FIFTH possible, to preserve in its external politics the 
 same separatist attitude. Its relations with 
 neighbouring states were to be, as nearly as 
 practicable, no relations at all. Intercourse with 
 conterminous heathendom was sure to mean in 
 any case temptation, and most probably corrup- 
 tion. Peace there might be with idolatrous 
 states — with Egypt, with Phoenicia, with Assyria ; 
 but it was to be the peace of indifference, not of 
 alliance. Throughout the whole of Jewish his- 
 tory, any drawing close of the bonds of political 
 friendship between the chosen people and adjacent 
 viii. 5^14 ; heathen empires was looked on by pious Jews as 
 
 Hos. vii. 8- .- ^ _ . ^ ^. . . , ,. . 
 
 16. a perilous and un- Jewish policy, false to the divme 
 
 vocation of the race. Nay, in so far as any 
 other policy than one of isolation was enjoined, 
 it was a policy of hostility. Close in on the 
 flanks of Hebrew territory lay several border tribes 
 somewhat allied to Israel in blood. Contact 
 with these was inevitable ; but with them the 
 danger of interfusion was greatest, and the terms 
 to be held with them were explicitly prescribed. 
 
 Deut. xxiii. ISTonc of the race of Ammon or of Moab could 
 
 3-6. 
 
 become a Jewish proselyte ; and while a milder 
 Ibid. ver. 7. tone was used of the more cognate Edomites, the 
 17-19. ' tribe of Amalek was devoted to such annihilation, 
 
Wlio is my Neighhour ? 115 
 
 that its very memory was to perish. Within part i. 
 Hebrew territory itself there lingered remnants fifth 
 of the powerful aboriginal races which it had been i^^^'^tration 
 Israel's mission to dispossess. With them they 
 were to be on still worse terms. No friendly 
 league was ever to be contracted. On the con- 
 trary, Israel was bound over by its earliest con- Ex. xxiii. 
 
 32 33 • 
 
 stitution to pursue the Canaanitish tribes with Num. xxxiii. 
 
 50-56 • 
 
 relentless and unquenchable hostility. Whatever Deut. Vii. i- 
 public reasons of weight there were to justify this (cf.^josh. x. 
 rule of national politics, it never could be meant " ' '' 
 for a moment to dictate the feeling of individuals 
 or prescribe how in private life a Jew was to 
 treat a Philistine. At the same time, it was 
 perfectly natural that this isolation from other 
 races imposed on the Hebrews, their jealous fear 
 of defilement from foreign contact, the religious 
 conceit bred by such separatism, and the national 
 feud kept up with their next neighbours from 
 generation to generation, should all have formed 
 a fitting soil for the growth of bigotry, pride of 
 race, superciliousness, and hereditary hatred. It 
 is extremely intelligible how the ordinary Jew 
 should never have passed beyond the earliest and 
 narrowest sense of the word ' neighbour,' but have 
 continued to restrict his whole sympathy and 
 human interest to people of liis own land, religion, 
 
116 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. and blood. It is to the glory of the Jewish race, 
 FIFTH indeed, that there were men at many a moment 
 ILLUSTRATION ^^ ^^^ history who could separate between the 
 hostility which they owed to idolaters as public 
 enemies of the theocracy, and the humanity which 
 they owed to them as men. Statesmen and seers 
 whose moral stature rose as high as that of Moses, 
 or David, or Daniel, or Nehemiah, might never 
 suffer their patriotic and religious zeal to dege- 
 nerate into personal hate ; but this could not be 
 looked for from common natures. The average 
 Jew of Saul's day smote Amalek with the ferocity 
 of individual passion, just as the average Jew of 
 Christ's day spurned the fellowship of the Greek 
 with a bitter personal scorn. It is the inevitable 
 consequence of all separatism, prerogative, and 
 monopoly ; of every advantage which sets man 
 above man, race above race, and which either 
 may not or cannot be made the equal property 
 of all, — that from such a root springs the bitter 
 fruit of uncharitableness. This, however, was 
 not all. Having gone this length in cir- 
 cumscribing humanity, the next step was an 
 easy one. Once the Jew read his law in this 
 sense : ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour Jew, and 
 hate thy Gentile enemy,' it was natural to go a 
 little further, and exclude from love's pale even 
 
Who is my Neighhour ? 117 
 
 Jews who became as Gentiles through their part i. 
 enmity. If every foreigner and heathen is my fifth 
 
 n ^ j_l i. i. J ILLUSTRATION 
 
 enemy, as well as an enemy to the state, and 
 therefore to be hated, not loved ; why may not 
 my fellow-clansman become more of an enemy 
 to me, do me more hurt, and deserve more hate, 
 than any far-off Gentile of them all ? It is simply 
 as an enemy of mine that any man — Jew, why 
 not, as well as heathen ?—— deserves no love. Such 
 a man is no more my ' neighbour.' He is to me 
 as a heathen man. He is to be hated. So 
 reasoned in these Jews the cruel human heart 
 that is in all of us. So it thrust its petty selfish- 
 ness into the very large and loving law of God. 
 Words which He meant to be wide enough to 
 hold humanity, are contracted to just as narrow 
 a circle of near friends or comrades as any man 
 chooses ; and the divine law is travestied by a 
 word so inhuman, so devilish, as this : ' Thou 
 shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.' 
 
 The immediate protest of Jesus against this 
 rider to the words of the law taught nothing 
 which was absolutely new. It is rather common 
 to hear love for enemies spoken of as a precept 
 peculiar to the New Testament — a glory of Chris- 
 tian morals with no parallel elsewhere. The truth 
 
118 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. is, that even in the "book of Exodus the law of 
 fIfth Moses commanded eveiy Hebrew to help his 
 
 ILLUSTRATION ^^ -^ ^.^ g^^^-^g . . jf ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^-^^^ 
 
 Ex. xxiii. 4, *^ . , , ^ 
 
 5. enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt 
 
 surely bring it back to him again. If thou see 
 the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his 
 burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou 
 shalt surely help him.' The kindly spirit which 
 dictated these small injunctions to every-day 
 acts of neighbourliness is precisely the spirit of 
 the great Teacher on the mount ; and by a tribe 
 of simple Orientals, such small precepts would 
 be better understood than any wider principle of 
 ethics. In a more literary age of Hebrew his- 
 tory, the same spirit reappears in an admonition 
 against even secret exultation over an adversary's 
 Prov. xxiv. mishaps. ' Eejoice not,' said the Preacher, 
 the protest ' when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine 
 29, 30.' ' heart be glad when he stumbleth ; lest the Lord 
 see it, and it displease Him.' This is very noble 
 teachincr, and Hebrew annals can show as noble 
 examples. The brotherly forgiveness of Joseph, 
 the meekness of Moses, and the magnanimity of 
 David, who was, if any man was, the typical 
 hero of the Hebrews : these gave to their country- 
 men examples of generosity in the treatment of 
 private enemies brilliant enough to be worth a 
 
Who is my Neiglibour ? 119 
 
 thousand moral maxims. When Jesus, there- part t. 
 
 fore, reiterated His vigorous commands : ' Love fifth 
 
 your enemies, bless them that cnrse you, do ^illustration. 
 
 good to them that hate you,' and so on. He 
 
 only put into sharper and more memorable words 
 
 a law which had been from the becyinninof. Moses 
 
 would have recognised in these words his own 
 
 rub, David his own practice ; and heathendom 
 
 itself has had its teachers who in substance 
 
 taught : ' Thou shalt love thy neighbour, even 
 
 though he be thine enemy.' 
 
 What was more characteristic in the teaching 
 of Jesus as a Hebrew moralist, was the breaking 
 down of that national particularism which, from 
 the formation of the commonwealth, had made 
 every Jew, indeed, the Jew's neighbour, but 
 every foreigner his foe. It was not in the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount, it was in the weighty parable 
 of the good Samaritan, spoken later, that He Luke x. 30 ff. 
 expressly unbound the term ' neighbour/ and 
 levelled the walls of religious bigotry, of race 
 jealousy, and of national seclusion, in order to set 
 man in brotherhood with man all the world over. 
 I am not sure that this clear and firm assertion 
 of the universal brotherhood of men, implying 
 as it does their essential spiritual equality, is 
 not one of the most siixnal services which His 
 
120 The Laws of the Kingdoin. 
 
 teaching rendered to the moral thouc^ht of the world. 
 Whatever vagaries — stupid or frantic vagaries — 
 men may play with these catchwords, ' fraternity' 
 and ' equality ; ' however such terms may become 
 the Shibboleths of political fanaticism, or cany 
 to the frightened ears of society recollections of 
 carnage, rapine, and conflagration : their origin 
 at least is divine. They are of christian descent ; 
 they carry by right a blessed and beneficent sig- 
 nification. That every man is every other man's 
 equal in God's sight, has already abolished many 
 a gross shape of bondage ; it will yet abolish 
 shapes less gross. That human brotherhood is as 
 wide as humanity, has already brought the ends of 
 the earth into a more cosmopolitan relationship ; 
 it will yet federate the nations into a compacter 
 unity. That each man owes loving help to every 
 other man who needs it and to him most who 
 is nearest to him, has already created christian 
 philanthropy ; and it may yet teach us how to 
 bind social classes in gentler and more elastic 
 bonds of mutual support than political economy 
 has been able to weave. Christianity is not 
 responsible for all the folly and blundering which, 
 like froth from ferment, has been bred by chris- 
 tian ideas in human brains. But for this it is 
 responsible : for the teaching which suffers no 
 
WJio is my Neighbour ? 121 
 
 private man, on any plea of personal or public part i, 
 enmity, or of class estrangement, or of alien fifth 
 blood, or of hostile faiths, or of simple selfish 
 indifference and luxurious ease, to stand still and 
 see another man suffer without relief, or perish 
 without an effort to save ; for this it is respon- 
 sible, because this is the teaching of Jesus Christ. 
 I have said that it is in the story of the good 
 Samaritan that this part of Christ's teaching comes 
 out most fully ; but I find its ground and germ 
 in what is here said about the fatherly love of 
 God. For what does He say ? — * Love your 
 enemies, and do them good, as well as your 
 friends, in order that your love may be like God's. 
 God is your Father in heaven. It is the son's 
 mark and glory to be like his father. Now the 
 chief characteristic of the divine goodness is, that 
 it is over all, wide as His works, embracing evil 
 as wxll as good. So wide, so unconfined, so free 
 from selfishness and passion, ought your love to 
 be, if you would carry on your soul the family 
 features of the sons of God.' In this teaching 
 lies the germ of all christian teaching on the 
 subject. Is God our Father in heaven ? — then 
 are we all brethren. Does He show love to all 
 men with paternal impartiality ? — then are we all 
 in His sight essentially equal. Those barriers 
 
122 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. which are raised by ancestry, climate, education, 
 FIFTH or society, to sunder brother-men, and make them 
 ILLUSTRATION ^^ ^_^^^^ ncighbours to each other, oppose no ob- 
 stacle to His equal bounty. Who is the Maker 
 and the Parent of us all ; neither ought they any 
 longer to limit our good offices. Here, in Jesus, 
 mankind has found its common Father ; mankind 
 becomes, in consequence, one family of brothers. 
 Ver. 45. To drive His lesson home, Jesus reaches round 
 
 for some simple popular example of God's impar- 
 tial goodness : He finds it in sun and rain. Sun 
 and rain are neither the most precious nor the 
 most astonishing proofs of the kindness of the 
 Father for His evil no less than for His good chil- 
 dren. The Speaker Himself, sent of the Father 
 to bear our sins, to lighten our darkness, and to 
 revive our death ; Christ, sending abroad to all 
 men everywhere the same glad words of recon- 
 ciliation, like far-shooting shafts of spiritual light, 
 and pouring out on all men His quickening 
 Spirit, like showers that water the earth — He was 
 Tit. iii. 4, and is the grandest instance of God's impartial 
 * pliilanthropy,' and the love which blesses the evil 
 and the good. But the time was not then come 
 when this instance could be published, nor were 
 His audience prepared to hear it. Jesus reads a 
 lesson from an humbler book, which lies for ever 
 
mw is my Nciglibour ? 123 
 
 open before all men's eyes. Let those who tread pakt i. 
 God's earth and look np into His sky day after fifth 
 day, without a thought of what these so silently 
 are preaching, hearken to this Interpreter of 
 nature. Many a year through had He hearkened 
 to the ' still small voice ' of earth and sky, as He 
 walked about the white slopes of upland iSTazareth ; 
 and now He tells us what message had been 
 borne to Him from His Father on every sun- 
 beam — what words came dancing to the earth 
 in every raindrop. Has God left His children 
 without a witness to His love ? Was no message 
 sent to the great old world before Christ came ? 
 none to the uncounted heathens of to-day ? none 
 to the emigrant, the seaman, the souls who hear 
 no Sabbath bell and have no \\Titten Word to 
 read ? ^ay, verily ; but ' in that He did good. Acts xiv. 17. 
 and i^ave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, 
 filling our hearts with food and gladness,' God 
 hath not 'left Himself without witness.' The 
 sweet and bounteous influences of the seasons, 
 in their ceaseless and impartial bestowal, have 
 always told in a speech which, without a voice, Ps. xix. 1-4. 
 goes to the end of the world, how the heavenly 
 Father loveth even the world of men who hate 
 Him, and hath blessings for such as curse Him. 
 Take your stand on some glorious day in June 
 
124 Tlic Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. on a rising ground, with a fair broad English 
 FIFTH landscape spread around you, bathed in warm 
 
 ILLUSTRATION t i ^ r-v i -i -. o -, 
 
 sunlight. Overhead the unconfined and generous 
 sky bends, large and full-armed, as if to brood in 
 nursing love over the growing earth — oldest and 
 best emblem of the all-nurturing Father. Away 
 on every side, to farthest line of vision, rolls 
 wave on wave of ridge and hollow, field and 
 copse, upland and meadow. Men have parcelled 
 it out, not without old bickerings and bloodshed 
 long forgotten, and the ancient landmarks they 
 guard with jealousy. But the sunlight heeds no 
 fence. With impartial warmth, it lies on either 
 side the hedge which parts the lands of rival 
 squires, nor cares for the ancestral feud which has 
 made them foes. It falls on the hind at work, 
 and his heart is lightened. It falls through the 
 cottage pane on the sick girl's coverlet ; and as 
 she turns twenty times in an hour to the glad 
 light, she calls herself better than she felt last 
 night. It falls on the children at play on the 
 village-green, and they shout the louder for it in 
 their mirth. It falls on the song-bird on the 
 bough, and he whistles out his soul for joy. Has 
 it no message, that glory, like the smile of God, 
 Eccius. xiii. which ' lookctli upon all things ' to bless them ? 
 Wait, then, till the heavy rain-cloud comes trail- 
 
JJ^lio is my Neighbour ? 125 
 
 ing across country before the soutli-west breeze, part i. 
 and you shall see how impartially it too will fall. fifth 
 Yonder lie two fields, with but a thread of darker 
 green to part them. That to the right has a 
 churl and a cheat for its owner, a man who 
 imderpays his hinds, grudges the poor their alms, 
 can rob the widow and cajole the orphan, a man 
 whose little godless soul worships the clay he 
 owns, yet stints the very soil its just and needful 
 nourishment. The neighbouring field is tilled 
 with patient and generous care by an honest 
 man, whose name the cottagers name with a 
 blessing. See now, how the swift shadow of 
 God's cloud sw^eeps nearer, and the big drops 
 begin to fall ! Would you have it bend from its 
 straight course to fertilize the furrows of the 
 righteous man, and leave the other's unwatered ? 
 He Who steers its way as His breath propels it, is 
 the Father of both, and His impartial love pours 
 as lavish treasure on the enemy as on the friend. 
 What does this impartiality of nature tell us ? 
 What glad tidings of its Almighty Maker does it 
 bring to His human children ? That everything 
 is moved by blind machinery, and has behind its 
 iron laAvs no feeling personal heart at all ? — that 
 either there is no God, or at least no revelation 
 of His character in the rigid system of physical 
 
126 Tlu Zaivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART I. forces whicli we call nature ? The dreary creed 
 FIFTH of scientific materialism, into which so many seek 
 
 ILLUSTRATION . , j. i . • i - i l^ 
 
 just noAV to shut us up, is as much against those 
 filial instincts of our human heart, which cry 
 aloud after a God Who is our Father, as they are 
 John xiv. against Him Who was manifest in history to show 
 us the Father, that our hearts might be satisfied. 
 Or shall we say that God, Whose sun shines so 
 equally on all, cares nothing for either good or 
 bad, and hath neither love nor hate ? That were 
 no gospel for any man to hear, nor a lesson any 
 man could believe. No ; but impartial nature 
 has this good news to tell, that the Father in 
 heaven cares for all His children, and is patient 
 with the evil among them, and is not willing to 
 punish, but waits to pardon. To the good He is 
 good, delio'htinc^ to bless ; to the evil also He is 
 not evil, but meanwhile good, being slow to anger. 
 By forbearance, by showing the loving-kindness of 
 His heart, by doing good unweariedly ' to the un- 
 thankful and the evil,' the Father strives to win 
 back His children ; in them He seeks to provoke 
 some faint shame, some feeble desire after their 
 2 Pet. iii.i5; Father and His favour. As the ' beloved brother 
 ^ ' ^ ' • ' pg^iji ' j-^as written to us, this common goodness of 
 God to unjust and evil men is meant to lead 
 them to repentance, and is therefore a testimony 
 
JVlio is my Nciglibour ? 127 
 
 wide as the eartli to the largeness of the Father's part i. 
 love ; a very gospel of mercy and hope to the fifth 
 whole race ; a sermon in every tongue on this i^^^^tkation 
 text, that God is One Who will bless them that 
 curse Him, and do good to those who hate Him. 
 The words of this gospel according to nature 
 shine in new clearness and speak more intelli- 
 gibly, now that we have also the better gospel 
 according to Jesus Christ. Another Sun is risen 
 on our spiritual night, and it is on the evil His 
 rays fall. 'God commendeth His love toward us, in Rom. v. 8-10. 
 that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. 
 . . . When we were enemies, we were reconciled 
 to God by the death of His Son.' The messenger Cf. Rev. 
 
 xiv. 6, c. 
 
 who flies abroad in the midst of our sky, shed- John i. 9. 
 
 ding spiritual light on every man, tells, but tells 
 
 more mightily, the same lesson as the sunshine. 
 
