Sin
Matt. v. 21, 27, 33, 47; ix. 13; x. 6; xv. 24; xviii. 12-14, 17, 24; xxi. 31.
Mark ii. 14-17; iii- 28, 29; vii. 20-23.
Luke v. 27-32; vi. 32-34; vii. 36-50; xv. 1 1-32; xviii. 1 1; xix. i-io; xxi. 34.
Matt. v. 20; vi. 1-18; ix. 4, 12, 13; xv. 3-9, 13, 14; xvi. 1-6; xxi. 28-32; xxii. 18; xxiii. 2-39.
Mark ii. 17; iii. 1-6, 22-30; vii. I-13; viii. 1 1 - 15; xii. I-44.
Luke v. 27-32; vi. 6-11; xi. 37-54; xii. 1; xiii. 10-17; xv. 25-32;
xviii. 9-14; xx. 9-19, 23, 45-47.
Matt. vi. 19-24; xvi. 6, 11; xix. 21-26; xxi. 13.
Mark viii. 15; xi. 15-18, 27-33; xii. 18-27 xiv. 55-65.
Luke viii. 1-14; x. 31, 32; xii. 16-21; xiv. 15-24; xvii. 27, 28; xviii. 1-8; xix. 46; xx. 27-38.
Matt. v. 10-12, 13, 19-48; vi. 12, 13, 15; vii. 1, 11, 23; ix. 2, 12;
x. 14, 16, 17, 22, 25, 33; xi. 16-19, 21-24; xii. 7, 30, 31-37,
39-45; xiii. 13, 15, 19, 25, 38, 41, 48; xiv. 31; xv. 18-20; xvi. 23; xvii. 12, 17, 23; xviii. 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 24; xx. 18, 19; xxiv. 12, 48, 49; xxv. 1-46; xxvi. 2, 21, 23, 28, 34, 45, 46.
Mark ii. 5; iii. 28, 29; iv. 12; vii. 21-23; viii. 33; ix. 12, 31; x. 19, 33, 34; xi. 26; xii. 3, 8. 10; xiii. 6, 13, 36; xiv. 18, 21, 30, 41.
Luke iv. 24; v. 18-26; vi. 27-35, 39-49; vii. S1^0; xi- 37’54 5 xii. 15; xiii. 1-5, 6-9, 27; xv. 13, 30, 32; xvii. 25; xviii. 32, 33; xxi. 8; xxii. 21, 22, 34, 40, 48, 52, 53.
IN Palestine in the days of our Lord there were three notorious forms of sin, each of which lay like a burden on His spirit, till He relieved Himself in words. These may be denominated the Sin of the publican, the Sin of the Pharisee, and the Sin of the Sadducee.
The Sin of the Publican
In every country there is a lost class, the peculiarity of which is that it has given way to the appetites of the flesh to such a degree that its sin can no longer be concealed. What others do by stealth and in secret, if they do it at all, the members of this class do openly in public, either defying public opinion or being too destitute of self-control to be able to hide their weakness. In our own country, as is well known, there exists at present such a class of formidable dimensions, characterized by many designations, such as “the lapsed masses,” “the submerged tenth,” “the residuum,” and so forth. Its members have fallen away from connection with
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the Church and from the habits of respectable society; it is by them that the police are kept busy and the prisons full; and to them is due the difficulty of solving such a problem as the housing of the poor; but the principal mark of the whole class is that it is sodden through and through with strong drink. Such a class existed in Palestine in the time of our Lord, and it plays a prominent part in the Gospels, where those composing it appear under such designations as “publicans and sinners,” “publicans and harlots,” “the lost* sheep of the house of Israel.” As this last name indicates, they were those who had broken through the fences of religion and social observance by which Jewish life was regulated and distinguished from the world at large, thus allowing themselves to become a reproach and a menace to all by whom these barriers were respected. So far had the publicans gone in defiance of traditional custom and national feeling as to sell themselves to the foreign power by which the country was held in servitude. They were, accordingly, looked upon as having forfeited their nationality and gone over to the pagans; and the very worst that could be said of any man was that he was “an heathen man and a publican.”
The attitude of Jesus to this class was one of
* Connect this term “lost,” which is extremely characteristic of the preaching of Jesus, with the word “lose,’’ commented on in the foregoing chapter. the most singular and characteristic features of His career and, when fully understood, reveals more clearly perhaps than any other circumstance the secret of His mission.
The respectable and religious classes of the land had no doubt what their attitude to the publicans and sinners ought to be. They frankly and heartily detested them, taking no pains to conceal their hostility. They treated them exactly as, in the physical world, they did leprosy, and they flattered themselves that they had good reason for so doing. Undoubtedly the members of this class, wherever it exists, are infected persons, who spread moral contagion. A harlot, for instance, is a menace to every respectable home. She lives by corrupting those of the opposite sex; and what else can be so utter an insult to her own sex as her trade? Such sinners are infinitely more dangerous than the small¬ pox or the cholera. And they ought to be made sensible of their degradation. Kindness shown to them is unkindness to others who are far more entitled to consideration. It is only by stigmatizing their course of life as it deserves that society is able to prevent others from adopting it.
Such was the theory of the religious classes, and it appeared to be supported by their religious books. In the Book of Proverbs, for example, one of the principal aims of which is to warn the young and inexperienced against evil company of every kind, no
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“the strange woman,” as she is there called, is held up to especial reprobation and contexnpt. The prophets, in like manner, while launching their thunderbolts against every form of public iniquity, are specially severe on luxury and riot. John the Baptist, the last of the Old Testament prophets, attacked the public iniquity of the time in the plainest of terms, pointing out to each class of his hearers the besetting sins which must be given up. In all ages, indeed, this is the rd!e of the prophet, as we see in such modern instances as Savonarola, Hugh Latimer and John Knox. In our own day many Christian ministers are roused to prophetic vehemence by drunkenness, pouring indignant floods of denunciation not only on the habits of the people, but on the traffic by which these are encouraged. With drunkenness they associate impurity and gambling, as a trinity of evil, against which the forces df Christian society ought to be embattled, as being both dishonouring in the highest degree to God and destructive to men.
