The Things of God
Matthew xii. 1-8, 9-13; xxiv. 20.
Mark i. 21; ii. 23-28; iii. 1-6; vi. 2; xvi. 9.
Luke iv. 16, 31; vi. 1-11; xiii. 10-17; xiv. 1-6.
Matthew iv. 4, 7, 10; v. 12, 17-19, 21-48; vi. 29; vii. 12; viii. 4, 11;
ix. 13; x. 10; xi. 10, U, 14 5 xii. 3-7, 37-42; xiii. 14-17; xv.
3-9; xvii. 11, 12; xix. 3-9; xxi. 13, 16, 42; xxii. 29-32, 34-46; xxiii. 2, 3, 29-32, 35-37; xxiv. 15, 37-39; xxvi. 24, 31, 54.
Mark ii. 23-28; vi. 13; ix. 12, 13; x. 2-12; xii. 18-27; xiii. 14; xiv. 2ip 27, 49*
Luke iv. 4, 8, 12; vi. 3, 4, 23, 26; vii. 27, 28; x. 24; xi. 28-32, 47- 52; xiii. 28, 34; xvi. 16, 17, 22, 31; xvii. 26-29, 32; xviii. 20; xix. 9; xx. 37, 41-44; xxi. 22; xxii. 37; xxiv. 25-27, 44-46.
Matthew v. 44; vi. 5-15; vii. 7-11; ix. 37, 38; xvii. 21; xviii. 19,
20; xxi. 22; xxiii. 14; xxiv. 20; xxvi. 36-46, 53.
Mark i. 35; vi. 41, 46; viii. 6, 7; ix. 29; x. 16; xx. 17, 24, 25; xii.
40; xiii. 18, 33; xiv. 22, 23, 32-42.
Luke iii. 21; v. 16; vi. 12, 28; ix. 16, 18, 28, 29; x. 2; xi. 1-13; xviii. 1 -14; xix. 46; xx. 47; xxi. 36; xxii. 32, 39-46; xxiii. 34, 46; xxiv. 30, 50, 51.
Matthew xvi. 18, 19; xviii. 15-20; xxii. 21; xxvi. 26-30.
Mark i. 21, 23, 39; ii. 18-28; iii. 1-5; v. 38; vi. 2; xi. 1 1, 15-17, 27;
xii. 39, 41-44; xiii. 1, 2, 3, 9, 14; xiv. 12-16, 49, 58; xv. 38.
Luke ii. 49; iv. 8, 15, 18, 33; v. 14, 33-39; vi. 4, 6; x. 31, 32; xi.
OT only does Jesus demand for God the
1 M strongest affection of the heart, but, according to His teaching, this internal state of mind has a bearing on what may be called the things of God,* such as public worship, the Bible, the Sabbath, prayer, and the like.
It has sometimes been contended that between the internal sentiment of religion, the most emphatic name for which is the love of God, and the external practice of religion there is no necessary connection. There are countries, for example, where the habitual neglect of the house of God is not considered inconsistent with a profession of Christianity. It has even been contended that the religion of the heart and the religion of outward ceremonies have always been opposed to each other. A true revival always drives those influenced by it inwards, to the cultivation of a secret life of communion with God; but, by
* This phrase is His own: “Thou savourest not the things that be of God,” r a tov Oeov; “Render unto God the things that are God’s,” ra tov Oeov.
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degrees, this spiritual tendency is captured by the manipulators of ecclesiastical machinery, who exploit it for their own interests — that is, in the interest of churches, Sundays and liturgies. In one generation there is a period of the spirit, when the religious nature of many is awakened and they experience an inner walk with God, which both secures their secret felicity and influences their outward behaviour as members of society; but, in the next generation, the children or the grandchildren of these persons, growing up in the pious habits transmitted from their fathers but not having experienced any deep religious change of their own, must, if they are to be kept in connection and attachment with religion, be gratified with orderly and beautiful forms, which appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities.