 He proclaims the Father's catholic charity. His 
 
 unrestricted love for His fallen and evil children, 
 
 and bids all men everjrwhere alike have hope, and 
 
 arise, and return. Another rain, too, has begun 
 
 to drop from the Father's heaven. It droppeth 
 
 on the just, but also on the unjust. ' If ye, being ^.^^^^; ^^' 
 
 CI. JMcitti, 
 
 evil, know how to give good gifts unto your chil- vii. 11. 
 dren, how much more shall your heavenly Father 
 give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him ! ' 
 Kain of gracious influence on arid and sterile 
 
128 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART 1. hearts ; rain to revive the weary and fructify the 
 
 FIFTH fruitless ; rain to be had for the asking, impartial 
 
 ILLUSTRATION ^^^ ^^^^ j BehoM the nature-lesson of Jesus 
 
 re-read in His own history : on the cross and at 
 Pentecost the old, old message that God loves all, 
 even His enemies, became a new message, laden 
 with new gladness and charged with a new power. 
 Johnxm.34; The children of God are bound to love one an- 
 aiid 1 John Other, as He has loved them. For them it is not 
 enough to love as the world loves — lovers, family, 
 and friends. Beautiful as such love is, which our 
 Father puts into evil hearts, it is not to be the 
 limit, though it is the centre, of christian affec- 
 tion. The love which comes of instinct and is 
 measured by nearness of neighbourhood, is good. 
 The love which has a moral root, acts on principle, 
 and keeps no measure, but, like God, can love the 
 worst and deny itself for the meanest ; that is 
 better, is best of all. Up to this godlike attitude 
 of self-denying and generous charity our Lord 
 calls His followers. To follow Him thither ; to 
 copy His style of loving; to stoop, to bear, to 
 forgive, to seek, to save, to overflow and reach 
 out, to embrace all men in our hearts, and spend 
 for them our lives ; this is, saith Jesus, chris- 
 tian perfection. It is to be not less noble, less 
 generous, or less munificent than the Father of 
 
Wlio is my Neighhour ? 129 
 
 all. This is a giddy height. Can human feet part i. 
 stand as high ? Up Jesus will lead us by easiest fifth 
 steps : by lessons of sunshine and cloud ; by doing ^^^^^^ration 
 of plain and simple works ; by saluting men who 
 are not our brethren ; by cultivating a larger 
 courtesy and a less partial kindness in daily inter- 
 course ; by learning to pray for our persecutors ; 
 by calling every man a neighbour, and being his 
 good Samaritan : thus, along a not too steep yet 
 arduous enough path of moral tuition, will He 
 guide us, if we will try to follow, till even our 
 feet also stand upon the dazzling pavement of 
 celestial virtue, and we too are become ' perfect, 
 even as our Father Which is in heaven is perfect.' 
 
PART II. 
 
 THE LAW OF SECRECY IN 
 RELIGION. 
 
 131 
 
THE PEINCIPLE: 
 BEFOEE GOD, NOT MEN. 
 
 133 
 
Take heed that ye do not you?' alms I'' righteousness'} before 
 men, to he seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your 
 Father Which is in heaven. — Matt. vi. 1. 
 
 IM 
 
THE PRINCIPLE : BEFORE GOD, 
 NOT MEN. 
 
 THE first eighteen verses of the sixth chapter part u 
 form one connected paragraph of our Lord's the 
 discourse, which in its substance complements the 
 last paragraph, and in its structure resembles it. 
 
 In the last paragraph, Jesus laid down His Matt. v. i* 
 
 48. 
 
 central principle at the outset : that His relation 
 to the earlier or Mosaic legislation w^as not de- 
 struction, but fulfilment ; and this principle He Ver. 17. 
 illustrated by a series of five examples. The 
 exactly parallel structure of this next paragraph vi. i-is. 
 is perhaps concealed from the reader by an error 
 in the received text. If, with the oldest mss. 
 and the best critics, we read for ' alms ' in the 
 opening verse the more general word ' righteous- 
 ness,'^ new light will be cast on the whole pas- 
 
 ^ So Tischendorf, Meyer, Tholuck, and others read, with B, 
 D, Vat., Sin., etc. It is possible, liowever, that since HpIV 
 ( = righteousness) is the standing Old Testament term for alms, 
 and in that sense is sometimes rendered by the LXX. iXiyifiotrvvn, 
 the variation of reading in this verse may not indicate any real 
 variation in the sense. May not both Greek words represent the 
 same Aramaic word, either in the mind of the evangelist or 
 in the usage of our Lord Himself ? 
 
 135 
 
136 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. sage. For then we have first of all the general 
 THE principle laid down as before — the principle that 
 righteousness is not to be done for the purpose 
 of display ; and on this there follows, as before, 
 a series of examples. The three subdivisions of 
 what the later Jews termed ' righteousness,' using 
 that word technically in the sense of religious 
 service, were almsgiving, prayers, and fasting; 
 and to each of these in succession our Lord 
 applies His central principle. 
 
 As these two large sections of the Sermon thus 
 correspond in their structure, so they have also a 
 deeper relation to one another. The word ' right- 
 eousness ' in the opening verses of this section 
 may not exactly answer to the same word ' right- 
 See V. 17-20. eousness ' as used in the opening verses of the last 
 section ; because it appears to be borrowed from 
 the phraseology of the Pharisees and to bear a 
 conventional and narrower signification : it is the 
 ' righteousness ' which made up in their estima- 
 tion a devout or relio-ious character. But at 
 
 o 
 
 least this choice of the same word to start with 
 afresh must be meant to look back upon the 
 starting-point of the discussion just closed ; and 
 we are driven to search for some inner connec- 
 tion between the thoughts.-^ We find it, I think, 
 
 ^ If the reading ^£ (after ?r/;o<rs;^£r£), wliicli Tiscliendorf and 
 
Before God, not Men. 
 
 137 
 
 in this, that what the preceding section did for 
 the rule of righteousness, this section does for its 
 motive. What Jesus has been doino^ is to cor- 
 rect the literal interpretation of the law of right- 
 eousness, which is also its narrow interpretation, 
 by reading the law in its spirit, and showing 
 that, so read, it is very broad. In one example 
 after another. He has read beneath the letter of 
 each commandment its informing spirit of love ; 
 and as, time after time, He used this spirit of 
 love as a canon of interpretation, the law has 
 become in His hands, instead of easier, harder to 
 be kept. For, in pointing to the spirit of each 
 action as the true seat of its goodness or badness, 
 rightness or wrongness. He has widened the area 
 of law, till it covers, not behaviour only, but in- 
 tention ; thousfht as well as deed ; the inward 
 even more than the outward life of men. We 
 are thus led to feel that, even when we do what 
 is undeniably a good or righteous action, it is not 
 the action alone we have to look to, but the 
 motive from which it proceeds. From the sphere 
 of law, so understood, we naturally pass to the 
 motive of obedience. Now, amonsj human actions 
 there were three sorts, which the somewhat ascetic 
 
 Meyer adopt, and wliich has the authority of the Sinaitic, be 
 correct, such a connection will have a textual ground. 
 
138 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 and very artificial piety of the time insisted on 
 as acts of eminent goodness. Other things might 
 be right to do ; but to give alms, say prayers, and 
 keep fasts, composed the 'righteousness' of saintly 
 or exceptionally good people. It was, indeed, a 
 miserable narrowing of human righteousness, that 
 righteousness whose ideal was not short of the 
 perfection of God, to shut it up within three such 
 formal exercises of religious worship ; but this 
 mistake, which later Judaism shared with all sys- 
 tems in which the relictions element has outOTOwn 
 the moral, Jesus had already sufiiciently exposed. 
 Another evil remained. When righteousness is 
 shrivelled down to a set of religious usages, these 
 usages themselves tend to become sapless and 
 unreal. The same evaporation of the spirit of 
 love, and the same preference for the letter over 
 the inner meaning of the law, which led men to 
 call alms, prayers, and fasts their ' righteousness,' 
 led them also to fast, pray, and give alms for the 
 praise of men rather than from the love of God. 
 Current Jewish limitations of the sphere of right- 
 eousness Jesus had corrected by the former prin- 
 ciple of spirituality in the law's interpretation; 
 the current perversion of motive in such right- 
 eousness as they did recognise He now corrects 
 by the principle of secrecy in religion. 
 
Before God, not Men. 139 
 
 It is not the visibility of one's sacred duties part ii. 
 to which Jesus takes objection ; for in an earlier the 
 part of this Sermon He has already tauc^ht that 
 
 ■^ -^ ^ See IVIatt. v. 
 
 the good deeds of His disciples must be not only 14-16. 
 visible, but luminous ; nor luminous only, but con- 
 spicuous. It is the purpose to attract attention 
 which is condemned. That vitiates the act by 
 substituting a selfish for a noble motive. That 
 is to put man in God's place of judgment. That 
 therefore robs the doer of all merit in the eye of 
 God. To do your righteous acts, says Jesus, in 
 the presence of men, in order to be looked at by 
 them as a spectacle,^ is to forfeit the reward of 
 the heavenly Father. Few words in Holy Writ 
 are more fundamental or searchim^ than this ; 
 for there lies at the root of such a principle this 
 still deeper truth, that the merit of a good action 
 consists not in its motive merely, but in the god - 
 liness of its motive. Eighteousness is not just 
 an affair betwixt man and man, as it appears to 
 be in the half-pagan philosophy of our ethical 
 schools. Even the schools, indeed, demand that 
 some nobler and less interested motive than the 
 love of applause should inspire men with virtue. 
 But the ethic of Jesus goes further. For an 
 
 ^ 6':.a.Fr,yot.i implies being looked at * cum. studio et admira- 
 tione.' See Tittmann, de Synonymis N. T. pp. 120, 121. 
 
140 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 audience of admiring bystanders, He is not con- 
 tent to substitute — as our systems do — the 
 approval of the good man's own conscience, or 
 an abstract love of virtue for its own sake, or an 
 enlightened regard to the welfare of the greatest 
 number : what He does substitute is God. God 
 is the sole audience and the sole spectator of the 
 Christian. Himself unseen. He sees the hidden 
 process of emotion and purpose which precedes 
 action, as well as the act itself; and as He was 
 our Lawgiver at the first. Whose will each actor 
 is bound to consult, so shall He be our Judge at 
 1 Sam. ii. 3. last, by Whosc sentence actions must be weighed. 
 According to christian teaching, therefore, reli- 
 gion is the soul of morals. The conscience of 
 each man is withdrawn from the crowd of on- 
 lookers who observe and criticise his outward 
 conduct. He is set free from their censure and 
 the craving to please them. He is placed in imme- 
 diate and confidential relations with the supreme 
 Onlooker, Who is too remote to be touched by 
 earthly misconceptions, for He is in heaven ; yet 
 not so remote as to be out of sympathy, for He 
 is our Father. The rule of duty ceases to be an 
 uninformed voice of our own nature, or a code 
 generalized from the experience of m.ankind, or 
 the average moral sentiment of a community. It 
 
PRINCIPLE. 
 
 Before God, not Men. 141 
 
 becomes the revealed law of the divine command- part i 
 ments. Eighteousness comes to mean just obe- the 
 dience ; such obedience as a child will pay to the 
 expressed will of a perfect Parent. Merit/ in the 
 divine eyes, will be in proportion to the single- 
 ness, purity, and unselfishness of the man's desire 
 to serve and please his heavenly Father. And 
 morality, ' righteousness,' whether in its narrower 
 or wider sense, becomes a sacred, secret, devout 
 thing, hid away in that holy of holies of the 
 religious nature in which worship dwells. Is it 
 needful to point out how entirely this carrying of 
 ethics up into godliness cuts away by the roots 
 that sham holiness of one-sided religionists of 
 which we have the type in Pharisaism ? It not 
 less cuts down on the other side the shallow uti- 
 litarian morality of our own day, which thinks it 
 can do without any basis outside of humanity — 
 the righteousness which has parted company with 
 godliness. Unnatural in Christ's eyes must be 
 any severance of these two ; for to Him these two 
 have one life : godliness is the root of righteous- 
 ness, and righteousness the fruit of godliness. 
 
 The bearing of all this on our Lord's warning 
 in the text is not far to seek. Since that only 
 
 ^ Merit, that is, not in the sense of claim on the reward, but 
 of moral fitness to receive it. 
 
142 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 THE 
 PRINCIPLE. 
 
 which is done out of a regard to God's approval 
 is well done, it follows that, in strict fact, the 
 Christian in his actions knows nothing of any 
 other witness. To him, so far as any practical 
 influence on his moral state is concerned, privacy 
 and publicity are words without meaning. He acts 
 the same before men as alone ; for he is never 
 ' alone ' from that one Spectator Whom he seeks 
 to please, and Who sees in secret ; nor can the 
 company of a crowd increase or lessen his desire 
 to please that one Spectator. One Presence fills, 
 possesses, dominates the man whose passion it is 
 to be righteous before the face of his Father in 
 heaven. But let him once become so conscious 
 of the observation of others, that with his desire 
 to please the judging Father and win His 
 reward, there shall mingle some desire to please 
 also his human witnesses, and win their admira- 
 tion ; instantly his singleness of aim grows con- 
 fused, the purity of his motive is clouded, and 
 the divine acceptableness of his service suffers. 
 The entrance of this dual reference is full of 
 peril. The man has need, in Jesus' words, to 
 ' take heed.' Nothing is so easy as to let a 
 regard to the notice and approbation of our 
 fellows edge out of its place first our exclusive, 
 and by and by our supreme, regard to the judg- 
 
Before God, not Men. 143 
 
 ment of the Fatlier, Our fellow-men are beside part n. 
 us ; we see that they observe us ; the signs of ^ 
 their admiration or censure are present, and not p^^^^'^^^^- 
 to be mistaken. Whereas He Who sees in secret 
 dwells also in a secret place ; that He sees us at 
 all, or cares to note what we do, is a thing to be 
 taken on trust ; if He is passing on us any pre- 
 sent judgment, at least it may be long before we 
 know it, or reap either reward from His approval 
 or pain from His displeasure. Here, as always, Cf- 2 Cor. iv. 
 it is the present which thrusts aside the future ; 
 the seen, the unseen ; and sense, faith. 
 
 It does not at all follow that a man's outward 
 behaviour will change when this change of 
 motive occurs. Man may have displaced God as 
 witness, umpire, and rewarder of righteousness ; 
 and yet the same righteous acts may continue to 
 be done, and done as diligently or punctiliously 
 as before. The man is fallen from a son of God 
 into a slave of human criticism ; but no eye which 
 does not see in secret can at first detect the fall. 
 His righteousness has ceased to receive reward 
 from God ; but it is not given to us to discern 
 the spiritual worth of human conduct, and the 
 subtle change passes unobserved. ^Nevertheless, 
 this corruption of the motive works disastrously 
 on practical conduct. For when a man's design 
 
144 TIu Lavjs of the Kingdom. 
 
 in behaving well is to be looked at, then the 
 presence of human witnesses becomes essential. 
 To be in society means then to be on one's good 
 behaviour. To be alone, where only God sees, — 
 the one Witness Whose inspection I have ceased 
 to fear, the one Judge Whose approbation I do 
 not crave, — this is to be without the motive 
 which moved me to be righteous. Whatever 
 restraint the presence of human spectators may 
 impose on passion, is lifted when the man escapes 
 from observation ; and just because his virtue 
 was a thing of restraint and not of choice, does 
 he make up by the licence he privately allows 
 himself for the violence he has done himself in 
 public. Thus the life splits itself more and more 
 into two halves : the righteous life played before 
 men, and the self-indulgent life lived in secret. 
 An appearance of devotion, or propriety, or bene- 
 volence, is sustained where the conduct is seen ; 
 because it is only where it is seen that any suf- 
 ficient motive exists for being generous, or de- 
 corous, or devout. But it is to external conduct 
 only that this consideration applies. The inner 
 life, lived even in their presence, is not visible to 
 those who have been installed the censors or re- 
 warders of righteousness ; and therefore it is but 
 the appearance of goodness, and nothing more, 
 
PKINCIPLE. 
 
 Before God, not Mm, 145 
 
 which it is either needful or even possible to parti 
 sustain. What passes now for such a man's the 
 righteousness is but a stage performance, at which 
 his neighbours assist as at a spectacle. He has 
 fabricated for himself a double life, of which the 
 visible half is fair but false, and the secret half 
 real but foul. The man is literally what his 
 name of * h}^ocrite ' signifies, a play-actor. He 
 only personates righteousness for applause; he 
 walks the earth an incarnate falsehood. 
 
 ' Take heed ' is the warning addressed to His 
 first Twelve, in their first days of fresh sincerity ; 
 a warning sharpened by the sight of full-blown 
 hypocrites filling at that moment the high places 
 of their fatherland, and the ' seats ' where pro- 
 phets once and just men had sat. Of this 
 spiritual plague the beginnings are as slight as 
 the issues are fatal. Besides, the temptation to 
 act from a regard to public opinion rather than 
 from the fear of God is one which, singularly 
 enough, lies specially near to men with a reputa- 
 tion for religion. The fact is certain, whether 
 the reasons be apparent or not. One reason may 
 be, that as a reputation for piety is hard to 
 win, so it is easy to lose. The world expects a 
 great deal from persons who imply a rebuke on 
 itself by professing exceptional godliness ; and it 
 K 
 
146 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 THE 
 PRINCIPLE. 
 
 visits any decline from that standard with corre- 
 sponding severity. It judges more severely the 
 inconsistencies of religious men than the flat 
 immoralities of others. Hence there is the 
 strongest reason why he who has once enjoyed 
 a character for religion should strive to keep, 
 and dread to lose, it. No doubt he will keep it 
 best by thinking least about it. A single eye to 
 his true Master will be the surest way of walking 
 straight ; and to care little about men's censure 
 is in the majority of cases to ensure at least their 
 respect, if not their praise. Still, these are hard 
 things to practise ; and when a good man finds 
 that his character for goodness is both very fra- 
 grant and very easily blown upon, he is apt to 
 watch over it with an unhealthy jealousy, to ask 
 what men will say when he ought to be asking 
 what God wills, and to eke out the goodness 
 he really possesses by just the least bit of occa- 
 sional assumption, in talk or manner, of more 
 goodness still. Add to this, that those parts of 
 righteousness which belong most to its religious 
 side are those which lend themselves most 
 readily to imitation, and it will be seen why 
 hypocrisy should be characteristically the re- 
 ligionist's vice. To persuade society that you 
 are honest while you are cheating it, or chaste 
 
PRINCIPLE. 
 