It is remarkable, however, how little of His eloquence Jesus directed against such carnal and public sins. He has plenty of prophetic indignation, but it is reserved for sins of a wholly different cast. And towards the members of the class in which these open sins prevailed He manifested a surprising leniency, not to say partiality. The most striking single instance is that preserved in the Gospel of iii
St. John, although probably not recorded by the pen of the Fourth Evangelist, of the woman taken in adultery, over whom Jesus cast the shield of His protection, to the discomfiture of her accusers. But in the Synoptists we have the case of Zacchasus and the still more touching one of the Woman who was a Sinner. Matthew, the publican, is chosen to be an apostle; and Jesus attends a feast of publicans, given at his house. So unlike was the conduct of our Lord in this respect to that expected in His native country from a religious teacher, that it excited the most damaging suspicions and evoked the most cutting criticisms, although it is difficult to believe that His enemies were not consciously lying when they characterized Him as “a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” Even the excess, however, of this accusation shows how inexplicable His conduct seemed to His contemporaries.
What is the explanation of it?
We may be certain that it was not due to any insensibility on His part to the wickedness of open and carnal sins. It is impossible to believe that one who loved God as He did could be indifferent to the high-handed breaking of the divine laws; and it is equally impossible to believe that one who loved man as He did could be tolerant of that which is so infectious and so deadly. It can be proved by quotation from His words, that He appealed to the
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Ten Commandments, where such sins are forbidden, with an earnestness not less warm than that of the Baptist himself. Against at least one public sin prevalent in His native land He frequently turned the point of His invective — the practice of profane swearing — a sin treated by many in His day, as it is in our own, with levity, but which filled His soul, as might have been expected, with abhorrence. He has drawn at least one full-length picture of carnal sin, matchless in its fidelity. This is in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Never has the natural history of sin been so realistically depicted, from the intoxication of its opening to the misery and degradation of its closing stages. It is a scene from real life rather than a parable; for there is not a town in the world which cannot produce a story to match it; yet, all through, there is the suggestion that the visible fall is not the worst: the spendthrift loses his home, his father, his means, his health and his character; but the worst loss is that of his God and of his destiny.
Another thing of which we may be equally sure is that the leniency of Jesus to this class of sinners was not due to such an affinity with them as His enemies attributed to Him. Arguing from the proverbial belief that like draws to like, they affected to believe that His partiality for such society was due to sympathy with their ways of living. And this mode of interpreting His conduct has not yet died out of the ii3
world. There are at the present day litterateurs of international renown who seek their heroes and heroines among the outcasts of society, whom they invest with all the virtues necessary to excite the admiration and affection of their readers. Thieves are depicted as miracles of generosity, and harlots as paragons of purity; and the narrative is so managed that the virtues atone for the imperfections, and the crimes are made to appear more misfortunes than faults. The heroes and heroines are the victims of circumstances, and society, which draws in its skirts as they pass by, is really more to blame than they. Not infrequently has the name of the Teacher of Galilee been invoked to legitimise such representations, it being taken for granted that He would have judged in the same way. But. one essential point is missed by those who thus in our day patronise Jesus, as it was by those who criticized Him in His own — namely, that He invariably drew near to the outcasts for the purpose of reclaiming them. He went among them, as He said Himself, as the physician goes among the sick. Never was there a more unanswerable argument; for where ought a physician to be if not among the diseased? and, the more desperate the disease is, the more imperative is it that he should be there.* But the virtue of this argument depends entirely on the sup-
* Compare the logion attributed to Jesus by Ephraem Syrus: “But where the pains are, thither hasteneth the physician.” position that he is there to cure. Too often the modern writers of whom I have spoken flatter instead of curing, making light of sin and putting excuses in the mouths of those who practise it. But Jesus induced Zacchseus to disgorge his ill-gotten gains and commanded the woman taken in adultery to sin no more. The publicans and the sinners never received the impression that He had come to be one of them¬ selves: they were perfectly well aware that He had come to win them from an evil life.
Yet there was in His behaviour a remarkable novelty; and, although the world has since then travelled far in His company — so far that the hostility of His contemporaries to His efforts on behalf of the fallen are now hardly intelligible — it is still far from comprehending His secret. The settled conviction of His contemporaries and predecessors was that, in dealing with carnal and open sinners, a religious teacher must attack their sins without mercy or circumlocution, pounding at them incessantly, condemn¬ ing and exposing them. There is nothing else to be done, it was thought; and this is still the conviction, conscious or unconscious, of many earnest souls. But Jesus, while not less sensible than others of the magnitude and heinousness of such sins, recognised that these did not make up the whole history of those guilty of them. Conspicuous as their offences might be, towering aloft and inviting the lightning of prophetic denunciation, there was another side, less visible and us
less easy of access but, when found, far more capable of being penetrated with the message of Heaven. Can anyone look at the Woman who was a Sinner, kneeling at the feet of the Saviour, the expression of her love so passionate and yet so restrained, without being convinced that, in spite of her awful past, there were in her composition elements of womanhood of the finest quality, waiting for disenthralment? In short, there is a conscience in man, even at his worst, and Jesus habitually made use of this as a lever to over¬ turn the fabric of iniquity. It is by the good in everyone that the evil must be overcome. This was the secret of Jesus.
The locus classicus, in which we must seek the innermost thoughts of Jesus on this vital point, is the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke. The woman’s piece of silver did not turn to copper or lead, when it was lost. In one sense its value was reduced to zero, because, for the time, it was of no use to its owner; and this is an image of the fact, no doubt intended to be suggested by the Preacher, that an impenitent sinner is throwing away thousands of opportunities of being useful to God and man. In like manner the Lost Sheep is an image of how such an one has forsaken his own mercies; and the Prodigal Son of the misery, conscious or unconscious, of his condition. But, although mixed up with dust and dirt, the coin has not been changed to dust and dirt: on the contrary, the eye of the mind can see it shining where it lies, even before ii6
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it is discovered, as the imagination of the miner sees the diamond, condensed from secular pressures, sparkling below the quartz. And, in the same way, Jesus taught the world to divine behind the iniquities of the chief of sinners a possible son of God and heir of eternity.