Of the truth of this opposition, it may be said, there could be no more glaring example than that of Jesus Himself. His was a religion of the heart; but He was surrounded by a generation absorbed in religious rites and forms; and so violent was the collision between the opposite tendencies that He perished in the attempt to counteract the prevailing practices. In Palestine, in His day, there existed two great centres of religion — the temple and the synagogue. The former was the more ancient; with it were associated the grand names and many of the most thrilling events of the national history; its form of worship was sacrifice, which was centralised in Jerusalem and Mount Zion. The synagogue was a later development; it was localised in every town and hamlet in the country; its services were far less gorgeous than those of the temple, but they appealed more directly to the intellect and more immediately affected the life. The heads of the temple worship were the high-priests, who formed the strength of the Sadducean party; those of the synagogue were the scribes, who belonged mainly to the party of the Pharisees. But both high-priests and scribes were bitter opponents of Christ. The enmity of the latter was the first to manifest itself; in every district of the country in which He appeared the local heads of the synagogues being His uncompromising opponents. He Himself began early to answer scorn with scorn; and, at length, He emptied all the vials of His prophetic wrath on the heads of scribes and Pharisees. Against the Sadducees He did not direct His philip¬ pics nearly so frequently; but it was by the high-priesthood that He was put to death, this authority being at the time the seat of judicial power; and, if, during His lifetime, the Sadducees were less prominent than the Pharisees in opposing Him, the situation was reversed after His death, when the persecution of the Early Church proceeded principally from this party.
From the recorded sayings of Jesus there might be collected an entire artillery of weapons with which to assail the forms and functionaries of public religion;
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and His whole life might be written as that of an enemy of rabbinism and ecclesiasticism. Indeed, there is enough of truth in such a representation to give serious pause to those who either are themselves teachers of the doctrine and conductors of the worship of the Church or who have the prospect before them of becoming such. I should not think much of the man charged with these duties who, in reading the Gospels, was not sometimes pulled up by the question whether, if he had lived in the days of which he is reading, he might not have been found among the upholders of tradition and the enemies of the Re¬ former who was setting at defiance so many of the current opinions and practices.
In spite, however, of all these facts, Jesus was not an enemy of public religion. On His trial He was accused of saying, “I will destroy this temple made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands”; and, although the testimony of the witnesses brought in support of the statement did not agree together, the probability is that it was so far true as to indicate that He had predicted the passing away of the worship of the temple; but He did so only on the assumption that He was to put another form of public worship in its place. In the same way, although He attacked the rabbis with unsparing severity, yet He foretold that He was Himself to send forth into the world rabbis of a different description: “Behold, I send unto you,” were His words, “prophets and wise men and scribes,” Matt, xxiii. 34. Thus He assumes that the worship in which these functionaries had assisted must go on, with only the difference that it was to be modified in accordance with the spirit of His Gospel.
That which He utterly repudiated in the worship of the time was the notion that ritual has an independent value apart from the character and the profit of the worshipper. Worship was supposed to be a tribute which gratified God and accumulated, in His hands, merits credited to the worshipper which would be awarded when the proper time came. So far had this gone that ritual was actually made use of to compound for the neglect of the most obvious moral duties, as in the case of the Corban, by which children relieved themselves from the duty of sustaining their parents through making a payment to the ecclesiastical treasury. Jesus accuses His contemporaries of thus making void the law by their traditions. “And many like things,” He added, “ye do.” In all ages this has been the error of ecclesiastical life — the idea that worship is intended for the gratification of the Deity, instead of the benefit of the worshipper. The service, on the contrary, with which God is well pleased is the doing of His will; and this consists not in the performance of ritual but in the growth of character. More than once He quoted the Old Testament maxim, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice”; and He stated the principle broadly in
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the great saying: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith; these ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone.” Here, in the three words “judgment, mercy and faith,” we have a summary of those things with which God is well pleased and for the production of which all worship ought to be carried out; “mint and anise and cummin” having become proverbial to denote the mere outside and ceremonial of worship. Yet it is noteworthy that Jesus does not altogether ignore or undervalue even the latter; for He says, Ye ought to have done the great things and not to have left the small things undone. What He desiderated was proportion and measure: He did not condemn ritual, but wished it to be relegated to its proper place.