 Before God, not Men. 147 
 
 when you are licentious, is rather hard. Plain part i 
 round duties of every-day morality are easily the 
 tested ; and comparatively few will try to wear 
 a mask which is so sure to be torn off. But the 
 higher and more inward side of virtue, its God- 
 ward aspect, is absolutely screened from the 
 direct inspection of society ; and if it betray it- 
 self at all, must betray itself by certain outward 
 signs or acts which are very imitable. The three 
 stock exercises of good Pharisees, for example, of 
 which Jesus goes on to speak, are pretty much 
 the characteristic outcome of piety in every age 
 of the world. With regard to every one of these, 
 it is exceedingly easy to perform the visible act, 
 and exceedingly difficult to tell what feeling is 
 hidden under it. Anybody who has money to spare 
 can give alms, and pass for charitable ; prayers 
 are as easily said by a knave as by a saint ; while 
 he who cares to fast, may fast, whatever his 
 reason for it be. The actions of piety, like its 
 tones or its gaits, are so imitable, and the imita- 
 tion is so hard of detection, that they become 
 the invariable livery of the hypocrite. For the 
 very same reason, they seduce those who are not 
 as yet hypocrites into becoming so. When a 
 man would increase or preserve a reputation 
 for piety which he has once honestly enough ob- 
 
148 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. tained, it is fatally easy to perform pious acts, 
 THE with this end in view, a little oftener or a little 
 more ostentatiously than he would do were he 
 careful only about serving God. Thus one gets, 
 commonly before one quite knows it, on that 
 inclined plane of men-pleasing and false appear- 
 ances, the end of which is death. ' Take heed,' 
 said Jesus. 
 
 ISTo one who has so much as read the Gospels 
 
 needs to be told, that against no evil in religious 
 
 life did Jesus so often or so urgently warn His 
 
 Lukexii. 1; foUowers as acjaiust hypocrisy. 'The leaven of 
 
 cf. Matt. . ° J r J 
 
 xvi. 6 ff. ; the Pharisees,' He called it ; meaning by that 
 
 Markviii. 15. -i i • 
 
 emblem, as I suppose, to lay stress both on its 
 slight and unobserved beginnings, and on its rapid 
 and certain increase wherever tolerated. There 
 is no guarantee for the purity of spiritual service, 
 but resolutely to repel every particle of insin- 
 cerity or unreality. Only admit ever so little 
 regard to what men will say of you — only pre- 
 tend to be in the very least holier or better than 
 you are ; and not only is your inner life no longer 
 a whole, true, transparent thing, but you have 
 admitted a working principle of falsehood, the 
 nature of which is to spread, and to spread fast. 
 The eye once diverted from the Father in heaven, 
 gets incapable of looking straight at our unseen 
 
THE 
 PRINCIPLE. 
 
 Before God, not Men. 149 
 
 Witness ; the ear once open to the mnrmnr of 
 human applause at one's side, forgets to listen for 
 that voice of heavenly approval which only faith 
 can hear ; the piety which, however genuine, is 
 flaunted as a robe to be admired, soon ceases to 
 be more than a cloak of deceit ; in short, the 
 entrance of insincerity is like the letting in of 
 waters, — it widens its own passage, and drowns Cf. l Tim. 
 the soul in perdition at last. ' Take heed,' there- 
 fore. Whatever we do, let us do it as in God's 
 sight. Who sees in secret as well as in public ; 
 whatever we are before God alone, that we are to 
 be in the presence of men — that, and no more. 
 Affect not any feelings or desires ; no, nor tricks of 
 voice, nor devoutnesses of manner, which are not 
 downright and true, else you have no reward of 
 your heavenly Father. ' No reward,' says Jesus 
 here, putting God's judgment on hypocrisy at its 
 lowest; because here He would only warn against 
 the first false step, and spoke to hearts which were 
 as yet tender and loyal. Hear how He spoke, a 
 little later, to men who had travelled far on the 
 road, of the hypocrite, and had come to hide 
 behind their stage dress and painted mask of piety 
 nothing but greed and cruelty and lust : ' Woe See Matt. 
 
 xxiii. lo-o3. 
 
 unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! fools 
 and blind ! whited sepulchres ! children of hell ! 
 
150 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 THE 
 PRINCIPLE. 
 
 generation of vipers !' Such startling words of 
 indignation — words that shiver and scorch like 
 lightning — He never uttered, except against the 
 men who affected religion for the sake of appear- 
 ances. Let each Christian, therefore, guard as 
 his best treasure that life in secret, that holy 
 tremulous fear of God, that openness to His eye, 
 that simplicity of regard for His will, that un- 
 affected indifference to all spectators save Him, 
 which is the very soul and breath of all true 
 righteousness ; for without that we may have 
 what credit we will among men, or wear what 
 garb of goodness we please, but we have neither 
 honour nor reward at the hands of the secret- 
 judging Father, Who trieth heart and reins. 
 
FIRST APPLI CATIO N: 
 TO ALMSGIVING. 
 
 151 
 
Therefore, icTien thou doest [thinel alms, do not sound a 
 trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and 
 in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I 
 say unto you. They have their reward. But when thou doest 
 alms, let not thy left hand know ivhat thy right hand doeth : 
 that thine alms may he in secret ; and thy Father, Which seeth 
 in secret, [Himself '\ shall reward thee [openly']. — Matt. vi. 
 2-4. 
 
 152 
 

 
 ALMSGIVING. 
 
 F the three religious exercises to which paet n. 
 Jesus applied His general warning against first 
 
 a hypocritical courting of publicity, almsgiving is 
 undoubtedly the one with reference to which we 
 moderns have most need to be warned. At the 
 same time, it is the one which has now-a-days 
 the least connection with the religious service of 
 God. Since Christianity has succeeded in breath- 
 ing a general spirit of compassion for the desti- 
 tute and suffering into modern European life, and 
 since society has been taught to respect the duty 
 of beneficence on that broad ground of humanity 
 which Christianity was the first to enforce, alms- 
 giving, or rather all active charity from man to 
 man, has ceased to be, to the same extent as 
 formerly, an act of religion. It is no longer con- 
 fined to religious persons. It is not so exclu- 
 sively urged on religious grounds. Many who 
 do not profess to be serving God in it, are ready 
 enough to put their hand to enterprises of prac- 
 tical beneficence. It is, in fact, a virtue much 
 
 153 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 154 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. petted by that section of society wliicli does 
 FIRST not call itself religious, by whom it is usually 
 opposed, either to the zeal of orthodoxy, which 
 attaches weisjht to men's theolocrical beliefs, or 
 to that ' unpractical ' piety which seeks to save 
 people's souls while their bodies remain unre- 
 lieved. However idle or unjust this pitting 
 of one virtue against another may be, religious 
 persons have no reason to regret that the area 
 of effective kindness among men has been much 
 widened, or that one of the secondary fruits 
 of Christ's faith has been to lead those who 
 never would have shown any charity for God's 
 sake, to show it for man's. Inadequate we 
 must hold the merely humanitarian motive to 
 be — inadequate at its best, and in the long-run 
 unreliable, when not sustained by a deeper 
 regard for His will Who is the Father of us 
 all. Still we ought to rejoice when, from any 
 motive whatever, the lot of our poor or ailing 
 brothers is made lighter by generous hands. For 
 the sake of our religion itself, however, it is of 
 consequence that the intimate connection which 
 it has so long had with benevolence should neither 
 be forgotten nor relaxed. Charity has always 
 been an integral part of practical Christianity ; at 
 the best of times it was even an offering of chris- 
 
Almsgiving. 155 
 
 tian worship : and this sacred link between the part it. 
 service we pay to men and that which we owe to first 
 
 , 1 • 1 r>n • APPLICATION, 
 
 God is part of the good inheritance which Chris- 
 tianity drew from Judaism. The religious cha- 
 racter attached to the duty of almsgiving, under 
 both the earlier and the new economy, it will 
 therefore be worth our while to trace. 
 
 The Jewish commonwealth had no poor-law 
 in the modern sense ; but its legislation was skil- 
 fully directed, first to prevent poverty, and then 
 to relieve in the kindest way such poverty as 
 could not be prevented. The strange land-law 
 which restored to its original owner, at the 
 close of every half-century, all property^ which, 
 through pressure of misfortune, had become 
 alienated, was a powerful instrument for prevent- 
 incr the accumulation of land in a few hands and 
 
 o 
 
 the consequent growth of a hopelessly impover- 
 ished class. The general remission of outstand- 
 ing debts at the same 'year of jubilee'^ told in a 
 similar direction. Still it was certain that the 
 poor could ' never cease out of the land ;' and the Deut. xv. ii. 
 law enjoined on every Israelite the most generous 
 
 ^ Except town property, or land devoted by its proper owner 
 to sacred purposes. See Lev. xxv. 29-31, and xxvii. 18-24. 
 2 See Josephus, Antt. iii. 12. 3. 
 
156 Tlie Lavjs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. consideration for his unfortunate brethren. He 
 
 FIRST was urged to lend to the poor without interest, 
 
 APPLICATION. ^itjjQ^ 1^ (jg]3^g Qf ^l^ig character could not be 
 
 Deut. XV. ° 
 
 1-4. recovered after the seventh year. Each seventh 
 
 Lev. XXV. 5. year, also, the spontaneous products of the un- 
 tilled earth were open to any hand to pluck 
 them ; each third year one-tenth part of the 
 crops was set aside, not, like the annual tithe, for 
 the ordinary maintenance of the sacred tribe, but 
 Deut. xiv. for special distribution anions^ the destitute classes 
 
 28 29 
 
 xx'vi. 12-14. as well as among God's ministers ',^ each harvest 
 Lev. xLx. 9, the field corners were to be left desio^nedly 
 
 10, xxiii. 22. , , , „ , 
 
 unreaped, and the smaller grape -clusters un- 
 Cf. Deut. gathered, that there might be something for the 
 Euth ii. 2. ' poor to glean ; the standing crops were free to 
 every hungry passer-by to eat ; while, in order 
 to connect the duty of charity closely with re- 
 liction, the e^reat relisrious festivals of the sacred 
 year were celebrated with open banquets, at 
 which, while the prosperous husbandman himself 
 Deut. xvi. rejoiced over God's bounty, ' the stranger and 
 the fatherless and the widow' were also to be 
 welcome guests. 
 
 ^ There is some difficulty about the relation of these new pre- 
 scriptions in Deuteronomy to the original tithe-law in Leviticus 
 (xxvii. 30-33) ; but they are more likely to have been an addi- 
 tion to the annual tax than a limitation of it. 
 
Almsgiving. 157 
 
 Throughout the whole of these most careful part ii. 
 and liberal statutes, obedience was enforced by fiest 
 the highest of all considerations. It was because 
 their fathers had been ' bondmen ' and poor in Deut. xv. 15, 
 
 xvi 12 
 
 Egypt, but had been redeemed by Jehovah's xxiv. 22. 
 
 kindness ; because the generous land they dwelt 
 
 in was His land, and brought forth plenty at His 
 
 bidding ; because He loved to reward the merciful 
 
 with increase, but was ready to avenge the cry Deut. xxiv. 
 
 14 15 19 
 
 of the needy ; in short, it was because they ' ' 
 
 ' feared God ' that their eye was not to be ' evil,' 
 
 nor their heart hard, nor their hand shut ac^ainst Cf. Deut. 
 
 . XV. 7-11. 
 
 their poor brother. This elevation of liberality to 
 the poor into a sacred duty to God has naturally 
 left its mark upon the whole later literature of 
 the Hebrew people. Especially in the wealthy and 
 relaxed age of Solomon do we find stress laid on 
 alms as winning prosperity^ and spiritual favour^ 
 from the Almighty ; while the man who oppressed 
 the poor by usury, or put them off with empty 
 promises, was regarded as reproaching Him Who 
 had made rich and poor alike, and in danger of 
 forfeiting his unhallowed gains.^ In spite, how- 
 ever, of both written laws and current maxims, 
 
 1 Cf. Prov. xiv. 21, xxii. 9, xxviii. 27. 
 
 2 Prov. X. 2, xi. 4. 
 
 3 See Prov. iii. 27, 28, xiv. 31, xvii. 5, xxii. 16, xxviii. 8. 
 
158 The Laius of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. the bad times which followed in the disrupted 
 FIRST kingdom were times of social wrong, and greed, 
 
 APPLICATION. J -o ^^ • rni 
 
 and manifold oppression. Ine successive voices 
 of the prophets are loud in their condemnation of 
 the rich and powerful for ' grinding the faces ' of 
 their poorer countrymen, and ' selling the needy ' 
 for trifling gain.^ When they summoned the 
 land to repentance, this was the fast which the 
 isa.iviii.6,7. Lord cliose : ' To deal thy bread to the hungry, and 
 that thou bring the outcast poor to thy house ; 
 when thou seest the naked, that thou cover 
 him ; and that thou hide not thyself from thine 
 own flesh.' Throughout the prophetic period, 
 indeed, kindness to the poor is preached as one 
 of the first duties of piety and a main proof of 
 loyalty to their theocratic King Jehovah. It was 
 evidently needed. Although we do not read of 
 actual mendicancy till after the long captivity had 
 shaken to pieces the old Mosaic institutions and 
 utterly impoverished the land, there is no doubt 
 that, under the later monarchy, luxury and in- 
 justice must have done their work, by reducing a 
 large class to hopeless dependence upon charity; 
 so that, more than ever, patriotism and religion 
 
 1 Cf. amongst others, passages like Isa. iii. 14, 15 ; Jer. v. 
 28, xxii. 16, 17 ; Amos ii. 6, v. 11, 12, viii. 4-8 ; Ezek. xviii. 
 7-13 : Zech. vii. 8-14. 
 
Almsgiving. 159 
 
 combined to recommend to the pious an open- part n. 
 handed almsgiving.^ first 
 
 Thus the Jewish mind was prepared for that 
 exafy(:reration of this virtue which had come to 
 prevail in the time of Christ, and which is one 
 of the features of later Judaism. Already in the 
 apocryphal books we find, along with excellent 
 exhortations to liberality, an extravagant value 
 ascribed to the exercise of it. ' Turn not thy Tob. iv. 7- 
 face from any poor, and the face of God shall not 
 be turned away from thee. If thou hast abun- 
 dance, give alms accordingly ; if thou have but 
 a little, be not afraid to give according to that 
 little : for thou layest up a good treasure for 
 thyself against the day of necessity : ' these are 
 words which strongly recall what our Lord said Luke xvi. 9 ; 
 
 . p , cf . xii. 33 ; 
 
 about making heavenly friends out of the earthly Matt.xix.2i. 
 mammon : but when it is added that ' alms do Tob. xii. 9 ; 
 
 J Ecclus. iii. 
 
 deliver from death' and ' shall purge away all sm, 30. 
 or that ' alms maketh an atonement for sins ' as 
 water quencheth flame,^ we feel that we are on 
 
 1 Generosity to the poor is conspicuous in the Purim festivi- 
 ties (Esth. ix. 22), and in the rejoicings which celebrated the 
 resumption of national worship in the rebuilt capital. Cf. Neh. 
 Tiii. 10-12. 
 
 2 This exaggeration of alms has been curiously revived in the 
 Christian Church through the misinterpretation of the text, 
 ' Charity shall cover the multitude of sins ' (1 Pet. iv. 8). In 
 
160 The Laios of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. a soil out of which the fictitious righteousness 
 FIRST of the Pharisees could grow. When such an 
 
 .ppLicATiox. exaggerated spiritual worth before God can be 
 attached to any external act, were it the best a 
 man can do, the spiritual sense must already have 
 become distorted, and the way is prepared for the 
 substitution of merely external acts for the inward 
 spirit of righteousness. 
 
 This process of perversion had gone its full 
 length when Jesus spoke. It is true that the 
 arrangements for the collection of charity among 
 the later Jews were admirable enough. A row 
 
 Cf. Mark xii. of alms-boxes stood always in the temple court 
 to receive the offerings of worshippers ; at every 
 Sabbath morning service in the synagogues, ap- 
 pointed officers collected money for the poor of 
 the town, to be given away the same afternoon, 
 besides a special offertory on fast-days ; from 
 house to house, also, agents solicited broken 
 meats and other gifts for gratuitous distribution.^ 
 Through its times of deepest depression, the 
 Jewish race has never since forgotten its old 
 habit of remembering the poor. To this hour it 
 
 this, as in many other matters, debased Catholicism has run a 
 similar course to debased Judaism. 
 
 ^ The authorities will be found cited by Winer in his Real- 
 worterbuch, under art. * Almosen. ' 
 
Almsgiving, 161 
 
 sets to Gentiles and Christians a good example, part n. 
 and to this hour the ancient alliance between the first 
 worship of God and charity to the needy brother- ^^^'^^ication. 
 hood has kept its ground. But the over-estima- 
 tion of almsgiving, as a part of righteousness, 
 corrupted the motives of it. Men who attach 
 merit to the mere act, or fancy that parting with 
 theu' money can of itself purchase forgiveness 
 or reward from the Almighty, have already lost 
 that spirit of humble gratitude to Him which 
 chiefly makes the gift precious. That spirit gone, 
 another inspiration wiU take its place. The 
 good deed is performed, and the gift given, what- 
 ever motive lie behind it. Why should not 
 reputation on earth, as well as favour from heaven, 
 be the rew^ard of so virtuous an action ? To 
 please God by doing alms, and please men by 
 letting them see the alms we do, is a successful 
 stroke wdiich pays a man doubly for his outlay. 
 Only there is an unhappy tendency in all cases 
 where a lower motive mingles with a better one, 
 that the base should by degrees eat away the 
 noble. Neither a simple regard to God, nor even 
 a pure generosity to men, w^ill long dwell in the 
 heart along with an interested eye to profit or 
 applause ; so that the rich Pharisee, who begins 
 by trumpeting his good deeds, ends by hardly 
 
 L 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 162 The Laws of the Kirigdom. 
 
 seeking any higher reward than a reputation for 
 FIRST generosity. The hypocrites whom our Lord cen- 
 sured took care to bestow their charity at the 
 synagogues, where the beggars congregated about 
 the door and the people passing by could see ; 
 or they paraded their bounty, by dispensing it 
 along the narrow and crowded Oriental thorough- 
 fares. They might about as well have literally 
 ' blown a trumpet,' as their namesakes the stage- 
 players did, to call idle bystanders to the spec- 
 tacle. Not without a touch of caustic satire does 
 Jesus add, * Verily they have their reward.' 
 Men do look on and praise ; even if the shrewder 
 should nod to one another or whisper a jest about 
 trumpet-blowing, at least the indigent who take 
 his coin dare not show that they see through the 
 donor's motive, and there arc sure to be persons 
 thoughtless enough to credit him with excep- 
 tional piety and benevolence. The man who 
 plays at almsgiving, therefore, has what he covets 
 and courts. But see ! Above there is another 
 Witness, in Whose pure name the farce is played, 
 and before Whose face the player must one day 
 stand. Surely what He has seen in secret. He 
 too shall then reward very openly ^ indeed ; but 
 
 ^ Tlironghout this section of St. Matthew the reading of the 
 received text, iv tZ (panfu, is discredited by seine recent critics, 
 
AlTnsgiviTig. 163 
 
 it shall be with that unlooked-for reward in which part ii. 
 ' all liars ' have a part. first 
 
 We are now, I think, in a position to see what ^^^^^^^tion. 
 