So far, indeed, from becoming valueless through being lost, the coin thereby acquired an extraordinary value and interest in the mind of the owner. This fact is the salient point of all the three parables of the fifteenth of St. Luke. The Pharisees were acting on the supposition that those whom God had lost were forgotten or hated by Him; and they believed they were acting in accordance with His mind when they neglected or hated them too; but Jesus proved to them by a series of illustrations, which could easily have been multiplied — for the principle, once admitted, can be illustrated by a hundred instances — that the very fact of being lost lends to any object a new value in the eyes of its owner. The desiderium may increase till it is an all-absorbing agony, leading to the most persevering efforts to find that which has been lost. This is human nature. Jesus appealed to the world to confirm His reading of the human heart; and, in the depths of His own consciousness, He was certain that it is divine nature also; and so He ventured to announce it as the sentiment of Heaven — “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.”
The Sin of the Pharisee
If Jesus displayed extraordinary tolerance to the sins of the publicans, He made up for it by His treatment of the sins of the Pharisees, His attacks on the latter being vehement — not to say violent — in the extreme. In the Sermon on the Mount He turned into ridicule their habits of prayer, fasting and almsgiving. As time went on, He came into more and more direct collision with them, inflicting many a wound that could not but be bitterly resented, as in the parable of the Two Men who went up to the Temple to Pray. At length during the last week of His life, in the discourse preserved in the twenty-third of St. Matthew,* he threw every consideration aside, and, in tones ranging from the most biting sarcasm to holy indignation, He exposed His enemies to the contempt of the multitude. He advised His hearers to listen, indeed, to these holy men, because they sat in Moses’ seat, but He entreated them not to imitate them; “For,” said He, “they say and do not.” Then He ridiculed their broad phylacteries and long prayers, and drew an irresistibly amusing picture of their struggle for the chief seats at feasts and their childish delight in titles of honour. What could have been more galling to religious teachers than to be told, “Ye shut up the kingdom of heaven
* This is the locus classicus.
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against men, for ye neither go in yourselves nor suffer them that are entering to go in”; or to those zealous in making converts to Judaism from other religions than to be told, “Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and, when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves”? He compared them to “whited sepulchres, which, indeed, appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness.” He overwhelmed them with a succession of Seven Woes, as if to indicate that, in His opinion, they had carried iniquity to the point of perfection.
There recently appeared an article on Jesus by a Jewish scholar of the most modern type, who spoke of Him with respect, commending His doctrine to the attention of his co-religionists; but, he added, the attacks on the scribes and Pharisees attributed to Him must undoubtedly be inventions of a later age and of inferior minds; because it is inconceivable that so good a man could have spoken so of other good men. Even among Christians there has sometimes been manifested a shrinking from this section of the words of the Master, as if He had gone over the score. Certainly these attacks are calculated to upset the image of Him in some minds, to which He appears too meek and mild to kindle into wrath and indignation under any circumstances. But of the authenticity of these portions of His preaching there can be no doubt; who, indeed, but Himself could have uttered the discourse of the twenty-third of St. Matthew? * And those who love and honour Him need not be afraid to face the facts. Jesus was a prophet, and one of the principal aspects of the mission of the prophets was to stigmatize the sins of the people among whom they lived; and, if on this occasion His attitude was of more than prophetic severity, it is enough to remark, in vindication of His vehemence, that the sin He was denouncing was hypocrisy.
It has sometimes been suggested that the reason why Jesus attacked the sin of the publicans so little and that of the Pharisees so unmercifully was be¬ cause the latter was a novelty in the world. In the former there was nothing new; the prophets of the Old Testament had sufficiently dealt with it already; the Son of God would not deign to expose those who confessed their own sin. But the sin of the Pharisees was a new development of the mystery of iniquity, and its wickedness was not understood: on the contrary, its practisers were able to masquerade in The garb of sanctity; and it became the new prophet to expose and stigmatize the new sin. This is the line taken by Mozley in the discourse on the Pharisees in his
* In literary form this discourse is not surpassed by any other utterance of Jesus. The feeling is strong, having obviously been accumulating for a lifetime, but it is perfectly controlled; and the swing of the rhetoric almost goes over into poetry. Only at v. 33 does the Speaker at last seem on the point of losing His self-control; but how quickly is this discord resolved in the pathos of v. 37!
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University Sermons, in which we have a marvellous instance of what can be done, by depth of psychology and keenness of moral sensitiveness, to shed fresh light on a subject which may appear to have been long exhausted; for Mozley may almost be said to have discovered the Pharisee, so subtle and illuminative is his analysis. “It was a new development of evil in the world,” says he, “when a class, socially and religiously respectable, was discovered to be corrupt at the root. Evil which produced evil, which issued in disorder and crime, was an old fact; but evil which was the parent of outward discipline and goodness was new. It was a new stroke of policy in evil, like a new principle in trade or economic science. It was a new revelation of the power and character of evil that it was not confined to its simple and primitive ways — its direct resistance to conscience — but that it had at its disposal a very subtle and intricate machinery for attaining what the simple methods could not reach. It was a revelation of human nature that it contained all this machinery, this duplicity of action and working of wheel within wheel. And it was fit — there was a special aptness in the task — that He who knew what was in man should arraign this new form of evil upon its appearance in the world and at once stamp upon it that ineffaceable stigma which it has never been able to erase. He wbP saw the imposture and exposed it knew that it must be exposed in no doubtful terms, and that less severity would not have answered His purpose and left the mark which He designed.”