The portion of the things of God, as these existed in His time and country, to which He appeared to take up the most uncompromising attitude of opposition was the Sabbath. Again and again did He come into the sharpest collision on this subject with the ecclesiastical authorities; and so completely did He separate Himself from their traditional mode of reverencing the day that it has not infrequently been inferred that His intention was to abolish the institution altogether. Even Luther made this mistake and embodied it in the Augsburg Confession; and the Reformers generally, in their zeal for abolishing the Saints’ Days and other festivals with which the Church of Rome had over-burdened the Christian community, did not clearly distinguish between the authority by which these were sanctioned and that by which the Sabbath is supported. It was in Puritan England that it was first clearly perceived in modern times * that the Sabbath rests on an entirely different footing from Saints’ Days, and that it is possible by abolishing these to make its divine right shine out more conspicuously. The great word of Jesus on the subject is: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” which is certainly a vindication of the right of man to have the observance of the Sabbath so arranged as to be no yoke, but a palpable relief and benefit. Nevertheless, the first part of the statement obviously looks back to the creation of man at the beginning and implies that the necessity for a Sabbath is rooted in the human constitution; so that it must last as long as man is what he is. Thus the Sabbath holds a place in what may be called the law of creation. To this primeval sanction there is added another through its occurrence
* As early, however, as the fourth century it was recognised that the Christian Sunday had taken the place of the Jewish Sabbath and rested on the same authority; and this was the accepted view in subsequent centuries. See the article entitled Geschichte des Sonntags vornehmlich in der alten Kirche in Zahn’s Skizzen.
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among the Ten Commandments, which Jesus expressly re-enacted. This second authorisation is not disproved by the fact that there may be a national and temporary element in the form in which it appears in the Decalogue; for this is the case also with others of the commandments — the fifth, for example — which certainly are in their essence eternal and immutable. The Scottish Church, in both of its great sections, has been tempted, in the course of the last half-century, by the influence of great and beloved names,* to give up this position and to rest the authority of the Lord’s Day solely on the recognition by the Christian Church of what is due to the memory of her Lord’s resurrection; but, after mature deliberation, she has resolutely declined to do so, believing herself to be interpreting her Lord’s mind aright when basing the observance of this day on the threefold authority of the primeval sanction, the Decalogue and Christian propriety.
It has often been remarked that the position of the Sabbath in the Decalogue, looking back to the commandments respecting the things of God and forward to those respecting the things of man, is an indication of the service it is intended to render as the guardian and defence of both classes of duties; and certainly it discharges this function, at any rate, to what we have called the things of God; because the chance which all of these have of receiving the attention
* Dr. Norman Macleod and Dr. Walter C. Smith. which is their due depends on mankind having time to occupy mind and heart with them*
While, however, we contend that it would not be in accordance with the spirit of Jesus to abolish an institution so essential to the things of God, it would be still more at variance with His sayings on the subject, as these stand under our eyes in the record, not to confess that this institution is liable to be turned into a fetich, round which a conception of religion may gather which is not that of the Author of Christianity at all; and that those who by their teaching or practice have to determine the modes in which the day is observed are bound to see that it is fitted to be a delight and not a weariness. Its hours and its exercises may be treated as the coins in which tribute is paid to the Deity, exactly as they were by scribes and Pharisees; but the intention of Jesus is that out of the sacred hours there should be derived the rest and the strength required for living on the other days of the week a life of “judgment, mercy and faith”; and this is what He meant when He said: “Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath.” Some hold this saying to be a palmary instance to prove that, in the vocabulary of Jesus, the phrase “the Son of man” means simply “man”; because, in their opinion, the natural conclusion from the premises is that “man” is lord of the Sabbath. But Jesus can never have meant to say that “man”
* Cf. D. M. Ross, The Teaching of Jesus, p. 173.
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is lord of the Sabbath, thus submitting the sublime institution to the arbitrament of his taste and fancy. On the contrary, it may be seen in this saying how far Jesus was conscious of standing above ordinary men, and yet how linked He felt Himself to be with humanity. He is so connected with all men as to be fit to be the mouthpiece of all in vindicating their claim to a gift given them at the Creation against the encroachments of all who, under whatever pretence, would deprive them of their birthright.
If Jesus was at variance with the traditional worship in the observance of the Sabbath, there were two of its forms with which, on the contrary, He was in the closest sympathy and affinity.