 ^ Eev. xxi. 8. 
 
 was our Lord's attitude towards this duty of 
 almsgiving, and how it passed from the Old to 
 the JSTew Testament. Here also He did not de- Matt. v. 17. 
 stroy, but fulfil. For, in the first place, He had 
 not a word to say against that ancient association 
 of active beneficence with religious worship and 
 the fear of God which had honourably distin- 
 guished the historical institutions of His country- 
 men. Eather, by re-asserting that alms must be 
 given as in God's secret sight. He replanted charity 
 in its true soil of godliness. He has left it where 
 the whole development of Hebrew thought had 
 placed it, in one class with prayers and fasting, 
 as an integral part of a devout man's righteous- 
 ness. It is true that both His own example (Who Luke viii. 3 ; 
 had everything except silver and gold to give) 
 and the spirit of His own teaching have widened 
 for us the sphere of our active beneficence. Bare 
 almsgiving is not now the only, nor even the 
 chief, way in which it is open to us to relieve 
 men's material wants, or cure the social disorder 
 
 but, as regards verses 4 and 6, on doubtful autbority. At all 
 events, the idea o^ a, public retribution is amply sustained by such 
 passages as Matt. x. 32, xxv. 31-46 ; Luke ix. 26, xii. 1, 2. 
 
164 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. out of which want springs. Christian charity 
 FIRST early gave itself, with a blessed inventiveness in 
 
 .ppLicATioN. ^en_(joijia to the healiog of the sick, the ransom 
 of the slave, the burial of the dead, the teaching 
 of the young, and the like gratuitous services to 
 society. In our more complex life, the solution 
 of economical and social difficulties is perhaps its 
 noblest and most arduous field. But when Jesus 
 commended the generous widow, who cast all her 
 
 Mark xii. livin^f into the poor's box, and set her forth as a 
 
 42-44. o r J 
 
 pattern of benevolence. He both recognised alms 
 as a fit channel for charity where no other or 
 better can be found, and at the same time praised 
 by implication all less simple efforts to relieve 
 distress or lessen the sum of human need. 
 Whether it be only a ' mite ' of money spared by 
 thrift out of a slender income, or the foundations 
 endowed by men of fortune, or personal attend- 
 ance on the helpless and aged, or surgical inge- 
 nuity abridging pain, or statesmanlike labour to 
 make every worker a fair sharer in the profits of 
 labour ; all forms of what, for shortness, we may 
 call ' almsgiving ' are equally elevated under the 
 christian system into a pious service, and linked 
 to the fear and love of our heavenly Father. 
 John xii. 8; Jesus tauojht His first disciples to see in the poor, 
 
 Matt. XXV. ° . 'I 
 
 40. whom we have always with us, representatives of 
 
Almsgiving. 165 
 
 Himself, in relieving whom we pay Him service, part h. 
 
 and thus gave a new christian reading to the first 
 
 good old Hebrew saying, that ' he that hath ^^^^^^^'^^^n- 
 
 pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord.' The Prov. xix. 
 
 17 
 first act of the new-born Church was to abolish 
 
 poverty among her own members by a systematic Acts iv. 
 
 distribution of alms on an unprecedented scale. 
 
 So lonor as christian communities were small and 
 
 o 
 
 oppressed, and mainly recruited from the labouring 
 and servile classes, it was only within the circle 
 of christian disciples that charity could be shown ; 
 but such charity was always enforced by the 
 most sacred and spiritual motives. The self- 2Cor.viii. 9; 
 impoverishing grace of the Son of God, His love i v. 20-v. 2;' 
 of His brethren unto death, the common sonship 
 to God which made christian men brothers in 
 a sense which was then new, the unity of the 
 christian body, and the supreme example which 
 God had given of the blessedness of giving ; 
 these were the fresh thoughts which in the early 
 Church gave to the old duty of almsgiving a 
 mighty impulse, — thoughts fetched all of them 
 out of the very holiest mysteries of the christian 
 faith. The new revelation of God supplemented 
 those pious considerations which from the time 
 of Moses had given strength to Hebrew kindli- 
 ness ; yet apostles were not above borrowing, 
 
166 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART ir. that they might use anew, the old arguments. 
 
 FIRST Paul pleads with Corinth, in words of Solomon's, 
 
 that to scatter with a Qenerous hand is the secret 
 
 2 Cor. ix. 6- ^ 
 
 11 ; cf, Prov. of the bcst increase ; and the writer to the 
 
 xi. 24, 25. ' 
 
 Heb. xiii. 16; Hebrews speaks of beneficence, as Isaiah might 
 11-17.' ' h.dNQ done, as a sacrifice with which ' God is well 
 pleased.' The truth is, that the infixed as well 
 as inbred selfishness of men has need to be 
 plied with every variety of noble motive for 
 being generous ; only the motives with which 
 Scripture plies us are never drawn from a sen- 
 timental humanity, but always from a divine 
 faith. The Church had ample justification, if 
 not in the letter, yet in the spirit, of the 
 Word, for that very old and beautiful usage 
 which, by soliciting for the poor the alms of 
 the faithful as often as they come together to 
 ' eat bread,' has enshrined this whole duty of 
 beneficence at the very centre and sanctuary of 
 christian devotion. 
 
 While Jesus thus carried over into His new 
 kingdom the traditional association of all humane 
 and liberal deeds with the service of God, He 
 strove, by applying to almsgiving the law of 
 secrecy, to reanimate it with the spirit of sincere 
 and unaffected godliness. All the more because 
 
Almsgiving. 167 
 
 this holy work of ministering to the poor was, and part n. 
 ought to be, a devout tribute paid to Him Who first 
 makes the rich man His steward and the poor 
 His care, ought a pure regard for Him, and not 
 for human opinion, to lie at the bottom of it. It is 
 a wretched tiling to turn what is meant to be a 
 passage of love betwixt the true heart and its God 
 into a piece of petty ostentation. Secrecy in 
 giving is the cure which Christ prescribed. It is 
 true, indeed, that provided the heart be honest 
 and keep God alone in view as its Spectator and 
 Eewarder, it will matter nothinsj where the alms 
 are given, or with what publicity. But it is 
 equally certain that the presence of witnesses sets 
 a trap for the weakness of human vanity, suggests 
 the desire to be observed, and easily, almost in- 
 evitably, adulterates the motive. Extremely few 
 people, and especially few wealthy people, are 
 above the temptation to let their munificence be 
 known, that they may win the present pleasure 
 of being praised, as well as the hope of some less 
 appreciable reward in the world to come. How 
 much must this temptation be increased when the 
 current mode of collecting alms compels men to 
 bestow them in public ; nay, when this appeal to 
 vanity is deliberately employed by the agents of 
 charity for the purpose of drawing from the vain 
 
168 Tlie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. ricli a larger subscription ! It is not too much 
 FIRST to say, that this motive of ostentation is worked 
 in the interest of some of our public charities 
 on a system. Secretaries, collectors, and other 
 organizers of benevolence, are apt to be held suc- 
 cessful at tlieir work in proportion as they can 
 play skilfully on this infirmity of the benevolent, 
 and, by humouring men's love of reputation, swell 
 the society's list. There is undoubtedly a certain 
 space left, after higher motives have got their due, 
 for the play of such a secondary, but still harm- 
 less, motive as emulation. Between different 
 public bodies this may fairly be used in the ser- 
 
 2 Cor. viii. vicc of charity. Paul was not ashamed to press 
 liberality on the wealthy church at Corinth by 
 the example of poorer Christians in Macedonia. 
 Even emulation, however, is hardly a safe motive 
 to work when individuals, not bodies of men, are 
 to be handled ; and it is nobleness itself, compared 
 with the petty consideration of personal vanity. 
 Who does not know that some men never contri- 
 bute unless the donation is to be advertised in 
 the papers ? Are people never found to follow 
 the lead of a few first subscribers, and give where 
 aristocratic patrons have shown the way ? Is it 
 desirable that, when people are warm with wine, 
 they should hear their offerings shouted forth at 
 
 IX. passim. 
 
ArPLICATION. 
 
 Almsgivitig. 169 
 
 the close of a charity dinner ? Or what shall be part h. 
 said of firms the names of which figure promi- first 
 nently when a public subscription list is opened 
 in the City, but for whose less obtrusive bounty 
 no beggared family of orphans or broken-down 
 clerk in their own office was ever much the 
 better ? Nor is the Church quite safe from a 
 similar reproach ; still less what is termed ' the 
 religious world.' There are christian congrega- 
 tions where a bag handed round the pews will 
 produce twice as much as an unobtrusive box in 
 the porch. Missionary societies live to some 
 extent by the same arts of canvassing, puffing, 
 and advertising which are used for hospitals and 
 orphanages. Our larger christian enterprises are 
 usually started by published, and by no means 
 anonymous, lists. I am far from meaning, of 
 course, that it is always possible even for the most 
 modest and sincere giver to escape such methods 
 of giving ; or that those who have gTcat schemes 
 of benevolence in hand can all at once shake 
 themselves clear of the offensive features in our 
 present system. But while there unquestionably is 
 in England a vast amount of honest, good-hearted 
 kindness, and of genuine christian liberality, let 
 any man who knows ask himself whether there 
 is not also entwined with it a vast deal which is 
 
170 The Laws of the Kingdom, 
 
 spurious, and which people know to be spurious. 
 Let him ask whether, without these offerincfs of 
 the baser sort, either our benevolent or our reli- 
 gious undertakings could thrive, or perhaps exist, 
 as they do ; and whether it is not a fact that our 
 methods of collecting are sometimes intentionally 
 constructed so as to angle for the offerings of vanity 
 as well as for those of piety ? One wonders what 
 words of sarcasm, mounting into outspoken wrath- 
 ful denunciation. He would address to our modern 
 Pharisees, were He sent acjain to London Who was 
 once sent of the Father to old Jerusalem. Not 
 that even these were to be His most fearful words 
 against the ostentation of charity. So long as He 
 sat on the lowly sward of our earth, with the 
 wide-armed bounty of His Father's sunshine glad- 
 dening the soil and air around Him, it was well 
 that He should speak humanly — not severely — 
 of our human foibles : ' Verily I say unto you, 
 Ye have your reward.' Other words will become 
 those regal lips when the King shall be seated on 
 B«v. XX. 11. His white throne of celestial judgment, and before 
 isa. xxxiii His awful face ' fearfulness shall surprise the 
 hypocrites.' 
 
 There is no cure for this rottenness at the heart 
 of charity but secrecy. ' When thou doest alms, 
 let not thy left hand know what thy right hand 
 
Almsgiving. 171 
 
 doeth.' If it woiJd be a reason for giving more part n. 
 than the fear of God or the love of man prompts first 
 you to give, do not even say to yourselr, with a 
 glow of seK-approval, ' I have given alms.' Cer- 
 tain acts of piety, such as private prayer, do 
 naturally court seclusion from every eye. Un- 
 fortunately, in charitable deeds, there must com- 
 monly be at least two parties privy to the action : 
 the giver and the receiver. In any case, let no 
 third witness be by, if you can help it ; nay, let 
 not even the receiver know who is the donor, if 
 you can help it. Let us do our best to discourage 
 and abolish the vicious system of trumpeted 
 benefactions, of advertised lists, of alms wheedled 
 by flattery out of close fists, of weak though bene- 
 volent souls tempted into corrupt motives and 
 the ffivincj which bringjs no reward. It was the 
 Church which first taught society throughout Chris- 
 tendom this now fashionable virtue of charity. It 
 is the Church which can alone teach that better 
 way of giving in the simplicity and unconscious- 
 ness of a childlike regard for the heavenly Father, 
 which will make our charity fragrant, and not an 
 offence, to Heaven. To bring our benevolence 
 under the breath of our godliness ; to make our 
 alms as real a part of devotion as our prayers ; to 
 do good secretly and for God's sake ; to devote 
 
172 The Laivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. first to God and to our Lord Christ what we 
 FIRST propose to bestow on the Father's needy chil- 
 
 APPLICATION. , /^i . , T 1 1 1 , . , , 
 
 dren or on Christ s little brethren : it is thus that 
 we shall best redeem our charities from con- 
 tempt, and make them more worthy of reward 
 than a theatrical performance' to the blowing of 
 the trumpet of vanity. 
 
SECOND APPLICATION" 
 
 TO PEAYEE. 
 
 173 
 
And when thou prayest^ thou shalt not be as the hypocrites 
 are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in 
 the corners of the streets^ that they may be seen of men. Verily, 
 I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, ivhen 
 thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy 
 door, pray to thy Father Which is in secret; and thy Father 
 Which seeth in secret shall reward thee ^openly']. — Matt. vi. 
 5,6. 
 
 174 
 
SECOND APPLICATION : TO PHAYER. 
 
 M 
 
 ID WAY betwixt the giving of alms to men part n. 
 and the fasting which chastens one's own second 
 
 flesh, stands that central and most vital act of the ^^^^^^^'^^^n- 
 
 religious life which more than any other expresses 
 
 the soul's relation to God.^ Prayer belongs more 
 
 exclusively than either fasting or alms to the 
 
 worship of God ; and of all the usual forms 
 
 which divine worship takes, it appears to be 
 
 the most inward and sacred to secrecy. The 
 
 song by wdiich praise rises on waves of harmony 
 
 to heaven needs a concert of practised voices ; 
 
 sacred oratory by which men are taught or stirred 
 
 to holiness depends on the sympathy of numbers, 
 
 and requires at least the two or three in whom 
 
 Jesus saw the rudiments of His Church ; the sacra- Matt, xviii 20. 
 
 ments, too, are essentially public acts : but every 
 
 solitude becomes a house of prayer when the 
 
 solitary worshipper realizes that it is a house Gten. xxviii 
 
 of God. Here therefore most of all, everything 
 
 should be real. All affectation of devoutness is 
 
 * ' Eleemosyna, tanquam prsecipimm officium erga proxiraum ; 
 oratio, erga Deum ; jejunium, respectu nostri.' — Bengel in loc. 
 
 175 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 176 The Lav)s of the Kingdom. 
 
 PARI II. offensive ; but to affect to hold personal inter- 
 sEcoND course with God, to pretend that we are speaking 
 alone with Him, when we are doing no such 
 thing but only inviting other men to hear us 
 repeat a prayer, is unspeakably offensive. This 
 is to thrust our insincerity under the very eye of 
 the God of truth ; to call His special attention to 
 a farce ; to add profanity to falsehood. 
 
 It may have been because prayer belongs so 
 characteristically to the spiritual and personal 
 side of the life of faith, and is of its own nature 
 so free and jealous of prescriptions, that, among 
 the minute regulations by which Mosaic law 
 ordered all other parts of Hebrew worship, there 
 occur no instructions for either the public or the 
 private petitions of the people.-^ Yet the records 
 of Old Testament saints are full of proofs that 
 even under that economy of localized national 
 worship, as at all other periods, religious life 
 found its expression abundantl}^ in unrestrained 
 private petitions ; while the prayer of King 
 Solomon at the dedication of the temple amply 
 shows that (with or without unrecorded direc- 
 tions from the Mosaic time) individual as well 
 as national requests were habitually presented to 
 Jehovah before His secret shrine and at the 
 ^ So Braiine, quoted by Stier, Reden Jesu, in loc. 
 
Prayer. 177 
 
 central seat of His people's worship. In the part n; 
 earliest periods, no set times for private prayer second 
 were probably observed, nor any other hallowed -^^^^^^-^t^^-'^'- 
 place frequented but the one national sanctuary. 
 One of the Davidic psalms, however, speaks of Ps. iv. 17. 
 praying in the evening, in the morning, and at 
 noon. By the time of the long captivity, we find Dan. vi. 10, 11. 
 that the habit of private prayer thrice a day, at 
 stated hours, had become recognised. Traces of 
 a still more frequent observance of the duty- 
 appear in one of the latest psalms. The intro- Ps. cxix. 164. 
 duction of synagogue worship, probably soon aftex? 
 the return from Babylon,^ by providing a con- 
 venient place for retirement, naturally served 
 to confirm the custom of saying all prayers in 
 public, which in the rabbinical schools was at 
 length worked into a system. To this prayer- 
 system of later Judaism the hypocrisy con- 
 demned by our Lord came ultimately to attach 
 itself. 
 
 In order to understand our Lord aright, it must 
 be borne in mind that His words apply in the 
 first place to personal or private prayer. It is 
 possible that, in His time as well as later, the 
 synagogues were open for public prayer meetings 
 every Monday and Thursday, as well as on the 
 
 ^ See tlie Ai^t. ' Synagogue ' in Smith's Bible Dictionary. 
 M 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 178 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. Sabbath-day ; ^ and ostentatious religionists who 
 SECOND preferred to throng these meetings rather than to 
 pray in private, certainly came within the scope of 
 His rebuke. But the stated assemblies of the pious 
 for common prayer could not seem censurable 
 in the eyes of One Who was Himself accustomed 
 to attend them. Besides this, however, the doors 
 of the synagogue seem to have stood open, as to 
 this day they commonly do, — as the doors of the 
 mosque and of the Eoman Catholic church stand 
 open, — for the greater part of every day, not for 
 public but for private devotion ; and it was first 
 of all the abuse of this otherwise convenient 
 arrangement by hypocritical worshippers against 
 which Jesus warned His followers. To the pious 
 Jew, or the Jew who desired to be esteemed 
 pious, custom prescribed the repetition of certain 
 forms of prayer at least three times a day. 
 Modesty and true devoutness would have chosen 
 to observe these hours, whenever it was possible 
 to do so, in the privacy of home ; but the Phari- 
 sees deliberately left their own houses for the sake 
 of being seen at statutory prayer time in the 
 open synagogue. Nor was this all. The hour 
 of worship might surprise a man when passing 
 
 ^ On these later Rabbinical arrangements, cf. Tholuck, Berg- 
 predigt in loc. 
 
Prayer. 179 
 
 on a needful errand along the street; and, without part ir. 
 meaning any display, a very conscientious Jew second 
 
 . , , . ^ j^ i.1 1, 1 APPLICATION. 
 
 might stop, and turnmg so as to lace tne noiy 
 temple, recite his devotions where passers-by 
 could not fail to see him. All who know any- 
 thing of the East know how usual is this practice 
 among pious Mohammedans. But, as it happens 
 to-day among Mohammedans,^ so it happened then 
 among Jews : publicity encouraged hypocrisy. 
 Sanctimonious persons, who coveted a repute for 
 sanctity, took care to be pretty frequently on the 
 street, especially at its most conspicuous and busy 
 corners, when the call to prayer came ; that, with 
 superfluous punctuality and an overdone appear- 
 ance of devoutness, they might perform the ap- 
 pointed recitation to the admiration of beholders. 
 Nothing, of course, about the present religious 
 habits or the public opinion of Western nations 
 encouras^es or would even tolerate abuses like 
 these. On the contrary, we have banished religion 
 so much out of sight, that we can hardly conceive 
 how such practices should ever have become 
 current. Even in those communions which still 
 invite the faithful to say their private prayers in 
 
 ^ Cf. on the evil repute which very devout Moslems have 
 among their neighhours, Thomson's Land and Book, p. 25 
 (Lond. 1859). 
 