The besetting sin of the Jewish race in earlier ages had been idolatry; it was against this that the wrath of all the prophets was directed. Nothing is more perplexing, as the Old Testament history is perused, than to observe how ineradicable was the tendency to apostatize from Jehovah. The student of the sacred narrative asks in astonishment how those who had known the true God could, century after century, fall away from Him to the worship of a golden calf or such monsters as Chemosh and Baal. The explanation usually offered is that ancient peoples, when defeated in battle, were liable to transfer their allegiance to the deities who were supposed to have given victory to their own votaries. But, while this may sometimes have contributed, the real reason was a different one: it was simply that the worship of idols made the strongest possible appeal to the worst side of human nature. The heathen temples and groves were the scenes of sensual orgies, in which the appetites of the natural man received stimulus and satisfaction to the full. It was this that made the proximity of the Canaanite cults so terrible a temptation to Israel, while it made everyone in Israel who had any regard for decency and purity their uncompromising enemy. Almost more surprising, however, than the lapses of Israel into idolatry during so many
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centuries of its history are the suddenness and the completeness with which at a certain point in its history this tendency was overcome. By the exile in Babylon it was cured once for all, the nation returning to its own land not only with no disposition to follow after strange gods but with a fanatical zeal for the suppression of idolatry. Even when they had to succumb to the Roman sway, they would not permit the standards of the legions, which were decorated with symbols of idolatry, to be carried into their holy city, but were ready to offer their necks in thousands to the swords of the conquerors rather than admit such a profanation. This zeal had its principal seat in the Pharisaic party, the members of which were distinguished for patriotism.
The nation was like a man who, having sown his wild oats, turns over a new leaf and becomes a respectable member of society, marrying a wife, becoming the head of a family, and setting up as a zealous defender of Church and State. On such a man the transformation is great to outward seeming; for he has gone over to the side of law and order, and is zealous against transgressors. Yet, in reality, he may remain in all essential respects the very same man as before, because the motive of the change is purely selfish, and his heart may be totally destitute of that which is the essence of morality and religion. Conformity to the conventionalities is the price he pays for the comfortable position he occupies in society; and, the longer he enjoys the esteem of his neighbours, the easier does it become to pay the tribute. But the superficiality of the change is proved by the ease with which, when from home and not under observation, he slips such habits as Sabbath-keeping and church-going, and by the zest with which, in confidential hours among old associates, he recalls the memories of his Bohemian days. In fact, he is the same man, only with a veneer of decency spread over the surface of his character. Such was the change which had passed over the Jewish people and was exhibited especially in the Pharisees. In some respect it was a change for the better; because, as it is better in any community to have law-abiding citizens than robbers and drunkards, so it is better that men should be zealots for the worship of the true God than remain worshippers of stocks and stones. But the motive of the change was a purely selfish one; there was in it nothing of either the love of God or the love of man. It had been discovered that religion could be made a means of personal display and aggrandisement. The un¬ thinking multitude looked up to the Pharisees as holy men; and the Pharisees eagerly raked in this tribute of popular applause. “Religion,” observes Mozley in the discourse already quoted, “is so much a part of our nature that even the pride of man cannot culminate to the full without it. Religion undoubtedly makes him a greater being; if, then, he grasps like a robber at the prize without the humbling
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means, he does become the prouder for it. And then, in its turn, religion grovels in the dust.”
It was not, however, only or even chiefly because it was new that Jesus attacked so bitterly the sin of the Pharisees. He must have considered it peculiarly malignant. Once He compared His own generation to a man out of whom a devil has been cast; where¬ upon the dispossessed demon goes through dry places, seeking rest and finding none; till at last he says, I will return to the place whence I came out: and, finding the house empty, swept and garnished, he takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and, entering in, he dwells there; “And,” solemnly adds Jesus, “the last state is worse than the first.” There can be little doubt about the interpretation of this parable as far as it was intended to apply to its immediate hearers. The demon by which Israel had been possessed in the days of the prophets was, as we have seen, idolatry; but, by means of the Exile, this evil spirit had been exorcised. Unfortunately, however, the reformation had been merely negative. The empty house had been swept and garnished; but the genuine spirits of religion and morality had never been heartily invited to come and abide in it. So, there was room for any occupants that might chance to be passing that way; and at last the sins of the mind — such as ambition and arrogance — entered the tenantless dwelling and took possession, in place of the sins of the flesh. Or rather, I ought to say, in company with the sins of the flesh, for Jesus affirms that the original evil spirit came back along with the seven new ones; and in the Gospels there are too many indications that beneath the cloak of Pharisaism sensual sin was not infrequently concealed.* This must be the signification of our Lord’s charge that the Pharisees made clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, when within these were full of extortion and excess. Mankind in all ages have instinctively felt that this kind of sin — sin which is concealed beneath a profession of virtue and religion — eats more deeply into the soul and produces more complete corruption than the worst kinds of open sin. Hence the annihilating force of the language of Jesus when He made the name of Pharisee a synonym for hypocrite.
It was in a more pathetic vein that He sometimes referred to another characteristic of the sin of the Pharisee in such sayings as this, “They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick.” There is hope for a sinner who knows that he is condemned, but of what use is even the Saviour of the world to one who is not aware of anything of which he requires to repent? “Hence,” observes
* In the second chapter of Romans, after the terrible indictment of the Gentiles in the first chapter, St. Paul expressly brings this charge against the members of his own race — “And thinkest thou, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God? v
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Mozley, “that great and conspicuous point of view in which the Pharisee always figures in the Gospel — namely, as incapable of repentance. Self-knowledge is the first condition of repentance, and he did not possess self-knowledge; and, therefore, it was said to him: ‘ The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you,’ because the publicans and the harlots knew their guilt, and he did not. He had degraded conscience below the place which the heathen gave it. The heathen, at any rate, allowed it to protest. There is, indeed, nothing in all history more remarkable than the wild and fitful voice of the heathen conscience, which would suddenly wake up out of its trance, to pierce heaven with its cries, invoking divine vengeance upon some crime. The heathen conscience was ‘ an accuser, a tormentor; it brooded over men; it stung them; it haunted them in their dreams; they started out of their sleep with horror in their countenances, wanting to fly from it, and not knowing where to fly; while the more they fled away from it, the more its arrows pursued them, wandering over the wide earth, and seeking rest in vain. Or, if they tried to drown its voice in excitement or passion, it still watched its moment, and would be heard, poisoning their revelry, and awakening them to misery and despair. Compare with this wild, this dreadful, but still this great visitant from another world the Pharisaic conscience, pacified, domesticated, brought into harness — a tame conscience, converted into a manageable and applaud¬ ing companion, vulgarised, humiliated, and chained; with a potent sway over mint, anise and cummin, but no power over the heart — and what do we see but a dethroned conscience, deserted by every vestige of rank and dignity?”