One of these was the reading of Scripture. The books of the Old Testament had been divided by the scribes into well-arranged lessons, and these were read regularly in public worship all the year round. It was from listening to these lessons that Jesus acquired His matchless knowledge of Holy Writ. But He had also learned Himself to read the sacred pages, so that He could be called upon to read these in the audience of the people. Whether in His own home there may have been any portions of the rolls we do not know; perhaps the more likely supposition is that He obtained access to these treasures by ingratiating Himself with the keeper of the manuscripts belonging to the synagogue of Nazareth. At any rate, from His quotations, which are very numerous, we can assure ourselves that He was familiar with every part of the Scriptures. Less remarkable, however, is the extent of His knowledge than the depth of His insight. Rarely does He quote a text without unfolding some meaning in it which could only have disclosed itself to one brooding long and lovingly; and He would reproach even the scribes themselves for the superficiality of their reading of the sacred documents of which they were the official custodians by introducing His interpretation with the words, “Have ye never read?” or “Go and learn what this meaneth.”
That Jesus attributed to the Old Testament the very highest divine authority there can be no question whatever. Through it He conversed habitually with His Father in Heaven; and, in the most trying passages of His own life, especially towards the end, He found, to His comfort, His pathway clearly indicated in prophecy; so that, for example, He could say to the disciples on the way to Emmaus: “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have written”; “and, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” On the other hand, when a precept of Moses was quoted against Him, He did not hesitate to say: “For the hardness of your hearts Moses gave you this law; but from the beginning it was not so”;
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and then He proceeded, by adducing the Scriptural account of the Creation, to correct the impression which the scribes had derived from the reading of the words of Moses. Thus, if the Old Testament required amendment, He could correct it out of itself. In the Sermon on the Mount He corrected in a similar way the impressions produced by other precepts of the ancient code, only in these cases He sets His own authority more directly in opposition to that of Moses.
In our own day the question has been much discussed whether, by His references to Moses, David and Jonah, He is to be understood as giving authoritative pronouncements on questions of the Higher Criticism which have recently come to the front. On this subject no scholar has written more profoundly or wisely than the late Professor Tholuck; and it may be worth while to quote his summing-up on this particular point in his precious little book entitled The Old Testament in the New: “Human knowledge is of two kinds — that which, under greater or less external stimulus, develops itself purely inwardly in thought or intuition, and that which is learned from man and can be stamped upon the memory. If the development of the Redeemer was a universally human one, the knowledge inside the religious-moral sphere, especially that necessary for the interpretation of the Scriptures, which has to be learned by memory can only have become known to Him according to the state of culture in His time, and the means of education which His circumstances supplied. Proofs could be adduced that even in such questions, belonging to learned exegesis, as for instance the historical connection of a passage, or the writer and age of a book, an original spiritual glance, even without the culture of the schools, can frequently divine the truth; and the highest degree of this divinatory power is to be ascribed to Jesus. Yet this cannot take the place of real scientific study. Not to reveal science, not even theological science, to the world, did the Redeemer appear, but to speak and live out before mankind the truth of religion and morals. Although we find, in the sayings of Jesus we possess, no formal hermeneutic mistake, yet the impossibility of such cannot be asserted a priori any more than the impossibility of a grammatical blunder or a chronological slip. If the period of critical rationalism has swept like a flood over the older theology, and carried away many traditional views and prejudices, it has at least left us one gain — the consciousness of the distinction between Christianreligious knowledge, which belongs to mankind, and Christian-theological knowledge, which belongs to the school.” %
The other portion of the worship of the synagogue in which Jesus seems to have particularly delighted was prayer. No change in the religious history of mankind is more momentous than that from the worship of God by sacrifice to worship by means of