180 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PAET II. church, I do not know that a hypocritical parade 
 SECOND of piety is at all a common result. Certainly, 
 
 APPLICATION. Protestants cannot be fairly accused of frequenting 
 prayer meetings for the purpose of attracting 
 general attention. Here and there no doubt, in 
 religious circles, a person may be found whose 
 prominence as a leader in prayer is only a cloak 
 to disguise the rogue ; and some poor pensioners 
 of the church may be tempted by the hope of relief 
 to be very regular in their attendance on public 
 worship. But, speaking generally, the temptation 
 is more powerful at present to conceal than to 
 parade such piety as exists among us. The 
 christian boy, for example, at a public school; 
 the shopman and domestic servant who share 
 their room with several mates ; the poor believer 
 who finds no privacy in those dens which we call 
 by courtesy the homes of the people : these are in 
 far greater risk of offending Christ by not praying 
 at all than by praying too conspicuously. We 
 have more need to have pressed upon us that 
 
 Matt. X. 32, 33, Other law of confession which enters to limit and 
 
 and par. : E.om. , , , i i o 
 
 X. 10. complement the law oi secrecy. 
 
 At the same time, the error which lay at the 
 root of Pharisaic ostentation in prayer is too 
 subtle to be ever wholly banished, and the correc- 
 tion which our Lord supplied is too precious ever 
 
Prayer. 181 
 
 to be forgotten. At the root of tlie abominable part n. 
 affectation which vitiated the prayers of many second 
 
 -TT- , -1 T • APPLICATION. 
 
 among His contemporaries, lay, as 1 conceive, 
 this mistake : That instead of regarding prayer 
 as a spontaneous childlike utterance of depend- 
 ance upon God, which has no value in itsel/, but 
 only as a medium of intercourse ; men had come 
 to reckon prayer among the constituent acts of a 
 man's righteousness, pleasing or meritorious for 
 its own sake in the eyes of Heaven. From 
 speaking in these verses of hypocritical saying of 
 prayers, Jesus diverges in those which follow to Vers. 7, 8. 
 the parallel abuse of superstitious repetition of 
 prayers. That is strictly an excursus from the 
 main thought of the present section ; but both 
 abuses spring from the same source. It is one 
 blunder respecting the nature of prayer and 
 where its value lies, that led the Pharisees, as it 
 always has led men, both to praying which is 
 superstitious and to praying which is hypocritical ; 
 to prayers by rote and prayers for show. The 
 Jew who, like a heathen, recited over and over 
 again the same words, did so because, like a 
 heathen, he had come to attach merit or value to 
 the mere act of praying. Prayer, that is to say, 
 had become in his eyes, no longer a simple request 
 addressed by a child to his Father, useful only as 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 182 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. it carried to the Father the child's desire ; but a 
 SECOND work of religion, a good action, itself prescribed 
 as a test or sign of godliness, the performance of 
 which would operate, if not as a charm, at least 
 as a merit, to win by its acceptableness the 
 blessing of God. For this reason, he prayed very 
 often and very long ; for this reason also he 
 prayed where men could see him pray. Prayer 
 viewed as a soul's petition to God is of its . own 
 nature a private thing. Its value lies in its being 
 heard and understood by Him. It craves no 
 overhearing ear, for to other ears than His it 
 carries no meaning and has no value. On the 
 contrary, it rather shrinks from, than courts, the 
 observation of any third party. So long as you 
 only pray because you are in need, and because 
 you cannot help telling God what it is you need, 
 prayer continues to be . an affair of two : it lies 
 between the petitioner and the Giver. It is only 
 when prayers have become sei'vices or acts of 
 religion, by the number or the length or the regu- 
 larity or the fervency of which a man makes 
 himself pleasing to God and exhibits to men the 
 quality of his piety, that there can arise the 
 slightest temptation to take one's private devo- 
 tions into pubKc places or say them aloud for 
 others to hear. 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 Prayer. 183 
 
 It is at this point that we discover the precise 
 bearing of that corrective which our Lord supplied. second 
 To this central utterance of spiritual life, He 
 applied His law of secrecy in religion. Here, if 
 anywhere, that law is in its place. As all religi- 
 ous acts, to be worth anything, must have God 
 for their sole spectator, so eminently must this 
 act, which is the very heart of our religion, be 
 done in secret. The true type of all prayer there- 
 fore is solitary prayer. Its favourite resort is not 
 the synagogue, but the closet. It is, to go to the 
 essence of the. thing, just a word spoken to that 
 Father Wliose characteristic is that He is most 
 with us when we are in secret, and is felt to see 
 us there most closely where no one else can see us. 
 But a word of request simply spoken to God 
 alone never can be construed into a meritorious 
 performance or exalted into a department of 
 human 'righteousness.' To drive prayer back 
 behind a shut closet door is to revive the true 
 conception of it and to cut off occasion from both 
 these later misgrowths, the public saying of 
 prayers, which is ostentation, and the idle repeat- 
 ing of prayers, which is superstition. 
 
 I have said that it is with private, not social, 
 prayer our Lord is here dealing. The abuses He 
 corrects were abuses which clung less to the public 
 
184 Tlie Lavjs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. than to the individual worship of His country- 
 men. It is our personal intercourse with God 
 which He expressly banishes from open gaze into 
 the closed chamber. ISJ'o inference, therefore, to 
 the discouragement of family or social or congre- 
 gational worship can legitimately be drawn, or by 
 any reasonable men ever has been drawn, from 
 His words. In strict truth, however, even social 
 prayer, in which many worshippers nnite in 
 one petition, remains subject to the same law of 
 secrecy, '^o two or more Christians have any better 
 right tlian a single Christian has to stand and per- 
 form their devotions in a conspicuous place, for the 
 purpose af attracting the attention of those who 
 are not worshippers.^ The ordinary rule of social 
 as well as of personal prayer is, that it be more 
 or less concealed from mere spectators, never 
 obtruded on their notice, least of all performed 
 for their admiration. The place of prayer may 
 be vast as a cathedral ; but the congregation 
 is presumed to be alone. The worshippers have 
 but one heart, as well as one voice. A common 
 
 ^ I do not mean, of course, to reflect upon the eff"orts of street 
 prea hers to gain an audience for the gospel, by singing or pray- 
 ing at street corners ; because these are to be justified by quite 
 other considerations. They contemplate a very different end 
 from the admiration of non-worshipping bystanders. They aim 
 at turning bystanders into worshippers. 
 
Prayer. 185 
 
 desire makes of many petitioners one petitioner, part ii. 
 No one's attention is distracted by the presence second 
 of a single onlooker. The people bow in their ^^^^^^^^"^^'• 
 great house of prayer just as each man bows in 
 his little closet, before Him AVho still is seeing 
 in secret. ]N'ot he who reverently joins his desire 
 with the desire of his fellows ; but he who while 
 professing to pray with his neighbours allows 
 himself to become a mere spectator of his neigh- 
 bour's prayer : he it is who really violates the 
 privacy of the House of God. 
 
 After all, then, it is the closet, and not the 
 church, which is the primary or typical oratory. 
 Spiritual life never continues to be individual 
 only ; it becomes also social : but it is individual 
 first of all. It is born in the secrecy of the soul ; 
 it is nurtured in the secrecy of the closet. Con- 
 stituted as men are, it is impossible to be in the 
 presence of others so absolutely unconscious of 
 witnesses, so perfectly spontaneous, so unaffectedly 
 true, as we may be where only God can see us. 
 To know how far the devotional feeling of which 
 we are conscious in social worship is genuine, it 
 is needful to carry it into the cool, hushed, and 
 lonely presence-chamber of the secret Father, and 
 submit it there to the scrutiny of His testing eye 
 and of our own. The habit of worshipping ex- 
 
186 TJu Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. clusively in the presence of even the nearest and 
 
 SECOND most congenial of fellow- Christians — supposing it 
 
 ■ possible for a Christian — would put in peril the 
 
 integrity and simplicity of any man's religion. 
 
 It would beo'et an evil consciousness of self at 
 
 o 
 
 the most solemn moments of life. It would 
 hinder religious emotion from penetrating beneath 
 the surface, and by keeping it dependent on the 
 sympathy of others, would degrade it into a 
 sentiment. It would tempt him to look more to 
 the form than to the spirit of his worship. It 
 would be apt to confuse the singleness of his 
 regard to God, as the Witness, no less than the 
 Object, of his adoration. Above all, it would 
 interfere with the outspokenness and utterly un- 
 reserved frankness with which each child of God 
 should address his heavenly Father. Eeligion 
 may be said to commence when a soul ceases to 
 keep back any secret from God. To live always 
 bare to the soul's core in His sight is the condition 
 of healthful religion. To speak out in His ear 
 what cannot be spoken in another's — those incom- 
 municable things which only each man's own 
 1 Cor. ii. 11 ; c. spirit knows, and which can be told even to God 
 only in such inarticulate groans as need a divine 
 Interpreter : this is that manner of praying which 
 is a necessity in the religious life, and which 
 
Prayer. 187 
 
 can only be reached in secret. The reason for part ii. 
 this necessity runs down into that mysterious second 
 
 T, 1 • 1 1 1 1 • , APPLICATION. 
 
 personality which makes every human being at 
 the last resort a solitude, impervious to his fellow, 
 accessible only to his God. Largely indeed it is 
 with sin, the peculiar consciousness of which each 
 man takes to be an unparalleled and incommuni- 
 cable experience of his own; with sin, and with 
 the secret struc^orle he has to make ac^ainst it, 
 that the solitary confessions and petitions of a 
 Christian must for the present be occupied. Yet 
 this necessity for solitary prayer is so far from 
 resting on the evil state of man that it is rather 
 found to increase as men make progress toward 
 perfection ;. while the memorable example of our 
 Lord Himself, throwing back light upon His words, 
 demonstrates how indispensable even to a perfect 
 Son of God was such retirement from human 
 sight into the solitary presence of His Father. 
 
 This retreat therefore from all human presences 
 back into that One Presence where we can be 
 nakedly ourselves, and can breathe all secrets 
 into an ear which perfectly understands, and lean 
 all weakness upon a bosom which perfectly loves ; 
 this retreat which Jesus Himself was forced on Cf. Mark i. 35; 
 
 , , . , , , Luke vi. 12; 
 
 several occasions to seek by night on a lonely Matt. xiv. 23, 
 hill or in an orchard, is not only the sweetest their parallels. 
 
SECOND 
 APPLICATION 
 
 188 The Laius of the Kingdom. 
 
 luxury of genuine spiritual life, but its supreme 
 necessity. The place to which a man may retire 
 to be with God is of such inferior moment that 
 in case of need any place will answer. To be 
 literally without human companionship or the 
 risk of observation is no doubt most desirable. 
 Among the numerous evils which spring from 
 the overcrowding of both the urban and the rural 
 poor into insufficient dwellings, the absence of a 
 private room, or at least of a noiseless and undis- 
 turbed corner for prayer, is not to be overlooked. 
 In the country, to be sure, one can generally walk 
 Gen. xxiv. 63. alone, like Isaac, in the fields ; but it is hard to 
 see what retreat from intrusion is left to the pent- 
 up city poor, whose wretched lodgings do not even 
 boast that store-room with a door to it which 
 Jesus took for granted might be found in any 
 ordinary Jewish home.^ If it v/ere not too entire 
 a departure from English habits, one w^ould be 
 tempted to wish that our churches in crowded 
 localities could be utilized on week-days for 
 private prayer, or else some smaller and more 
 
 1 The word rendered ' closet ' is not that by which the ' upper 
 room, ' or guest-room, of a Jewish house is commonly indicated 
 {vTipMov), but TcifAilov (or Tocy-nlov), rendered 'storehouse ' in Luke 
 xii. 24, and 'secret chamber' in Matt. xxiv. 26. It probably is 
 purposely general, and signifies any small or subsidiary room 
 not usually employed for living in. 
 
Prayer. 189 
 
 secluded oratories provided, to which weary souls 
 might retire at a spare moment, in search of that 
 peace and spiritual refreshment which must be 
 sought in vain where the voices of boisterous 
 neighbours are always audible through the frail 
 partition, and the tiny strip of domestic floor room 
 must serve the ends at once of kitchen and of 
 nursery. It is quite beyond any one's power to 
 estimate how far this mere want of opportunity 
 for retirement is daily operating to drive all 
 religious reflection and private prayer out of the 
 lives of thousands of our English poor. What is 
 so excessively inconvenient is sure to be treated 
 by most people as a practical impossibility. At 
 the same time, it is never really impossible to be 
 alone with God. To be silent and to think, 
 always means to be alone. The seclusion which 
 we may make within our own bosom is a closer 
 solitude than that of bolted doors,-^ And the soul 
 that has once pushed its way with struggle and 
 pain through that guilty silence which like a wall 
 holds back the impenitent from the face of God, 
 and has once tasted the inexpressible deliciousness 
 of being confidential with its reconciled Father ; 
 
 ^ So some of the Fathers, as Origen and Augustine, expounded 
 the ' closet ; ' but a literal removal iuto solitude must be in- 
 tended, where it is practicable. 
 
 SECOND 
 APPLICATION. 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 190 TJic Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 that soul must and will again and again make 
 SECOND for itself times and places and methods for getting 
 back into sweet colloquy with the secret Author 
 of its life, with the only One before Whom it has 
 nothing to conceal, and from Whom it has every- 
 thing to hope. 
 
 Our Father Who is in secret loves to be the 
 one privileged Intimate of each heart among His 
 children. In the preference for Him which 
 forces a man to be dissatisfied with all meaner 
 company ; in the trustfulness which dares to teU 
 Him everything; in that self- asserting irrepressible 
 instinct of childship which must cry out to its 
 unseen Father, though philosophy should dis- 
 suade, and reason should lose its way in its effort 
 to justify the cry : in all this the paternal Heart 
 on high finds such delight as paternal hearts 
 below would find ; and each low breathino- which 
 goes up unseen from any tender tearful penitent 
 or from a warm affectionate worshipper, goes, 
 like a sigfh from some heart of little child too 
 
 o 
 
 fond to speak, straight unto the Father. 
 
 He shall reward it, said the Son of His love. 
 But I trust we know that He doth reward it ; 
 not ' openly ' indeed, nor always by manifest ac- 
 complishment of such things as our ignorance 
 may solicit ; never perhaps in such ways as can 
 
APPLICATION. 
 
 Prayer. 191 
 
 be tabulated in our statistics ; yet is His response part h. 
 none the less certain, because it is as secret as our second 
 prayer was secret, felt only by the instinct of 
 love, and given only to the heart of the child. 
 So surely as he who hath been born of God must 
 have that to say unto his Father which can be 
 spoken in no other ear, so surely shall the great 
 Father make such answer within His child as it 
 is not given to any stranger to surmise. There 
 are more things passing betwixt heaven and earth 
 than are dreamt of in our philosophy ; and divine 
 love, like the earthly, has secrets of its own. 
 Wouldst thou know them for thyself ? Then 
 ' enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy 
 door,' learn there how to 'pray to thy Father 
 Which is in secret;' for thee also 'thy Father 
 Which seeth in secret shall reward.' 
 
EXCUESUS 
 
 THE MODEL PEAYEE. 
 
But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen 
 do : for they think that they shall he heard for their much 
 speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your 
 Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask 
 Him. After this manner therefore pray ye: ''Our Father, 
 Which art in heaven! Hallowed he Thy Name: Thy kingdom 
 come : Thy will he done in earth as it is in heaven : Give us 
 this day our daily hread: And forgive -us our dehts, as we 
 forgive our dehtors : And lead us not into temptation, but 
 deliver us from evil: [For Thine is the kingdom and the 
 poicer and the glory for ever, Amen'].'' For if ye forgive men 
 their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: 
 hut if ye forgive not m^n their trespasses, neither will your 
 Father forgive your trespasses. — Matt. vi. 7-15. 
 
 Cf, Luke xi. 1-4. 
 
 194 
 
EXCURSUS: THE MODEL PRAYER. 
 
 "DEFORE leaving the subject of prayer, to part ii. 
 -*-^ apply His law of secrecy to fasting as excursus. 
 the third constituent in Hebrew ' righteousness/ 
 Jesus turns aside from His rebuke of hypocrisy 
 to forbid another abuse, no less inconsistent with 
 the true idea of worship. Superstition is a disease 
 as inveterate in every false religion as hypocrisy 
 is in the true. But although it has always 
 attached itself by preference to heathen faiths^ 
 there is enough of native heathenism in every hu- 
 man heart to develop superstitious practices even 
 in the worship of the true God. Degenerate Juda- 
 ism, like degenerate Christianity, had its occasional 
 paganism. The notion that God is a Being Who 
 can be wrought upon by the mechanical iteration 
 of petitions till they become wearisome, was 
 indeed too foreign from the spiritual monotheism 
 of Israel ever to become popular. From the 
 earliest instance in Scripture of vain repetition, 
 when Baal's Phoenician priests called on his name i Kings xviii 
 
 26 
 
 from morn till noon, down to the latest, when 
 
 195 
 
196 The Lavjs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. Diana's votaries at Epliesus shouted out her great- 
 
 ExcuRsus. ness 'about the space of two hours/ it is on 
 
 Acts xix. 34. heathen ground that we find it flourish. The fact, 
 
 Eccies. V. 1,2; however, that Hebrew teachers of various ages 
 
 andtheKlbbis! found it needful to warn their countrymen against 
 
 it, suasests that devout Jews must often have 
 
 betrayed some tendency to fall into this error. 
 
 See p. 181. The truth is, that, as we have seen, it has at 
 
 bottom the same root as hypocrisy. A religion 
 
 of forms, such as the Pharisees practised, runs 
 
 very readily into a religion of charms, such as 
 
 pagans believe in. When the Pharisee recited 
 
 Matt, xxiii. 14. his ' long prayer ' in order to appear devout, his 
 
 prayer was only said, not prayed. Whatever trust 
 
 he placed in its efficacy, therefore, was likely to 
 
 rest, not on its sincerity, but on its' length or 
 
 frequency ; and the more he expected from his 
 
 devotions, he would be only the more apt to rely 
 
 upon the reiteration of them. . Forms of prayer, 
 
 which, in order to please men, had been at first 
 
 repeated as a pretence, would thus come to be 
 
 repeated, in order to please God, as a charm. In 
 
 either case prayer became a vain thing : only its 
 
 vanity was in the one case the vanity of falsehood ; 
 
 in the other, the vanity of folly. Betwixt these 
 
 two poles, all false religion for ever vibrates. 
 