St. Paul, himself a converted Pharisee, carefully distinguishes between the desires of the flesh and the desires of the mind in the life of sin, when he imparts this bit of autobiography: “Among whom also we all had our conversation in time past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” * And elsewhere he draws the same distinction, when he exhorts, “Dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit. The sins of the flesh are such as luxury, gluttony and sloth; the sins of the mind or the spirit are such as pride, ostentation and selfishness. The former are the sins of youth, the latter of age; the former are the sins of the savage, the latter of the civilised; the former are the sins of the publican, the latter of the Pharisee. The former strike the eye of every observer and invite the thunderbolts of every prophet; but the deepest thinkers on such subjects have recognised that the sins of the mind and the spirit send their roots far deeper and are infinitely more difficult to eradicate from the soul.
* Eph. ii. 3.
t 2 Cor. vii. 1.
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The Sin of the Sadducee
The Sadducees were the anti-Pharisaic party; whatever was championed by the one party was likely to be opposed by the other. Thus, whereas the Pharisees adhered to “the traditions of the elders,” which they believed to have come down orally from Moses and to possess equal authority with those doctrines and precepts which had proceeded from the great legislator in writing,- the Sadducees rejected these traditions in toto, adhering to the written Word alone, and especially to the Books of Moses. In this they were undoubtedly correct; but they went as far in the direction of believing too little as the Pharisees did in believing too much. Thus, the Gospel tells us, they denied the resurrection of the dead and the existence of angels and spirits; or, as Josephus in The Jewish War expresses their opinions, they denied the immortality of the soul and the rewards and punishments of a future life, saying that the soul perishes with the body. They were the sceptical party; or, at least, their religious beliefs lacked warmth and conviction.
The weakness of the religious sentiment in them was partly the cause and partly the effect of another characteristic — perhaps the most marked of all — namely, worldliness. If the spiritual and eternal stirred them but faintly, all the more tenacious was the grasp they took of the concerns of the present life. They were the aristocratic and ruling, but, at the same time, the priestly party, because, from the date of the return from the Babylonian Exile, the high-priestly office had been closely associated with political power, and the high-priestly families were the leaders of politics and society. Priests immersed in the affairs of the visible world and but faintly tinged with the hoper or spirit of the world invisible, the professed ministers of which they are, have been no unusual phenomena in history; but rarely has the type been more perfectly exhibited than in the Sadducean party. Again and again would the religion of Jehovah have been sacrificed, and with it the national identity, if these sacred inheritances had, in critical moments, had no more zealous conservators; and, however severely we may judge the Pharisees, as they appear in the biography of J esus, it cannot be denied that, in such times as those of Antiochus Epiphanes, they were the saviours of the religion of which we have become the heirs.
The Sadducees do not play anything like so important a part in the life of Christ as do the Pharisees. Jesus did not come nearly so much into contact or collision with them. Only at the very close of His career do we find them openly identified with the opposition to His influence and doctrine. On this occasion they may have been provoked into active hostility by His action in cleansing the temple; or the temple was under the charge of the high-priests, who nearly all belonged to this party; and it was against their unholy gains that He was striking when He drove out of the sacred precincts the traffickers in sacrificial animals, who were in the employment of the high-priests, exclaiming: “It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
It would be interesting to know whether, in the sayings of Jesus, we have received any picture of the Sadducee similar to that of the Pharisee in the parable of the Two Men who went up to the Temple to Pray. No such portrait exists to which the Author has expressly attached the name; but there exist more portraitures than one from the hand of the Master to which we can hardly be mistaken in affixing this label.
Such especially is the parable — if it be a parable — of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Dives, as he is often called, was clothed with purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day, while Lazarus lay at his gate full of sores and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Exegetic ingenuity has pointed out that the parable does not state that Lazarus was fed from the crumbs, but only that he desired to be fed. To such wire¬ drawing, however, we will give no countenance. Jesus sketches Dives not unkindly. On the contrary, even in hell the miserable man is represented as anxious iji
about the fate of his five brethren. At this also, indeed, wire-drawing exegesis, terrified at discovering any trace of goodness in hell, has taken offence, and construed it as a trait of selfishness: he was afraid, it is insinuated, to meet his brethren in the place of woe, lest they should reproach him with bringing them thither. But neither with this will we have anything to do. Wherein, then, lay the guilt for which Dives was condemned to such an awful fate? Is it sinful to be clothed well and to dine well? Of course the answer is, that to Dives these things were the whole of life. He lived to dine and to wear sumptuous clothing, neither bestowing on the poor any generosity commensurate with his means nor remembering that he was an heir of eternity. Here, in fact, we have come again upon the tremendous moral principle, which occupies so prominent a place in the Ethic of Jesus, that not-doing may be as guilty as doing, and that the Judge will accept no excuse for a life not marked by usefulness up to the measure of its opportunities. It is evident, however, that the lesson would acquire additional piquancy if Dives could with certainty be identified with the Sadducee.
There is another of the parables between which and this one there is a close resemblance — namely, that of the Rich Fool. In regard to it also the question has been asked, wherein the man’s fault lay. Is it a crime, when a farmer’s barns are too small, to build greater, or even, when the harvest-home has
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been unusually abundant, to eat, drink and be merry? In this case, however, Jesus has, in the closing sentences of the parable, made unmistakeable what His charge against the accused is. His mind and heart have been entirely absorbed in his property — the mere shell and husk of life — while for his soul and his eternity he has manifested no concern. To quote the very words of the Teacher, he has heaped up treasures for himself, but has not been rich towards God. This is precisely the spirit of the Sadduc.ee — it is a perfect description of worldliness, the Sadducee’s sin; but it is perhaps too common a case to have been consciously painted with an eye to a particular class.