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prayer. The difference was immense between the religious notions of a Hebrew who, in order to deal with God about himself, had to travel to the sanctuary at Jerusalem and offer a sacrifice to Jehovah there, through the intervention of a priest, and that of one who, wherever he might be, in the utmost corner of the land, could, by shutting his eyes and lifting up his hands, deal with the Deity there and then. The rise of the synagogue-system, for which there is no legal warrant in the Old Testament, was an evidence, that this momentous transition had been accomplished; and it fostered greatly the simpler and more spiritual form of worship. Jesus entered into it with all His heart. It is known how He used, during H is public ministry, to retire to the mountain — that is, not any particular mountain, but the mountainous region which was accessible from nearly every town of Palestine — to pray. To these solitudes He some¬ times climbed before sunrise, and before the human beings around Him were astir; sometimes He would go up in the evening and spend the whole night among the silent pastures; and it is noticeable that such a night of prayer was apt to precede the occurrence of any momentous choice or pivotal incident in His life. These habits He taught also to Plis disciples; and He accompanied His efforts with many a direction as to the spirit and manner of prayer. Thus, in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, He utterly condemned the kind of prayer which is offered as a tribute to God and expresses the worshipper’s sense of fulness and self-sufficiency, while He indicated that the prayer which prevails is that which expresses the sense of need and comes to receive everything from the Deity.* In the parables of the Unjust Judge and the Friend at Midnight, He recommended a holy urgency as one of the virtues of prayer; and He frequently expatiated on the advantages of united prayer, setting no limits to the efficacy of prayer in which two or more agree together. It must have been with a profound experience of having obtained much Himself from this source that He gave the assurance: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it* shall be opened unto you; for everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”
The Lord’s Prayer is the summing-up of all His teaching on this subject; and, among the innumerable truths to be learnt from it, none is more palpable than the stress laid on the things of God. It was remarked, in an earlier portion of this volume, that out of seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer three are devoted to sin under different points of view, and this fact was taken as an indication of the importance of that subject in
* The phrase in Luke xviii. 14, “Justified rather than the other,” supposes the two men to be appealing to God to decide which is the genuine kind of prayer; and the Judge gives the decision in favour of the one and against the other. Compare what was said on p. 60 about “righteousness.”
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the mind of Jesus. Similarly it has now to be noticed that other three — and these the three opening petitions of the prayer — relate to the things of God; and we may draw the same inference, that the prominence thus given to these proves the value placed on them by Jesus. In comparison, daily bread, which stands for those things which are believed by people who do not themselves pray to be the great topics of prayer, absorbs only a single petition. The things of God were foremost in the mind of Jesus, and fore¬ most He desired them to be in the minds of His disciples in their holiest moments.
The elements of worship hitherto discussed belong as much to the exercise of private as public devotion; but, when we now come to what belonged distinctively to the latter, we perceive that Jesus was not an enemy to it, but the reverse.
Not only was He carried to the temple in His infancy, to be made a citizen of the holy nation through the rite of circumcision, but, at the age of twelve, He was brought to the same place at one of the annual feasts; and on this occasion His enthusiasm for the sacred building and the rites concentrated there was evinced both by the extraordinary incident of His staying behind after His parents had left the spot and by His remark¬ able saying: “Wist ye not that I must be in My Father’s house?” The same enthusiasm blazed forth again in a flame of prophetic zeal when He drove the buyers and sellers out of the temple, saying: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” During His public ministry Jesus was a regular visitor to the Holy City at the festivals; and, on these occasions, He appears to have been a frequenter of the temple; for, during His trial, He said to His accusers: “I was daily with you in the temple, and ye found no fault in Me.” To the sacrifices of the place there is little allusion in His words, though this is not entirely wanting; but, on one of the last evenings of His life, He observed the Passover with His disciples; and the lamb which they used on that occasion must have been sacrificed like the other victims of the festival.