 Por both hypocritical and superstitious prayers, 
 
Tlu Model Prayer. 197 
 
 the remedy is similar. A just conception of part ir. 
 
 what prayer is as the offering up of childlike excursus. 
 
 desire to One Who is in secret, will always save 
 
 us, if we are faithful to it, from saying our 
 
 prayers 'for a pretence.' A- just conception of 
 
 His character to Whom our prayers are offered, 
 
 will equally save us from saying them as an 
 
 incantation. The heathen ' think that they shall 
 
 be heard for their much speaking,' because they 
 
 have a heathenish notion of the Divine Being. 
 
 They suppose Him to be ignorant of their need 
 
 till He is told; disinclined to help them till 
 
 He is importuned ; capricious, so that He must 
 
 be humoured ; or indolent, so that He can be Cf. ouundere 
 
 Deos: Terence. 
 
 pestered into compliance. It is nothing else but 
 a parallel mistake as to the nature of God which 
 is made by those ignorant Christians w^ho duti- 
 fully repeat every day certain formal petitions 
 which express no real desire, or mumble over 
 the same form of prayer scores of times without 
 stopping, under the belief that such a mechanical 
 style of worship is pleasing to the Eternal. Surely 
 it is no less unworthy of the Father to fancy that 
 He can be gratified by empty phrases which 
 mean nothing, or that He will find some merit 
 to reward in the pattering of beads, than it w^ould 
 be to attract His attention by shouting or win 
 
198 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 His favour by self4aceration, like the priests of 
 Baal. To ' acquaint ' oneself with the true God 
 is here, as in so many things, to ' be at peace.' 
 Jesus discloses the Father to us ; and our worship 
 becomes rational by becoming filial. Our Father 
 knoAvs before we speak what it is that we would 
 have, and before we are willing to ask, He is 
 ready to bestow. He needs neither to be 
 informed, nor to be coaxed, nor to be wrought 
 upon. He waits indeed for the voice of His 
 child to be lifted up in a lowly sense of want, 
 with earnest desire for a gift ; and that the child 
 may be led to lift up a voice of prayer, the Father 
 may often find it meet to leave its sore need for 
 a while unfilled : but He neither waits for, nor 
 can be in the least moved by, anything else. 
 
 Of course, this true and perfect fatherliness in 
 God, while it condemns as futile all repetition 
 merely for speaking's sake, does not condemn, 
 but, on the contrary, encourages, the importunity 
 of earnest and even passionate longing. He to 
 Whom we pray knows us too well and loves us too 
 much to be displeased when the overfull heart 
 of His child cannot content itself with few or 
 cold words, said once and said no more ; but 
 i\:att. xx\'i. 39- like the Son in the olive-yard, sends up petition 
 
 41 ; Heb. v. 7 ; ... , it.- -it 
 
 cf. att. xi. 12. on petition m spontaneous reduplication, mingled 
 
The Model Praijer. 199 
 
 too with siicli ' strong crying and tears/ as part ii. 
 though the soul would, with violence not to be kxcuksus. 
 gainsaid, besiege the very gate of heaven. -^ God 
 has as little need to be importuned as He has to 
 be informed ; yet for the same reason that He 
 would have us pray at all, would He have us 
 pray with the fervency and frequency of an Jas. v. 16, 
 ' inwrought' desire. He who has no belief in God 
 will not pray to Him at all. He who has some 
 misshapen belief in Him as other than He is, 
 may use prayer as a meritorious or a magical 
 instrument for the securing of benefits. But the 
 christian man, who trusts in the perfect know- 
 ledge and kindness of God as his Father, and 
 who knows that prayer is nothing but the 
 unfettered spontaneous utterance in his Father's 
 ear of all that the soul, when blown upon 
 by the breath of God, can feel or wish, will 
 neither force himself to repeat prayers when he 
 desires nothing, nor restrain himself from any 
 fashion of praying or continuance in it, which 
 is prompted by genuine emotion. He Who 
 inspires desire, may well be trusted to understand 
 and to excuse its utterances. 
 
 1 To the point are Augustine's words, quoted by Meyer, in loc. : 
 Absit ab oratione multa locutio, sed non desit multa precatio, 
 si fervens perseveret intentio. 
 
200 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. It was, in the first instance, as a pattern of what 
 
 EXCURSUS. OTir prayers ought to be, if we would avoid this 
 fault of heathenish repetition, that our Lord here 
 introduced the form which we are accustomed to 
 call by His name. On a subsequent occasion, 
 uke xi. 1, 2. indeed, mentioned by St. Luke, He showed that 
 He had designed it to be used for a liturgy, 
 as well as a model ; since, when His followers 
 begged that He would do as the Baptist and 
 . other Jewish masters had done — would teach 
 them words to pray in. He dictated substantially 
 the same petitions which He had given in the 
 Sermon on the Mount, and bade them repeat 
 these when they prayed. We have therefore 
 ample warrant for either the public or the private 
 employment of the very words of this divine 
 liturgy, as often as in our prayers we feel our 
 need of such assistance. We shall also be justi- 
 fied, I think, in taking its petitions to be a divine 
 directory for all prayer. Our Lord can hardly 
 have intended to restrict His rubric, ' After 
 this manner pray ye,' to mean only. After this 
 manner of brevity and simplicity in style ; but 
 also, After this manner of thought and desire. 
 When Jesus did by us as we do by the little 
 ones — put (so to say) our hands together, and 
 bade us look up into the sky and say after Him 
 
The Model Prayer. 201 
 
 in simple phrase, ' Our Father, Which art in part ii. 
 Heaven ; ' He could not but set ns an example as excursus. 
 perfect in the matter, as it is in the manner, of it. 
 In the first instance, however, it is to the form 
 rather than to the contents of this model, that 
 the connection compels our attention. Because 
 our christian prayers are not to be like those of 
 heathens, ' therefore ' we are to order them after 
 the fashion of this standard. That must mean, 
 that our prayers are to be brief, direct, com- 
 prehensive, orderly, and real. Very brief is 
 the model He sets, according to that word 
 of Solomon's : ' God is in heaven, and thou Eccles. v. 2. 
 upon earth ; therefore let thy words be few.' 
 The youngest memory is not burdened to retain 
 these ' few words.' Each clause is perfect in 
 terseness, stripped bare of every word not indis- 
 pensable, and looks alongside our overloaded 
 devotional phraseology like tlie skeleton of a 
 prayer. There is absolutely no repetition ; the 
 petitioner moves at once from each naked but 
 weighty request to the next. How direct, too, is 
 every word ! As though the suppliant kept silence 
 till he quite clearly saw what it was he needed 
 to ask, and having simply asked for it without 
 vagueness or circumlocution, was silent again. 
 One feels as if a great pause ought to separate 
 
202 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. the several clauses ; a pause to be filled up 
 EXCURSUS, with calm thought and the preparation of the 
 heart for a new request. It is from this back- 
 ground of reverent meditative silence that the 
 petitions appear to go up at intervals — each one 
 piercing heaven like an even-feathered arrow 
 shot by a strong arm. In every clause, too, 
 what a world of desire is shut up ! No more 
 than six requests, or seven at most ;^ yet though 
 the words might be lisped by infant's lips, 
 the whole wide round of human want and of 
 christian desire is traversed and gathered up. 
 Each clause mioht stand as the title to an entire 
 chapter in the universal prayer-book of the 
 Church ; for under these half-dozen comprehen- 
 sive head-lines you may range all the possible 
 supplications, however varied, of God's vast chris- 
 tian family. The fulness of devotional longing 
 condensed into each petition neither narrows 
 the worshipper's horizon nor obscures his logical 
 vision; for in this prayer, all those objects for 
 which men ought to ask find a place, and each 
 
 ^ In the "West, they have commonly been reckoned as six ; in 
 the East, as seven. Were it not for the ixxa. in ver. 13, one could 
 hardly be persuaded to treat so splendid a prayer as * Deliver 
 us from the evil' as only a repetition in more positive and 
 general terms of the preceding words : * Lead us not into temp- 
 tation. ' 
 
The Model Prayer. 203 
 
 its proper place. From things divine to things part h. 
 human, from temporal to spiritual need, the excursus. 
 well-ordered sentences progress. Sober judgment 
 keeps its hand even on the movements of devout 
 emotion; and while nothing is forgotten, there 
 is nothing overstrained. In a word, the most 
 intense reality characterizes this model of prayer ; 
 arising from the concentration of a man's whole 
 nature — intellect, spirit, and purpose — all bent 
 to know what things are the most desirable, and, 
 with childlike straightforwardness and such ab- 
 sorption as renders the petitioner unconscious of 
 others, to beg those things from the Father in 
 heaven. ' After this manner, therefore, pray ye.' 
 
 When from its form we pass to the contents 
 of the Lord's Prayer, still carrying in our hand 
 as a clue this rulin^ thousjht, that it is the 
 type upon which all prayers are in their own 
 way to be modelled, we find it still more full 
 of teaching. 
 
 1. The invocation, by the name which it gives 
 to God and the terms in which it teaches us to 
 address Him, gives the key-note of christian 
 supplication. It is for this reason the most 
 distinctively christian part of the whole. The 
 six petitions, if not all borrowed (as the first and 
 
204 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. second of them are said to be ^) from rabbinical forms 
 EXCURSUS, of prayer which may be as old as Jesus' day, are at 
 least conceived in a Hebrew quite as much as in 
 a christian spirit. They are too catholic to wear 
 any novel or peculiar colour. They belong to the 
 new dispensation, but to that part of it which it 
 shares with the old. They are in place on chris- 
 tian, but not out of place on Jewish, lips. The 
 doxology, on the other hand, which appears to 
 have been added, in the East at least, at a very 
 early date,^ in order to adapt the prayer to litur- 
 gical use in the public worship of the Church, is 
 so Jewish in its form that it may have been, or 
 probably was, condensed from the words with 
 1 Chron. xxix. which King David blessed Jehovah on the day 
 of his successor's coronation. Had it been desired 
 to append some concluding clause which should 
 express the natural response of every christian 
 heart to all those requests which Jesus here puts 
 into the Christian's mouth, the appropriate phrase 
 
 ' For the evidence of this, see references in Tholuck, Grotius, 
 and others. 
 
 2 The authority of the best mss. (Vat., Sin., D, etc.) com- 
 pel us, 1 fancy, to reject the doxology from the text, as Tisch- 
 endorf, Olshausen, Meyer, Tholuck, and most modern scholars 
 do. Its absence in all the Latin Fathers showed that it can 
 only have gained a late currency in the Western Church. On 
 the other hand, it is found in the Syriac Peschito, supposed to 
 date from the second century. 
 
The Model Praijer. 205 
 
 would have been one bearing on the mediatorial part ii. 
 propitiation and advocacy of Jesus Himself. ISTo excursus. 
 express allusion to this could be appropriate, so ^^^^^/h ^' 
 lonsj as Jesus stood within the confines of the ^X- ^ > '^^^^ 
 
 ° vii. 39. 
 
 Hebrew dispensation — His work of atonement 
 unaccomplished, and the Spirit Who should in- 
 augurate the new economy not yet given. But 
 from the beginning of her history, the instincts 
 of the Christian Church must have supplied that 
 unexpressed basis on which all acceptable prayer 
 now takes its stand, since we have been taught 
 that no man cometh unto the Father but by the John xiv. 6. 
 Son. For the characteristic christian tone of this 
 prayer, therefore, we must look to the invocation 
 alone. What neither the body of the prayer nor 
 its conclusion does, is virtually done for it by its 
 opening words. It was Jesus Christ Who re- 
 vealed God to be ' Our Father in heaven ; ' and 
 it is the disciples of Jesus Christ who are entitled 
 on the ground of regeneration and adoption to 
 address Him by that name. For though in some 
 few scattered texts of the Old Testament the 
 peculiar relation of the Israelitish people to 
 Jehovah had been expressed under the image of 
 paternity,^ yet it was our Lord Who first adopted 
 
 ^ Deut. xxxii. 6 is the seed-text in this connection. Compare 
 Isa. Ixiii. 16, Ixiv. 8 ; Jer. iii. 4, 19, xxxi. 9 ; and Malachi i. 6. 
 
206 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. tins name of ' Father ' as tlie one proper name 
 EXCURSUS. Tinder whicli alone He Himself knew or ever spoke 
 of Him from Whom He had come. So exclusive 
 was Jesus' employment of the word as His own 
 name for God, that it could not but awaken 
 attention when He habitually encouraged His 
 followers also, and none but His folio w^ers,^ to 
 think of the Most High as their Father too. It 
 was only by receiving Jesus as the Son of God, 
 by believing on Him as the image of the Father, 
 and by becoming one with Him, that the disciples 
 of Jesus learned to address the Eternal, as they 
 are here taught to do, under this endearing name. 
 There is a great deal more of loving and confiding 
 
 Jehovah called Himself a Father with special reference to 
 David, in the promise of 2 Sam. vii. 14 (1 Chron. xvii. 13), to 
 which Ps. Ixxxix. 26, 27 refers. The comparison in Ps. ciii. 13 
 bears only on one aspect of the relationship, and can hardly be 
 included in this short list, which comprises, T think, all the 
 passages of this class in the Old Testament. The use of the 
 word in this connection became more frequent and explicit after 
 the close of the Hebrew canon : cf. Ecclus. xxiii. 1 ; Tobit xiii. 
 4 ; Wisdom xiv. 3 ; and especially the remarkable passage in 
 the latter book : ii. 12-20. In our Lord's time, it was the 
 boast of the nation that God was its Father ; see John viii. 41. 
 ^ A comparison of the passages in the Evangelists (s. Bruder, 
 s. V. vccTtf) in which our Lord spoke of God as * your Father ' 
 will show that, without one exception, He was addressing, not 
 a mixed audience, but His own disciples. The passages are 
 (besides those in this Sermon on the Mount and its parallels) : 
 Matt. x. 20, 29, xiii. 43, xviii. 14, xxiii. 9, Mark xi. 25, 
 and John xx. 17. 
 
The Model Prayer. 207 
 
 familiarity in such a form of address than we part ii. 
 should have dared of ourselves, either as creatures excursus. 
 or as criminals, to cherish. It is the Eternal Son, 
 Who, having brought us near by the blood of His Eph. ii. 13. 
 cross and begotten us again by His Spirit, leads 
 us by the hand to the bosom of infinite love, and 
 encourages us, not as though we were exceptional 
 favourites, but as members of a reconciled family/ 
 to whisper the sweetest of names. At the same 
 time, it is the peculiarity of this filial affection 
 that it joins with such familiarity tlie lowliest 
 and most submissive reverence. He Who has 
 heTe taught us to lift our eyes to the lofty place 
 where our Father dwells was the most reverential 
 of men. In the" blending of these two feelings 
 which this invocation suggests — of the love which 
 draws boldly near, and the awe which restrains 
 from over-boldness — lies the just temper of all 
 christian prayer. Our prayers may be at one time 
 more intimate, and at another more distant, accord- 
 ing as the heart is touched. At one time, the 
 worshipper may feel with greater force that he is 
 a son, and at another that his Father is in heaven. 
 What is essential is that intimacy should never 
 
 ^ This seems to be employed in the plural pronoun ' Our. ' 
 At the same time, this was customary in Jewish forms of prayer 
 even when designed for private use. 
 
208 The Lavjs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. degenerate on the one side into the audacity of 
 EXCURSUS, disrespect, nor awe grow on the other to faithless 
 and nnfilial fear. And this golden mean will 
 always be observed, so long as the spirit of all 
 christian prayer shall answer the model invoca- 
 tion : ' Our Father Which art in heaven.' 
 
 2. The division and arrangement of the peti- 
 tions point further to the spirit w^hich ought to 
 rule our christian desires. Jesus teaches us to 
 pray in a noble, disinterested, and godly way. 
 Before He suffers us to descend to those requests 
 which touch our personal wants, even the most 
 urgent, He lifts our hearts, as the hearts of children 
 ought to be lifted, into sympathy with the larger 
 purposes of our Father in heaven. In obedience to 
 His own rule (to be laid down a little later). 
 He sets us out of ourselves into a divine unselfish- 
 ness, and bids us ' seek first the kingdom of God 
 and His righteousness ' before we ask any of those 
 other things which require to be added unto us. 
 The first place in our desires, like the first table 
 So Calvin, in of our duty, belongs to God. That the world 
 should be brought to recognise, as God's children 
 have learned to do, the awful sanctity and sepa- 
 rate incommunicable majesty of His revealed 
 character as Christ has declared it to us, so as to 
 feel its own sins against the Holy One and peni- 
 
The Model Prayer. 209 
 
 tently return to a practical acknowledgment of part ii. 
 God; that the true theocracy, or divine rule over excursus. 
 the earth, foretold in Hebrew Scriptures, should 
 be universally set up by the exaltation of God's 
 Anointed Kincj and the submission of all men to 
 His spiritual control ; and that, as the consum- 
 mation of this saving process, rebellion should die 
 out of the earth, and every human will, brought 
 back to its allecjiance, should move once more in 
 free and glad obedience to that supreme Will 
 which sways unfallen and celestial spirits : this 
 threefold desire for the success of God's work 
 of restoration, in its beginning, middle, and end, is 
 to be the foremost passion of every child of God, 
 as it is the Father's own abidiiicj and most cher- 
 ished purpose. So distiDctly did Jesus rebuke 
 by anticipation that subtle selfishness in religion 
 which cares for itself first, and only in the second 
 place for God's honour or authority. It is to be 
 remembered indeed that this is a prayer for men 
 already reconciled to God ; and therefore it can- 
 not be applied Avithout modification to the case of 
 the unregenerato, whose foremost duty, as well as 
 most urgent interest, it must always be to repent 
 and call upon the name of the Lord that they Acts ix. 21 j 
 may be saved. So far as they are concerned, this quotecffrom 
 is the one way in which the divine Name needs "^^^^ "* ^^' 
 
 
210 TliG Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. in the first instance to be hallowed and the divine 
 EXCURSUS. Kingdom to come. It is to be expected that a 
 man who has once been lifted into the fellowship 
 of Christ will be free to consider wider interests. 
 To pray for one's own individual wants as if there 
 were no greater or more clamant need beneath 
 the sun, is not to be like Jesus. The Christian 
 who looks abroad with eyes like those of a son of 
 God will see one tremendous want on earth 
 which dwarfs every personal consideration. That 
 everywhere among men God's name is profaned, 
 God's rule defied, God's will broken ; this is that 
 sight which the soul of God's child will soonest 
 cry out for : and when admitted into the presence- 
 chamber to lay at God's feet whatever weighs 
 most heavily on his heart, this will be the cry which 
 rises soonest to his lips, that the dishonoured 
 Father be once more revered, the Father's dis- 
 owned supremacy restored, and the Father's 
 broken orders again obeyed. 
 