There is, however, a third parable in which I should fancy it to be nearly indubitable that our Lord had a member of this party in His eye. This is the parable of the Unjust Judge and the Poor Widow. The Sadducees took a prominent part in the justiciary business of the country; and the cynicism of the official who neither feared God nor regarded man must have been the very mark of many a haughty member of this class, living in the provinces among people he despised, and far from the capital, for the society of which he pined. That which he could not be got to do, either for the fear of God or out of regard to man, he yet hastened to do merely to save himself from annoyance; and this is a thoroughly Sadducean trait. The Sadducee was a friend of heathen culture and philosophy; he found refuge from the disagreeable insistence of business and the presence of disagreeable people in association with the wisdom of Plato and the eloquence of Cicero; and, in order to escape to these employments of his learned leisure, he was willing to decree anything. For him justice had no majesty and the misfortune of a widow no sacredness; the thing which did immeasurably matter was that his philosophic calm should not be ruffled. Such a figure, I should suppose, had been seen by Jesus in the course of His wanderings through the land; and it is ten to one that he was a Sadducee.
Whether these supposed references to Sadducees in the teaching of our Lord be actual or not, certain it is that the spirit of the Sadducees was opposite to His — more so, I should say, than the spirit of the Pharisees. Worldliness was the badge of this party. Now, worldliness stifles the very faculty of religion; and on a cold, cynical heart the appeals of religion fall like seed upon a rock. This was the spirit that, consciously or unconsciously, our Lord was attacking when, in the parable of the Sower, He spoke of the seed falling on rocky soil; and it was the same spirit that in another parable — that of the Excuses — rendered of no effect the invitations to the feast. The man who bought a piece of ground which he was going to visit, the man who had bought a yoke of oxen which he must needs go and prove, and the
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man who had married a wife and therefore could not come were all samples of worldliness — that is, of the spirit to which the things that can be seen and touched are the realities which impress and inspire, but the objects of the spiritual and eternal world are shadows, to which one may decently bow and burn incense but which do not exercise any constraining influence over life and conduct.
There is one object on which the Sadducee in human nature casts itself by an inevitable instinct, and to which it clings with appalling tenacity. This is money. Money is the sign and symbol of all earthly possessions; it is earthly pleasure in a solid condition, only requiring to be melted to assume any of its more volatile and usable forms; and the pursuit of it easily becomes an absorbing passion even with those who have forgotten how to turn it into these equivalents.
On this subject the language of Jesus is astonishingly severe. He actually, at least as reported by one of the Evangelists,* said, “Blessed are ye poor,”
* St. Luke manifests a partiality for such sayings, which has caused him to be styled “the Socialist among the Evangelists.” Thus, to him alone we are indebted for the parables of the Rich Fool, Dives and Lazarus, and the Pharisee and the Publican, as well as the story of Zacchaeus, the incident in which Jesus was asked to decide a question of inheritance, and the social deliverances in the preaching of the Baptist. To sayings of this sort, reported also by the other Evangelists, he gives an additional emphasis as may be seen by comparing Matt. v. 22 with Luke vi. 30, 35; Mark vi. 8 with Luke ix. 3; Matt. xxii. 10 and, “Woe to you that are rich,” as if He condemned wealth absolutely and prescribed poverty to all who should accept His doctrine. “Lay not up for your¬ selves,” He cautioned His disciples, “treasure upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal; for, where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also” — the last words
with Luke xiv. 21. The most striking instance is that, whereas St. Matthew reports Jesus as saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” St. Luke not only renders this as “Blessed are ye poor,” but adds, “Woe unto you that are rich” (vi. 20, 24). The question is, whether, in such cases, the first and second Evangelists have toned down the original, which the third has preserved in its native freshness, or whether St. Luke has heightened the colouring for reasons of his own. Some have attributed his tendency to Pauline influence, but without considering sufficiently whether the influence of St. Paul would not have told the opposite way. Others have attributed it to a socialistic current which, it is said, can be traced in many quarters, heathen as well as Christian, in the century in which the New Testament literature came into existence. Of late there has been a disposition to attribute it to the use by St. Luke of a source which he must have found among the poor Jews at Jerusalem or in the surrounding neighbourhood to whom St. Paul brought alms from his Gentile converts; but it is not made very clear what should have caused St. Luke to be partial to information coming to him from such a quarter; though, of course, it may have been enough for him to be persuaded that it was according to fact, Jesus having actually uttered these sayings as they had been handed down. See a fairly good discussion of the question in Rogge, Der irdisclie Besitz im N.T., pp. 10-18.
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containing one of those great flashes of moral insight with which He was able ever and anon to light up His discourses. “It is easier,” He said, “for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” So extraordinary is this saying that even His disciples, who, one would suppose, had little need to be afraid lest they should be excluded on account of their wealth, were alarmed and asked, “Who, then, can be saved?” But the harshest saying of all was - to the young man who came asking, “What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” “Go and sell all
that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow Me.” Innumerable have been the attempts to prove the reasonableness of this demand, the majority of them assuming something exceptional, known to himself and Jesus, in the temperament and circumstances of the man; but, when all is said, it remains a hard saying.
Such sayings have been accepted literally by some who have undertaken to expound the mind of Jesus. So it was in the Ancient Church, when those at any rate who adopted the clerical career sold all that they had and distributed to the poor before entering upon office; in the Middle Ages, leaders like St. Francis of Assisi held up to thousands of enthusiasts the assumption of voluntary poverty as the true imitation of Christ; and in our own day a man like Count Tolstoy still understands in this sense the mind and intention of the Saviour. Nihilists, who dogmatically affirm that private property is robbery, appeal to the Man of Nazareth as the first teacher of their principles; whereas, on the opposite side, it is made a charge against Him by the materialistic writers of the Continent, that He had no proper respect for property; and there are few objections to Christianity more effective with the bourgeoisie or even the proletariat. Strauss, in his last work of importance, The Old and the New Faith, played off this objection for all it was worth; and Rau, an adherent of the naturalistic school of Feuerbach and Moleschott, in a work recently published, entitled The Ethic of Jesus, takes it for granted that the monastic interpretation of this portion of the words of Jesus is the true one; and thus he has no difficulty in raising strong prejudice against the moral teaching of our Lord. There are historians who represent Jesus as having been a wandering mendicant, whose aim was to found a society in which there should be no social distinctions, because all found their happiness in freedom from care, this being secured by freedom from possessions.