On one of the last days of His life, sitting with certain of His disciples on the Mount of Olives, over against the temple, He discoursed with great solemnity on the approaching fall of the venerable edifice; and there can be little doubt that He implied that the worship, along with the building, was to be swept away. But, months before, He had sketched the outline of a system of worship that was to take its place. It was at Caesarea Philippi, at the close of His Galilean ministry, that, upon hearing St. Peter’s great confession, which acknowledged Him to be the Christ, the Son of the living God, He replied, after acknowledging the confession:
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“Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build My Church; and the gates of Hell shall not prevail* against it.” Into these expressions so much has been read, and so interminable have been the controversies waged over them, that it is difficult to get back to their original meaning; but, at the very least, they foreshadow a community engaged in religious worship, and destined to last as long as the world. And the same fact is indicated in the saying: “Where two or three are met together in My name,
* The difficult words that follow (Matt. xvi. 19), “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven,” are interpreted by Calvin as applying solely to doctrine — the authoritative formulation of the truth in correspondence with Scripture ( Institutes, bk. iv., ch. ii.). The similar passage, (Matt xviii. 18), “Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven,” he refers similarly to discipline in the Church, with which the preceding verses are obviously dealing. In both cases he enters fully into the conditions and limitations under which alone it can be claimed that the decisions of the Church have the authority of Heaven. At such limitations the Church of Rome may be scornful, quoting them as evidence that Protestant ministers have not faith in their own authority; but she ought to remember how numerous and notorious are the instances in which the mind and conscience of the world have decided that what has been bound or loosed by her on earth cannot possibly have been bound or loosed in heaven. It is certainly wonderful that Christ should have attributed such powers to human beings at all; but it is only explicable on the understanding that these are acting in prayerful submission to the leading of the Holy Ghost and in modest loyalty to the guidance of Scripture. there am I in the midst of them.” He made known that the entry to the Church was to be through an initiatory rite, occupying the same place as circumcision had done in the former economy, when He charged His apostles to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. And the other great rite of the Church was instituted by Him, when, on the night of the Passover, and with the very elements with which He and His disciples were celebrating that ordinance, He observed the Lord’s Supper. On the part of some German divines there has recently been an attempt to prove that Jesus did not intend this to be a lasting ordinance; but it is impossible to conceive of a discussion in which there is less reality.* The real difficulty about these two rites of Christianity is not whether or not Jesus instituted them, but how He could have done so if He had foreknown that they were in the course of the Christian centuries to be converted into such instruments of superstition; for round them have gathered all the most glaring perversions of the religion which calls itself by His name. This is a great mystery, for the clearing up of which we must wait to the day of
* In Wellhausen’s commentary on St. Mark {in loci) will be found a summary of recent discussions in Germany on this subject; but I find it difficult to comprehend of what use it can be to anyone who is in pursuit of things, not of words.
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revelation; but in the meantime the duty of the Church is to ascertain, with the greatest possible exactness, what Jesus Himself intended by these rites and seek to make them subservient to the ends which He had in His mind.
With the other centre of religion in Palestine Jesus was even more familiar, and the Church of primitive times was even more directly modelled on the synagogue than on the temple. Undoubtedly Jesus was a regular and diligent attender of the synagogue in His childhood and youth; and, during His public ministry, He made constant use of the opportunities afforded by it to meet with and instruct the people. It was in the synagogue of Nazareth that, after reading a passage from Isaiah in which the prophetic office of the Messiah is described in the most impressive terms, He turned the words into a manifesto of His own Messiahship. It is distinctly said that He preached throughout all the synagogues of Galilee, and some of His miracles were wrought in the same buildings. When the apostles went forth, after the Ascension, to preach the Gospel, it was in the synagogue everywhere that they secured their first hearing; and, even if they were driven thence, the new place of worship, set up in its stead, copied the order of the synagogue as a matter of course.
It is often lightly said that, while Jesus diffused through the world the essence of truth and the fragrance of an imperishable influence, He left behind Him no organization or machinery of an ecclesiastical nature. But to say so is hardly reconcilable with the copiousness with which He spoke about such subjects as the Sabbath, the Bible and prayer, or with the pregnant hints which may be found among His sayings as to the doctrine, the worship and the discipline of the Church. It ought to be remembered that He was born and grew up in a community where the religious organization exercised over the lives of His fellow-countrymen a control separate from that of the State — to which, indeed, at the time, the State was hostile — but which was certainly not inferior in influence to the State. So much had this influence been to Himself and those nearest Him, that it was the most natural thing in the world for Him to think of it, or something equivalent, as controlling the world of the future. It is, no doubt, with the intention of honouring Jesus that some attempt to separate Him from the ecclesiastical organization; but the history of religions does not support the idea that mere spiritual influences, breathed into the air, last long or travel far. On the contrary, it demonstrates that, to provide channels in whicx beliefs and practices may flow on from land to land, and from age to age, is, only less than the invention of such inspirations themselves, the prerogative of religious genius.