 3. Another point in which this model prayer 
 is exemplary is in the place it assigns to tem- 
 poral blessings. Against the overdriven spiritu- 
 ality which affects to be too indifferent to earthly 
 good to think it worth asking for, Jesus vindicates 
 a place for it in our prayers.-^ But against the 
 
 1 To this overdriven spirituality we must set it down, when 
 
The Model Prayer. 211 
 
 worldliness which would prostitute prayer into a part iii 
 mere instrument for averting material disaster or excursus. 
 securing material benefit, Jesus has restricted our 
 desires to the most modest necessaries. It is not 
 inconsistent with that trustful dependence on the 
 spontaneous bounty of Him, Whose open hand 
 feeds the birds of the air, of which Jesus goes See Matt. vi. 
 on by and bye to speak, that we should be per- 
 mitted to solicit what is needful for the life of 
 to-day, or even a bare provision against to-morrow.^ 
 Eather, it is the most natural and becoming 
 expression of that hand-to-mouth dependence (if 
 I may so express it). For the poor man, it is 
 good that he is encouraged to lay even this mean 
 but gnawing care of his heart before the great 
 House -Father, lest he sliould be tempted to 
 distrust of providence. For the rich man, it is 
 no less good that he should be reminded of the 
 insecurity of earthly abundance and made a beg- 
 gar at the gate of God, not for wealth, but for 
 food. But there is no encouragement to be got 
 
 Olsliaiisen reads even this petition in a spiritual sense. See his . 
 Commentary in loc. 
 
 ^ There is much to be said for the derivation of that difficult 
 word l^r/oyc/o?, which our version renders 'daily,' from hl-Tnovffa,,. 
 In that case we should read, * Give us to-day our bread for 
 to-morrow. ' The rendering * daily ' is in any case extremely 
 doubtful. 
 
212 The Lay:s of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. from these words for the habit of importuning God 
 EXCURSUS, for such success, prosperity, or immunity from 
 trial as God has not promised, and may send, 
 if He send it at all, for a temptation or a penalty. 
 4. The last lesson of this prayer which I shall 
 mention is of such special moment and so hard 
 to learn, that our Lord Himself has called atten- 
 tion to it, by what may be termed a note of ex- 
 planation appended to the fifth petition. That 
 the divine forgiveness is conditioned by a for- 
 giving temper in the suppliant was not a new 
 thought to the hearers of this Sermon ; for it is 
 Matt. V. 7. the suljject of one of those Beatitudes with which 
 Cf. Matt, xviii. the Scrmoii opened. But it was a favourite point 
 25/26; Luke ill our Lord's teaching : and we nowhere find it 
 put with greater emphasis or earnestness than in 
 the words appended to this prayer. That it is 
 even embedded in the texture of the prayer 
 itself; that where brevity was so much studied 
 as here, Jesus could not teach us to say, ' Forgive 
 ns our debts,' without bidding us add in the same 
 breath, ' as we forgive our debtors ; ' suggests how 
 absolute is this condition of our pardon and how 
 essential to be perpetually kept in mind. These 
 words take for granted tliat we have already 
 Cf. Matt. V. pardoned all offenders against ourselves before we 
 
 23-25. 
 
 pray, and are, as Jesus had already taught that 
 
Tlie Model Prayer. 213 
 
 we should be, in peace with all men. If, however, part h. 
 any one should presume to present this petition ExcuRsua 
 to Almighty God with a resentful or implacable 
 heart, then must we not say that it will turn in 
 his mouth into a terrific petition against forgive- 
 ness ? For then it will run thus, in the ear of 
 God : Forgive not my debts, as I do not forgive 
 my debtors. The truth is, the attitude of true 
 prayer is ipso facto inconsistent with revenge or 
 unmercifulness ; for it assumes a prior repentance 
 for sin, and a present sympathy with the mind of 
 * the Father of mercies,' both of which exclude 2 Cor. i 3. 
 the diabolic spirit of unforgiving anger. 
 
 To open up at length the comprehensive sense 
 of each of these six petitions would require a 
 chapter to be devoted to each.^ All that is here 
 demanded of us by the connection in which this 
 model form occurs as an appendix to tlie present 
 section of our Lord's discourse, is that we should 
 try to gather up such general hints as it was 
 intended to afford respecting the form, the matter, 
 and the spirit of our own daily prayers. Much as 
 it has been used by the Church, and often as it 
 recurs in the family and social worship of devout 
 
 ' In recent literature, this has been thoughtfully and elegantly 
 done by Mr. Dods, in his 'Prayer that Teaches to Pray.* 
 (Edin. 1863.) 
 
214 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PAKT II. persons, it may be doubted whether its lessons 
 iixcuKsus. as a teaching specimen or condensed directory 
 for supplication have ever been sufficiently ap- 
 preciated. It was the manner of Jesus to instruct 
 by example ; and by this type-form He certainly 
 sought to impress upon the mind of His subjects 
 in all subsequent ages that they should address 
 themselves to prayer as a real, and, though rever- 
 ential, yet most confiding, converse with God as 
 their holy and gracious Father ; that their words 
 to Him should be few, well ordered, and child- 
 like ; that, while they might humbly represent 
 their immediate and most pressing earthly wants, 
 what it chiefly became them to beg at His hand 
 was deliverance from His displeasure and from sin ; 
 but that, before all personal mercies, it was their 
 priest-like privilege as God's children to enter 
 with sympathy into His own large thoughts of 
 love for all mankind, and to seek what He seeks, 
 the manifestation of His glory by the reduction 
 of the world into obedience to His perfect will. 
 Tor no other exercise of worship, except the 
 sacraments, did the Son of God think it worth 
 while to prescribe a model. But He Who 
 found in prayer the means of keeping up in His 
 strange human exile and at the distance of our 
 earth that most intimate and tender intercourse 
 
The Model Prayer. 215 
 
 which He had with His eternal Father before love part n. 
 drew Him into flesh, stooped patiently to teach excursus. 
 us how by prayer we too, ' who sometime were Eph. ii. 13. 
 far off ' and shut out from God, might reopen com- 
 munications with the Unseen, and become active 
 members of that spiritual family whose Head is 
 glad to hearken when His children speak and 
 prompt to answer when they ask. This Elder 
 Brother never looked more touchinsj in His low- 
 liness than when He dictated in brief and easy 
 words the prayers of us sinful men to our 
 Father Who is in heaven. Such prayers are as 
 far removed from the folly of superstition as from 
 the falsehood of hypocrisy. 
 
THIED APPLICATION 
 
 TO FASTING. 
 
 217 
 
Moreover, when ye fast, he not, as the hypocrites, of a sad 
 countenance : for they disfigure their faces that they may 
 appear unto men to fast. Verily, I say unto you. They have 
 their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine 
 head and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to 
 fast, hut unto thy Father Which is in secret: and thy Father 
 Which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. — Matt. vi. 
 16-18. 
 
 219 
 
THIRD APPLICATION: TO FASTING. 
 
 ABSTINENCE for a time, either from all food part n. 
 or from a free indulgence in it, or from the third 
 
 1 1. ■[ • J r '4. ■ ' p-i? APPLICATION. 
 
 more pleasant kinds of it, is an expression of grief 
 so very natural as in some instances to become 
 involuntary. The man whose whole life is taken 
 possession of by a recent and severe calamity 
 cannot eat as at other times, even if he would. 
 No real mourner will be nice in his choice of 
 viands, although he may consent to still the crav- 
 ings of hunger. Abstinence, therefore, partial or 
 total, becomes part of that natural language by 
 which men have always striven to express in 
 their behaviour the grief of their heart. It may 
 be grief accompanied by indignation, like Jona- l Sam. xx. 34. 
 than's at the furious envy of his father against 
 his friend David ; or grief accompanied by 
 anxiety, such as David's own when his infant's 2 Sam. xii. 16. 
 life hung in the balance ; or the grief of prolonged 
 disappointment, as when Hannah mourned her i Sam. i. 7. 
 want of children ; or the grief of vexation and 
 alarm which consumed Darius during the sleep- Dan. vi. 18. 
 219 
 
220 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. less night when his first officer of state lay in a 
 
 THIRD den of lions : for abstinence is natural under any 
 
 ' ' of those emotions which are at once overmastering 
 
 and depressing. Or the fast may be adopted in 
 
 that species of social mourning, as for a public 
 
 disaster or a private bereavement, which seeks 
 
 expression in ways more or less conventional. 
 
 The troops of the ten tribes fasted after their de- 
 
 Judg. XX. 26. feat in the old civil war against Benjamin ; the 
 
 1 Sam. xxxi. population of Jabesh fasted for a week after the 
 
 i 12, ik :i5. * fatal fight in which the king fell at Gilboa. 
 
 From instances like these, one passes naturally 
 to fasting as an accompaniment of religious 
 exercises. Men accustomed to express other 
 kinds of grief by abstinence from their wonted 
 meals will naturally adopt the same expression 
 for devout sorrow on account of sin. In this 
 way fasting has passed into the religious usages 
 of worshippers in many lands and under various 
 faiths. For sanitary reasons, dependent chiefly 
 on climate and customary diet, it has been most 
 prevalent among orientals. Eare in ancient 
 Greece, it was frequent among the Egyptians and 
 Persians, as it is to this day throughout Moham- 
 medan countries.^ It could hardly fail to find a 
 place in the religious rites of the Palestine 
 
 * Cf. Winer, Realworterhuch, sub voce. 
 
Fasting. 221 
 
 Hebrews, even if it had been entirely passed over part n. 
 in their divine statute-book. It was not entirely third 
 passed over ; but it seems to suggest how pre- 
 vailingly cheerful, almost idyllic, was the tone of 
 national worship during the earliest age of Juda- 
 ism, that, while Moses was directed to enjoin 
 several feasts, he enjoined no more than one fast Lev. xvi. 29- 
 
 1 ^^» xxiii. 27- 
 
 m tlie sacred year. The great day of annual 32 ; Num. 
 expiation or atonement was the solitary occasion ed to, Acts 
 which called on the whole people to ' afflict (or 
 humble) their souls,' as the law plirased it,^ by 
 public fasting ; of any private or individual acts 
 of abstinence, save in one incidental allusion, the Num. xxx. u. 
 law had not a word to say. With all its rude- 
 ness, the first age of Israel's national existence 
 was a glad age ; ^ the memory of the Exodus and 
 of the Conquest was still a spring of healthy 
 exultation to the pious and patriotic. And 
 though, under the troublous times of the later 
 monarchy, we find on some few occasions a special 
 public fast proclaimed by the authorities, as before 
 the great war in Jehoshaphat's reign ; yet these 2 Chron. xx. 3. 
 
 ^ This expression, which is used in the texts cited on the 
 margin in the sense of 'fasting,' serves to explain the fuller 
 phraseology of later passages, such as Isa. Iviii. 5, E^ra viii. 
 21 (cf. ix. 5), and Ps. xxxv. 13. 
 
 '^ Of its ' rudeness ' the Book of Judges is evidence enough ; 
 of its idyllic gladness in spite of trouble, the Book of Ruth. 
 
222 Tlie Laivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PAET II. occasions even are rare/ and there is no evidence 
 THIRD tliat any other recurring fast, annual or weekly, 
 
 APPLICATION. ^ ^ _ , -,.-,, T, ;r .-. , 
 
 was added to the one ordained by Moses, until the 
 long captivity had come to embitter at last the 
 spirit of the nation and to break its heart. Then 
 indeed fasts, both public and private, both occa- 
 sional and stated, became only too common. The 
 pan. Lx. 3, x. captives themselves, like Daniel at Babylon and 
 
 .3; Esther IV. ^ ' ^ 
 
 3, 16; Ezra Esther in Persia, the OTeat leaders of the return, 
 
 viii. 21-23, ix. . > o ' 
 
 5, X. ; Neh. like Ezra and Nehemiah, were all of necessity 
 
 i. 4, ix. 1. 
 
 mourners for the national sins which had brouc^ht 
 
 o 
 
 down the visitation of Jehovah ; and they all 
 joined fasting with those confessions, tears, and 
 prayers, by which they sought to entreat the re- 
 turning favour of their country's alienated God. 
 From one of the prophets of the restoration we 
 
 Zech. viii. 19, learn that four new annual fast-days had been 
 c. vii. 1 ff. , . -^ 
 
 instituted to commemorate the sad events of the 
 
 captivity ; one of which it was proposed to abolish 
 
 after the long desolate temple had been at length 
 
 ^ There is one instance as early as Samuel, on occasion of one 
 of the numerous reforms from idolatry (1 Sam. vii. 6) ; but 
 except two allusions of doubtful date in the prophets (for a 
 famine, in Joel i, 14, ii. 15 ; and that in Tsa. Iviii. 3 ff.) no other 
 genuine case occurs till the fifth year of Jehoiakim (Jer. xxxvi. 
 6-10), when the realm had already been made tributary to 
 Babylon. For the fast under cover of w^hich Queen Jezebel 
 compassed the murder of Naboth cannot be reckoned as a gen- 
 uine exercise of worship (see 1 Kings xxi. 9-12). 
 
Fasting. 223 
 
 rebuilt. To these were probably added, not long part n. 
 after, the two weekly fasts, on the observance of third 
 which self-riohteous Pharisees of our Lord's day ^ i ... -.o' 
 
 o ^ Luke xvxu. 12. 
 
 laid stress : the fasts, that is to say, of the second 
 and fifth days in each week, for which the Chris- 
 tian Church at an early date substituted the See Grotius on 
 
 Luke L c. 
 
 fourth and sixth days. Nor did even this fre- 
 quency of stated fasts supersede either the Cf. Josephus, 
 occasional appointment of others by authority or 
 the practice of private fasting on personal grounds. 
 It should be observed, however, that the exercise 
 did not always involve entire abstinence from cf. Dan. x. 3. 
 food.^ When it did so, the time of abstinence 
 was not protracted beyond one day, reckoned Joseph. Antt. 
 
 ^ "^ *^ iii. 10. 3. 
 
 from sunset to sunset, and was therefore at once 
 
 followed by the accustomed evening meal. A 
 
 strict abstinence of this duration, which really 
 
 amounted in many cases to the omission only of 
 
 a single meal, was not, in a warm climate and 
 
 among a rather inactive people, at all injurious to 
 
 health. Where the fast consisted only in a pro- 
 
 lono-ed disuse of wine and flesh, the exercise was Cf. Dan. i. 3- 
 
 "" 16. 
 
 probably to be recommended for dietetic reasons. 
 
 ^ The Roman Catholic Church has adopted a similar division 
 of fasts into {\) jejunium, which means entire abstinence from 
 one evening to the next ; and (2) ahstlnentia, which only means 
 the absence of tlesh-meat from the diet. See Herzog, EncyJclo- 
 pddie, sub voce. 
 
224 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART ir. When fasting assumes a religious character, 
 
 THIRD such as we have thus seen to belong to it through- 
 
 APPLICATION. 
 
 out Hebrew history, it may be said to aim at two 
 distinct and separable results. Its first value is 
 simply that of a natural expression for sorrow. 
 It allies itself with the squalid visage, the un- 
 washed person, the coarse sackcloth or rent robe, 
 the dust thrown over the head, the beating of the 
 breast, and other demonstrations of violent afflic- 
 tion usual among orientals. ^ Transferred to 
 exercises of religious penitence, it is designed to 
 give utterance to the deep depression of the heart 
 on account of sin. Of course, its value as a 
 symbol of religious mourning must depend, first, 
 on the genuineness of the mourning to be ex- 
 pressed ; and next, on the fitness of this particular 
 symbol to express it. Eeligious life, like all 
 human life, has its alternations of depression and 
 of joy; and to be thoroughly natural, it must find 
 for both becoming forms of expression. But the 
 law of truth is obviously transgressed when in 
 obedience to custom or prescription the forms of 
 religious grief are observed by men whose real 
 feelings at the moment are bright and cheerful 
 
 ^ See a good summary of these, as practised by the Hebrews 
 and other allied races, in the Art. 'Mourning,' in Smith's Diet, 
 of the Bible. 
 
Fasting. 225 
 
 This is the principle of our Lord's reply to the part u. 
 question respecting fasts put to Him by the fol- third 
 
 , ^-ri ^ -t-. • T 11 P-1 APPLICATION. 
 
 lowers of John the Baptist, it could not fai^^^^^ ^^ ^^ 
 to strike the contemporaries of Jesus that the jgJoQ^.^j^ jj; 
 religious temper of His disciples was precisely ^- 33-35. 
 the reverse of that which characterized all the 
 other eminent schools of piety embraced wdthin 
 the faith of Israel. The Pharisees, who inherited 
 in exaggerated form the traditions of the age that 
 succeeded the exile ; the Essenes, whose rule was 
 still stricter and more ascetic ; and the scholars 
 of the great Baptizer, whose mission it had been, 
 to call his countrymen to a preparatory repent- 
 ance : all these signalized their exceptional piety 
 by exceptional austerities. Eeligion was with, 
 them a thing of gloom, of self-mortification, andi 
 of abstinence. In singular contrast stood Jesus 
 and His scholars. They neither fasted nor 
 shunned society, but mixed freely in social life- 
 and cultivated a cheerful affability of manner.. 
 The justification of this change Jesus found 
 simply in its reason : they feasted because they 
 were glad ; to fast w^as impossil^le for them, cf. Matt, and 
 because as yet they were not sad. To use John's *^ ' 
 own figure, they were chosen comrades of Him 
 Who is the heavenly Bridegroom of all pure and See John iii. 
 
 29 
 
 loving hearts, and Whose coming made a bright 
 
226 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. wedding-day in the spiritual life of every one 
 
 THIRD who received Him. You cannot make men fast 
 
 (^f L k / ^^^ sorrow, when God is satisfying them with the 
 
 new wine of His kingdom as with the joy of 
 
 niarriao-e.^ But these first followers were not to 
 
 o 
 
 stand always on the hill-top of joy. On fruition 
 and the filling up of a long-deferred hope there 
 were to follow loss and the pain of absence. 
 The death of Jesus (thus early foreseen by Him- 
 self) came to make all their world dark again and 
 emptier than before ; and then, for at least the 
 
 John xiv. IS, brief ' day ' which found them ' orphans,' there 
 were none in Israel so ready to fast as they, 
 over Him Who had been snatched from their 
 eyes. These things are a picture of all christian 
 
 John xiv. iG. life : for, though the coming of the Second Com- 
 forter lias given to the experience of Christians 
 under the New Testament a more prevailing 
 accent of cheerfulness than was ever possible 
 before, and made it each believer's duty, in St. 
 