But, although in a theoretical world the absence of possessions may be identical with freedom from care, it is not so in the actual world. Unless those who have no possessions of their own are clever enough to induce others to toil for them, their life must be
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one of incessant anxiety, which is by no means favourable to religious absorption. Few are so exposed to temptation, or so little able to serve God with an undistracted mind, as persons in debt. While Jesus earnestly deprecated carefulness about such things as food and clothing, He nevertheless recognised these as things which all have need of, and He took it for granted that they must be sought, only urging that righteousness should be sought first. In parables like the Talents and the Pounds He manifested a high appreciation of all providential advantages such as are afforded by money and property for service to God and man; and in many parables He dwelt upon faithfulness to a trust, under a prince or a master, as a virtue of the very front rank. On nothing did He more frequently insist than that His followers should give alms to the poor. But it is obvious that those who habitually give to the poor must themselves have some means of acquiring the wherewithal with which to keep up the practice; and, if it be, as St. Paul has informed us, a maxim of Jesus that “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” * this is an acknowledgment that it is better to have than not to have; because it is those who have that give, and those who have not who receive. Besides giving to the poor, Jesus recommended giving to the house of God, and He could
* Quoted as a logion of Jesus in the speech to the elders of Ephesus, Acts xx. even defend lavish expenditure on objects which to narrow minds appeared destitute of utility, as in the case of Mary’s box of ointment. It would not be too much to say that He took it for granted that His followers would be of the class able to give to the needy. He did not associate exclusively with poor people, but accepted without hesitation the hospitality of those able to entertain Him in handsome and festive fashion. It was against such an absorption in wealth as makes it the be-all and end-all of existence that He protested — against the habit of regarding it as the end instead of only as the means of life.
This is the essential distinction. Money is an enslaving power when it is valued and pursued for its own sake; but, when mind and heart stand above it, compelling it to subserve their chosen ends, then it may become one of the instrumentalities of the kingdom of God. The strongest statement of Jesus in this direction is perhaps the conclusion of the Parable of the Unjust Steward: “And I say unto you, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that, when ye die, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” As a whole this is probably the most difficult to interpret of all our Lord’s parables, the main difficulty lying in the fact that it appears to hold up for imitation the shady behaviour of a bad man. But the single point on which the application turns is the necessity and the
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reward of foresight. This is the same lesson as was taught in the parable of the Ten Virgins; but here Jesus gives to it the peculiar application that even money, the use of which is so often tainted, may in this world be expended in such ways as to yield a return in the world to come.
Those who represent Jesus as aiming at the creation of a society in which there should be no wealth, but all should enjoy happiness in universal poverty, may mean well, but they are really doing their best to dethrone Him from the imperial position He occupies as the Teacher of the world; for nothing is more certain than that mankind will not permanently listen to any master who ignores or despises the fruits of intelligence, industry and labour. Man knows himself to be endowed with powers of mind and body on the exercise and development of which his happiness and his dignity depend; the stamp which his labour is impressing on nature is gradually transforming the earth into a scene of order, fertility and beauty; and no authority, however high, will permanently convince him that this aim is an error or a sin. We could not even believe Jesus if He taught what is directly contradictory of our own experience and the primary dictates of our intelligence. But this I say only in order to repudiate the interpretations of those who would father upon Him unnatural and fantastic ideas which He never entertained.
While, however, we thus vindicate Jesus from the exaggerations of such interpreters as Tolstoy, it remains true that He saw in money a much more formidable enemy of the kingdom of God than we are apt to recognise it to be. The feuds occasioned between nation and nation by the lust for the soil of the globe; the disruption of friendship and domestic ties by disputes about inheritance; the murders and robberies perpetrated for the sake of gold; the hardening of the heart to all sympathy and generosity induced by the keenness of competition; the un¬ righteous and shameful occupations to which men will stoop if only there be money in them; the power of the pleasures which money can buy to drown the soul in animalism; the oblivion of all distant and divine things produced by the acquisition of property, — such phenomena of the life of man stood out before the mind of Jesus with a vividness of impression which we only realise at rare moments and soon forget. In His eyes wealth constituted a moral danger, which only constant vigilance could prevent from turning out a curse in the disguise of a blessing. Only the determination to be the master and not the slave of property, combined with the constant practice of liberality, could keep the heart free and unentangled.
On the other hand, Jesus did not dread poverty, as the world does. It may be a blessing in disguise. In seasons of outward loss and calamity the enduring
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possessions of the soul grow large, luminous and attractive, and the slumbering instincts of the spiritual nature waken up to apprehend them. The poor are less liable than the rich to feel that one world is enough. Nothing seemed to Jesus so much to poison the existence of the children of men as a craven dread of the future. They think a lion is lurking round every turning of the road, and they darken the sunshine of to-day by borrowing trouble from to¬ morrow, as if there were no heavenly Father to whom the future is known. Men accumulate the apparatus of life instead of living, forgetful of the fact that a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. In reality, however, the requirements of a human being are few, and they are not so difficult to find. Martha is troubled about many things, but one thing is needful. God would not have brought us into the world if there had not been a place for us at the universal table. It is a sunny world, if we will only stand in the sunshine, instead of skulking among the shadows. This is the essence of the Sermon on the Mount, and it is at the opposite pole from Sadduceeism.
Such, then, were the sins of the time of Christ — the sin of the publican, the sin of the Pharisee, the sin of the Sadducee — and the fact that we have had to dwell so long on this part of our subject, in order to exhaust all His mind upon it, shows how large a place it held in His thoughts and in His teaching. It may be objected, however, that these were the sins of special classes, and that perhaps He did not attribute sinfulness to all men. But He says to all men who listen to Him, even when complimenting them on one of their good qualities, “If ye, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children.” The late Dr. Bruce protested against such an obiter dictum being used to carry a great dogmatic consequence; but it seems to me that it is the very casualness of the saying that imparts to it such terrible force: it is as if He said, “Of course ye are evil, and ye know it; it requires no proof.” And what a glance it is into the heart of man when He says, “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” The sins of individuals and of classes are only the outcropping above the surface of a solidarity of evil beneath the surface, which is the property of the race as a whole.
Jesus would appear, however, to have looked upon His own age and His own countrymen as peculiarly wicked. Against His own generation He directed a force and a reiteration of invective that are without a parallel. “This,” He said, “is an evil generation.” He went so far as to call it “a generation of vipers.” Again and again He denounced it as “a wicked and adulterous generation,” the latter adjective being, in accordance with the usage of the Old Testament,
M4
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employed in the sense of “idolatrous,” seeing that idolatry was unfaithfulness on the part of the nation to Jehovah, its husband; so that the entire phrase means morally and spiritually depraved. The Jewish nation He compared to a fig-tree planted in a vine¬ yard — that is, favoured with unusual privileges, and cultivated with unusual care — yet from year to year yielding nothing — a useless log, cumbering the ground.
Would inquiry show that the race of which He was a child was more wicked than the other races of the human species, and that the age in which He lived was worse than those that had preceded or that have come after it? or are these the stock complaints of every prophet in every age? A very short time after He left the earth, and before His century ended, the nation of the Jews was turned inside out and its seamy side exposed to the eyes of history. In the annals of mankind there have been few such testing experiences as the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the Christian era; and never has all which such a test has revealed of that which is in man been more mercilessly put on paper than in The Jewish War of Josephus. Perhaps this author is not altogether to be trusted, because he was a turncoat; but he alleges that such was the iniquity of the Holy City before it was besieged by Titus that, had it not been destroyed by the Romans, the earth must have opened to swallow it up; and, in spite of the pity extorted by his narrative, the impression produced by it as a whole is one of such demoniac passion and violence that the reader acquiesces in the judgment of Providence by which such a nest of iniquity was removed from the earth.
When the best is corrupted, says the proverb, it becomes the worst; and this principle may be the explanation of the degeneration of Israel. There is no sin so guilty as sin against light; and Israel had enjoyed divine light beyond all the nations of the ancient world. The results had not, however, been such as the Giver of the light was entitled to expect. Age after age those sent by Him to enlighten their fellow-countrymen had been despised and rejected. Jerusalem was the city which slew the prophets. The Jews were like husbandmen left in charge of a vine¬ yard who, when the owner at the vintage sent to ask for his own, beat one messenger and stoned another, and were only acting in character when at last they slew his son. And this conduct, Jesus predicted, would prevail in the future as it had done in the past: “Behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them ye shall scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city.” Again and again He had to forewarn His followers and apostles of the treatment they were to expect: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep into the midst of wolves... they will deliver you up to the councils,
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and they will scourge you in their synagogues, and ye shall be brought before governors and kings for My sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles.” The latter words show that this persecuting violence was not to be confined to Jews, but manifested by heathens as well. In any case its prevalence is one of the worst features of history, and one of the most damning facts against human nature.
In the words of Jesus humanity never appears to less advantage than when its hostility to goodness is being spoken of.
Of course the culminating illustration of this was in the conduct of the Jews, and of mankind as represented by the Jews, toward Christ Himself. In Him had the perfect goodness visited the earth, but its presence served only to irritate the wickedness and to bring out its uttermost malignity. He had brought to His own generation privileges such as no preceding age and no other race had ever enjoyed; yet, through misuse, these had all turned to condemnation; so that, as He told them, the men of Nineveh and the Queen of Sheba would rise up in judgment with the men of His generation and would condemn them; because they had made use of their privileges, and these had not. Even for Sodom and Gomorrah it. would be more tolerable in the day of judgment than for the towns, like Bethsaida and Capernaum, in the streets of which His messages had been delivered and His signs wrought. This is a principle which must always be illustrated by the religion of Jesus, to whatever quarter of the world it may travel: it hardens the hearts which it does not melt, and sinks into deeper condemnation those who do not through it attain to righteousness; for there can be no greater guilt than the rejection of the Son of God.
In spite, however, of the vast extent of the sayings of our Lord about sin and their solemn character, He never allowed Himself to speak in the wholesale and exasperating way about the sinfulness of human nature in which theology, both scientific and popular, has too often indulged. He never spoke as if all bad people were equally bad, or all good people equally good. On both sides there are degrees of development and shades of difference. When the seed of the Word is sown, it falls upon various sorts of ground, some more and some less congenial, and one kind He does not hesitate to describe as “an honest and good heart.” On the other hand, when the seed of goodness begins to grow, it produces in some thirty, in some sixty, and in some an hundredfold. In ordinary human nature He recognised both bad and good qualities, when, in words already quoted, He said to parents, “Ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children.” “Evil” they are, even the best of them — and this seems to describe what is most fundamental — yet they are disposed and able to give good gifts to their children; and
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here His finger is laid, with His accustomed certainty, on the very point; because, if there survive in human nature any vestiges of primitive innocence, these are nowhere so unmistakeable as in domestic affection. It may be urged by theology that even the best acts of human beings, such as those prompted by love to their offspring, must be condemned at least for im¬ perfection, or that “an honest and good heart” owes its goodness to the prevenient grace of God; but such refinements are not in the manner of Jesus, who looks broadly at the facts of life and never allows the acknowledgment of things as they are to be stifled on His lips by the recollection of any small dogmatic formula. Profound as is His sense of the wickedness of the world and the lostness of the individual, the ground-tone of His preaching is not despair, but hope; and the final and enduring impression left on the mind by the prolonged and sympathetic study of all His words is, that even in the meanest and the worst of the children of men there is an essence of divine dignity and immeasurable value, which it is the task of the Saviour and of all who are inspired with His aims to rescue from the dangers to which it is exposed and to redeem to a destiny of blessedness and immortality.