 1 Thess. V. 16 ; Paul's words, to ' rejoJcc evermore ;' yet such joy 
 
 of. Phil. iv. 4. 
 
 must still depend on the presence of ' the Bride- 
 groom ' realized by faith, and may still be for- 
 feited, when, through unbelief or disloyalty, the 
 
 ^ It was surely to symbolize this rew feature in His kingdom 
 that our Lord led His earliest converts to Caua, and there first 
 'manifested forth His glory.' — John ii. l-H. 
 
Fasting. 227 
 
 soul has to mourn a temporary withdrawal or part n. 
 eclipse of His gracious face. Dark hours in third 
 
 1-1 ^ 1 p • 1 p 1 APPLICATION.- 
 
 which remembered failure and unraithiulness and 
 
 the breach of holy purposes crowd in to obscure 
 
 one's spirit, and if they do not alarm with fear 
 
 of apostasy, at least succeed in shutting out 
 
 everything but that ' hope ' which clings like a 
 
 ' sure and stedfast anchor ' to the Forerunner, Heb. vi. I8-20. 
 
 Whose very absence means that He has entered 
 
 for us behind the veil ; these are the hours when 
 
 you cannot force christian men to be glad, but 
 
 must suffer them to indulge in an inward fast. 
 
 Whether in any case this inward fast of a 
 mournful heart is to be reflected in outward absti- ■ 
 
 nence from pleasant food will depend on health, 
 personal habits, and local usage. A change of 
 diet which is safe for people leading an outdoor 
 life in a warm climate, may be very hurtful to 
 the over-strained and seldom over-fed population 
 of our cities. Again, it suits the emotional East 
 to tear the robe and beat the breast for sorrow ; it 
 does not suit the self-restrained Englishman. So 
 the bread of sorrow, eaten with tears, may be, like 
 a sad-coloured dress, a natural enough accompani- 
 ment of penitence among a people who love to do 
 everything in public and to mirror every mood 
 of mind in fitting external symbol ; it may be 
 
228 Tlu Laivs of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. most unnatural to us. We have retained indeed 
 THIRD the disuse of colour in our dress as an expression 
 
 APPLICATION. „ . , ^ 1 -^ 1 ^ 
 
 01 mourning ; but we apply it only to mourning 
 for the dead ; and in almost everything else we 
 have abandoned the attempt to speak our emotions 
 to the public eye by either badge or gesture or 
 deportment. Even the language of facial expres- 
 sion in which nature teaches childhood to betray 
 its feelings, we tutor ourselves to suppress or to 
 disguise. While therefore it may be a natural, 
 and, to some races, a seemly token of inward grief, 
 the fast is certainly as much out of place among 
 ourselves, and as foreign to our national tastes, as 
 it would be to shave our heads or sit for a week 
 in silence on the ground. 
 
 To say this, however, is not to exhaust the re- 
 lifijious sif^nificance of fastins;. If it bcGjan to be 
 numbered among tlie adjuncts of devotion for 
 the sake of its expressiveness, it soon came to be 
 employed for the sake of its effects. It is first a 
 sign of grief : it is also a discipline of the soul. 
 To impose at certain times a stricter limit upon 
 the indulgence of appetite than temperance im- 
 poses at all times, with a view either to chasten 
 those desires which have their seat in the body 
 or to leave the spiritual nature more free for 
 
Fasting. 229 
 
 prolonged and absorbed worshi^^, has always been part n. 
 recomised as lecritimate, and employed as a third 
 
 . , . - . , APPLICATION. 
 
 wholesome discipline by those who iiave aspired 
 to a life of purity and devotion. It has been 
 practised with this design by worshippers nnder 
 nearly every creed and in almost every age of the 
 world. It is, in fact, the true and useful measure 
 of self-denial, of which asceticism has been the 
 wide-spread abuse.^ Every man who desires to 
 use his body as an instrument in the service of 
 God will strive to respect under all circumstances 
 those rules of moderation in the gratification of 
 his appetites which are prescribed by health, by 
 purity, by sobriety, and by the subordination of 
 the animal in man to the control of reason and 
 of conscience. Within these rules, however, there 
 is permissible a certain latitude of ordinary in- 
 dulgence in the lower pleasures of the body, wiiich 
 very well consorts with the cheerful and thankful 
 
 1 Does not asceticism begin only at that point where the 
 refusal of any bodily gratification or the self-infliction of bodily 
 suffering is believed to possess a necessary spiritual valve of its 
 own, apart from properly spiritual conditions ; whether that 
 value be supposed to lie in meriting divine commendation or in 
 effecting moral reformation ? Popularly indeed the word is 
 commonly applied also to cases in which an exaggerated value 
 is ascribed to self-denial as a means to spiritual or moral results, 
 even though no proper or inherent virtue is believed to belong 
 to it. 
 
230 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. spirit, habitual to tlie Christian. He Who came 
 
 THIRD ' eating and drinking/ has taught His followers to 
 
 . ,^' bold every creature of God for gjood, ' if it be re- 
 Matt. XI. 19, -^ _ G ^ 
 
 and parallels, ccivcd with thanksgiving,' and to use, without 
 1 Cor." vii. 31 ;' abusing, our Fatlier's gifts with a freedom which 
 could not be safely granted to man till men had 
 become sons of God. This freedom no Chris- 
 tian is at liberty to surrender to the judgment of 
 Cf. Rom. xiv. any ' weaker brother ' or at the bidding of any 
 mpva. ' ecclesiastical authority. But there do come sea- 
 sons in the inward life of the soul, known only 
 to each devout person and to be judged of by him- 
 self alone, when the higher wants of the divine 
 life will be best served by a voluntary abdication 
 of this liberty and a self-imposed abstinence from 
 permitted pleasures. It may be that some secret 
 lust, fed by a full habit of body or taking advan- 
 tage of the too easy humours bred by self-indul- 
 gence, needs to be weakened, mortified, and by 
 a wdiolesome severity tamed into sul^jection ; and 
 Cf. 1 Cor. ix. the christian athlete may do wisely to forestall 
 30-32.' ' " the sharper discipline of divine affliction by 
 'keeping under' his own body. Eminently this 
 is a case in which, to use Bishop Jeremy Taylor's 
 Holy Living, words, ' a man may abate of his ordinary liberty 
 also § 7.' " and bold freedom with great prudence, so he does 
 it without singularity in himself, or trouble to 
 
Fasting. 231 
 
 others.' It may be, on the other hand, that part u. 
 instead of beinc^ in danger of falling below the third 
 
 \. r^-, .. • ■ APPLICATION. 
 
 normal purity of a Christian, the samt is sum- 
 moned by God's dealings with him to a certain 
 unwonted elevation of spiritual experience. All 
 healthy relicjion is liable to its Peniels, like Jacob ; Gen. xxxii. 
 
 •^ ^ . 24-30. 
 
 to its crises of spiritual struggle : and the highest 
 lives have sometimes been called to go up, like 
 Moses, to some Sinai-summit, or driven, like Elijah, Ex. xxiv. 18; 
 
 1 Kings xix. 8 ; 
 
 unto Horeb, or even led in tlie footsteps of a Matt. iv. i, 2. 
 Greater still into a wilderness of temptation. 
 When the human spirit would brace itself for 
 such extraordinary seasons of divine communion, 
 would draw into itseli' the highest measure of 
 divine strength for exceptional efforts, or would 
 pass through inward victory to a serener and 
 heavenlier life than it has been wont to lead ; all 
 experience teaches that the intrusive calls and 
 grosser motions of the flesh must be for the time 
 denied, and to fast becomes the natural preparative 
 and the concomitant of prayer. Our Lord's forty 
 days' seclusion after baptism, prefigured in the 
 history of Moses and Elijah, is at once the type- 
 example and the supreme justification of all lesser 
 instances. 
 
 The service which occasional abstinence by 
 persons in full health may thus render as ' a 
 
232 
 
 The Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 pAKT II. nourisliment of prayer, a restraint of lust, and an 
 instrument of humility/ probably lies at the 
 bottom of that Pentateuch expression for fasting 
 which reappears in later Hebrew — I mean the 
 ' afflicting of the soul.' The soul is ' afflicted,' 
 humbled ^ or brought down, when the body is 
 made feeble by a low diet ; and though this may 
 refer only to the expression of religious grief, it 
 seems more natural to see in such a phrase a 
 recognition of the effects of abstinence, as a 
 discipline, upon the spiritual life. No doubt such 
 physical aid to self-culture and especially to self- 
 humbling must always be used with much care- 
 fulness and under the most judicious safeguards. 
 No doubt it may very easily become a minister 
 to superstition, be pushed the length of asceticism, 
 or generate the spiritual ' pride which apes 
 humility.' At the same time, it can ncA^er be 
 urged as a ' reproaclj ' against any devout and 
 humble worshipper that in his longing after 
 purity and divine fellowship he adopts such a 
 
 ^ The Septuagint equivalent is Ta'^nvoZv i-h -^vx'^.v ; whence 
 'humbled my soul' in Ps. xxxv. 13. 
 
 2 The three psalms in which reference is made to fasting 
 (xxxv. 13, Ixix. 10, and cix. 24) are all ascribed to David, 
 with more or less probability. In Psalm Ixix. the fasting is 
 evidently part of the psalmist's humiliation for dishonour done 
 to God. In Psalm cix. it is not clear that religious fasting is 
 meant ; but the physical feebleness produced by it is described. 
 
Fasting. 233 
 
 subordinate assistance, except by the profane. i'art n. 
 Our Lord Himself gave His express sanction to third 
 
 , . . . f> ,. , • -1 1 APPLICATION. 
 
 this conjunction oi lasting with prayer whenever 
 the faith which works miracles is required to be 
 exalted into extraordinary potency. ' This kind/ Matt. xvii. 21; 
 
 cf . ]\Iark ix. 
 
 He said, by way of explaining why His apostles 29, %yhere the 
 had failed in their effort to exorcise the demon vers, however, 
 from an epileptic and lunatic boy — ' This kind 
 goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.' What- 
 ever else these remarkable words may carry, they 
 certainly assume that abstinence from food during 
 seasons of prayer is among the legitimate means 
 by which in certain cases the religious faith of 
 the soul may be brought into its highest and most 
 powerful activity. It was thus the apostles were 
 taught by the Spirit to understand their Master. 
 Both by example and express permission, they 
 gave fasting a place among the rarer exercises of 
 christian life. When the primitive Church was 
 called to acts of special solemnity and moment, 
 such as the selection of missionaries or the ordi- See Acts xin. 
 
 p , . ., , . ,. 3, xiv. 23. 
 
 nation oi presbyters, it engaged m an extraordinary 
 service of worship, accompanied with fasting. 
 Similar seasons of exceptional devotion, under i Cor. vii. 5. 
 
 . . . But the textus 
 
 abstinence from the gratification of the appetites, reccptus is here 
 are recognised by St. Paul as equally permissible 
 to the private believer. 
 
234 The Laws of the Kingdom, 
 
 PART II. The evidence of the New Testament, however, 
 
 and, on the whole, that of the Old also, is rather 
 unfavourable to the imposition of stated, obliga- 
 tory, and general fasts. The formal recurrence 
 of fast-days in every week, the annual observance 
 of Lent, and the custom of fastincj before receivincp 
 the Lord's Supper (of which the first two at least 
 grew up within the Church of the first three cen- 
 turies, and even passed at the Eeformation into 
 Protestant w^orship), appear somewhat inconsis- 
 tent both with the joyous tone of the christian 
 economy and with the rare, casual, and optional 
 character which properly belongs to this exercise. 
 For I believe the impression which is made by 
 the whole teaching of Scripture on this subject is 
 that (apart from the oriental use of a spare diet 
 as one of the natural signs of grief) religious 
 fasting is mainly a personal discipline, to be 
 employed at the discretion of the individual just 
 in so far as he may find it to be a help to his 
 devotions under exceptional circumstances, and 
 especially at any unusually solemn crisis in his 
 religious history. There certainly does not 
 appear to be any sufficient reason for the recent 
 decline and disuse of this ancient discipline 
 among all classes, and, so far as I am aware, 
 throughout the whole of the Protestant com- 
 
Fasting. 2 :-3 5 
 
 munions. Modern Christianity has become pre- 
 dominantly active, aggressive, and beneficent. 
 Religious people now-a-days live upon the out- 
 goings of their faith in works of charity. The 
 cultivation of purely devotional piety has corre- 
 spondingly declined ; and fasting, as a discipline of 
 devotion, has gone out of use, along with questions 
 for self-examination, cases of casuistry, rules of 
 life, and other aids or guides to a scrupulous and 
 contemplative piety. Tlie change is partly an 
 improvement ; but surely not wholly so. It is 
 never a safe thing to over-cultivate one side of 
 religion; and wc are in danger of losing depth, 
 reverence, tenderness, and humility, through our 
 one-sided activity in doing, rather than in being, 
 good. A better balance in the development of 
 christian life would find room for self-discipline, 
 penitential fasting, and protracted seasons of pri- 
 vate communion with God, alongside of those 
 practical engagements which are at present so 
 multifarious and absorbing ; and christian life 
 would be all the stronger as well as more sym- 
 metrical for the combination. 
 
 What is abundantly clear from the very nature 
 of a fast is that it is not a thing to be paraded 
 before one's neighbours. It is entirely a subsidiary 
 
236 TJie Laws of the Kingdom. 
 
 PAKT II. aid to spiritual exercises, of no value in itself. It 
 
 THIRD finds its justification usually in something quite 
 
 ■ personal to tlie individual, with which no one else 
 
 need have anything to do. It is too exceptional 
 
 to form part of men's stated acts of worship ; nor 
 
 can its observance by one person be any rule for 
 
 another. No doubt a liypocrite will find the 
 
 temptation to make capital out of his fast-days a 
 
 strong one, just because to keep fasts is supposed 
 
 to be a mark of unusual seriousness and depth 
 
 of piety. Still most men will feel that there is 
 
 a peculiar indecency in thrusting private exercises 
 
 of so personal and sacred a character on the 
 
 notice of onlookers. This instance of Pharisaic 
 
 ostentation outdoes those which have been already 
 
 rebuked by Christ. It was really a new thing, 
 
 even in Jewish hypocrisy. More than one of the 
 
 See isa. iviii. old propliets had chastised the insincerity of public 
 
 5-14 ; andper- fasts for siu, wliich wcrc not accompanied by any 
 
 iT{d. ver.^5*). reform of manners or any ' fruits meet for repent- 
 
 Ec^ius! ixxiv. ance.' But there is no earlier trace in Hebrew 
 
 literature of men wlio took care to call attention 
 
 to the fact that they either were, or affected to 
 
 be, keeping a private fast, by the studiously 
 
 disfigured and neglected aspect of their persons. 
 
 To make believe that one is deeply exercised 
 
 about one's sins, and have an eye all the while 
 
 2f3. 
 
Fasting. 237 
 
 to what people will say about such eminent god- i'art n. 
 liness, betrays a singularly hardened or besotted third 
 
 ,. . , APPLICATION. 
 
 religious nature. 
 
 But Jesus is hardly content, in this third in- 
 stance, to apply His law of secrecy in worship, in 
 precisely the same way as in the two previous 
 instances. He does not say, merely, When thou 
 fastest, enter into thy closet, and fast in secret 
 before thy Father : but He bids us positively 
 conceal all traces and sims of fastini^ before we 
 return to the society of our fellows. ' Anoint 
 thine head, and wash thy face,' must mean : Be 
 careful to observe the ordinary rules of social 
 life, and to assume before others your customary 
 aspect of cheerfulness. The heart may be heavy 
 enouoii throuG^h that bitterness of sin within it 
 which is known to none else ; and in the 
 secret exercises through which we are forced to 
 pass in our solitary hours, the body, sympathizing 
 with the spirit, may refuse its pleasant food to 
 eat the bread of tears : no matter ; such painful Ps. ixxj:. c. 
 self-scrutiny and mortification of secret lust is too 
 much out of harmony with the buoyant attitude of 
 normal and healthy christian life to be obtruded 
 by any visible token upon the attention of 
 our brethren. We are not called as a saved 
 society to sorrow, but to gladness. Such inward 
 
238 llie Laws of the, Kingdom. 
 
 PART II. mourning as calls for a fast is characteristically 
 THIRD an exceptional personal thing which comes of the 
 APPLICATION. ^^-^ ^^ ^l^g individual heart. It has no business 
 to throw its black shadow across the souls that 
 have been redeemed for joy. It is due to the 
 comfort of Christians whose inner life is better 
 than our own, due to the courtesies dictated 
 by unselfish regard for others, and due to the 
 Lord of Gladness Himself, that he who for his 
 sins must fast in secret should at least come forth 
 with every trace of tears washed off, and no ill- 
 favoured downcast look to mar the cheerfulness 
 of the outside world. Few people now-a-days 
 are given to a literal fasting ; yet so long as 
 religious life must have its side of austerity and 
 gloom, so long will there be good people who sin 
 against this law. Some Christians have always 
 been found to betray their prevailing seriousness 
 by sour visages, whining tones, or meekly melan- 
 choly eyes. Unless such trappings of an unat- 
 tractive piety are falsely assumed, we dare not 
 say that Christians of this cJass are the modern 
 representatives of the sad-countenanced men whom 
 our Lord condemned. But we may say, that they 
 have not laid to heart the principle of llis law 
 which requires that penitential grief should be 
 kept to oneself and to God. So far from affecting 
 
Fasting. 239 
 
 a misery you do not feel, or parading in society part n. 
 the religious melancholy which you think sits third 
 well on the devout, you ought to conceal such 
 grief when it has become inevitable, lest it make 
 discord with that note of joy to which all godly 
 life has now been more than ever set. That is a 
 reasonable violence, which a good man does to his 
 private feelings when he restrains the utterance 
 of religious depression, lest he should oppress 
 without cause some heart which God hath not 
 made sad, or check the smile which God has put 
 on childhood's lips, or asperse the joy of Christ's 
 redeemed by making earth a cloudier, sadder 
 place than it needs to be. God knows, it is sad 
 enough and cloudy enough at the best ; let the 
 Christian keep his sorrow, with his fasting, to 
 himself, but hold it for a christian duty to shed 
 abroad wherever he goes the ' great joy ' which 
 of right belongs to the ' glad tidings ' of our Luke ii. lo. 
 salvation. 
 
 THE END. 
 
MCKRAT AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, 
 TRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONER! OFFICK. 
 
Date Due 
 
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