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Les diagrammes suivants iilustrent la mAthode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 'm- .1 '.)'* -r- -f ■:'"t ,/!ii', ;..-■ ...^v>,/, ■/•■■•■ i»t«-'i - ^ m$m p Sep^mon gRBAGHBD IN v>, •■'/', i-;'*' (©HALMSr^S * (©HLtl^GH, * QUEBBG ON SpBBflSl), 23i^D Dbg., 1888 \i -;v?- X "•(,- BY ©HE F{BV. ©HOS. fflAGflDAM H<;i>M> oo Smi^AWHI^OY, ONIP. 7 (G) ^ — T, J. MOOBG, •o Puteltober ^n--V *..-^' '.^^*^; J >',■'-> -v% C'E-^'"^"'^ >."*-yv ■>T':-ii.-''»ii*4^5; .',■,•.},,«*:■;»■ .J5«.v*^r-%«» -^.'l- . ■ f^^?^** iv- ■■.-<< V. ^ v-t, . |Mi'«lj. .. f** I * > '> ^, r... ^ r /* ■ Mi ^i*«, y h ' "r |j(' ''",1 F, B^HPi^-^ ^ * ^■JH^^ 'V' •» ^^^^^^Ibh ^^ »>• » t ■■''■' ^::™f^fc ;'i*>.-:;**rn7; :4-.. T-*f->^ -^ ---i_' v^-^ »-^4^^»*-.^ ^f*''^'' ■*>^?i5(,J«is.i- ,y, Jv ;:,,: li ■/ dadd,ddddZaddlrid,ddidri'nions, we find that the errors and gflhati pertaining to them, become accentuated and magnified with the process of the ages, till some great convulsion shatters the traditional creed, and forces men to fresh and independent consideration of the inspired sources. Calvinism, for example, is sometimes presented in a way that would startle Calvin himself, by men who adopt his views aa sound, and thinking it is proof of orthodoxy to stretch them to the utmost distort those sublime principles of Divine sovereignty to a degree that over-rides the freedom of the human will, destroys responsibility, and narrows the full presentation of a free Gospel. More than this. A creed that has been tirystalized in traditional formuho tends with, inferior minds to become fossilized and petrified. Adopted without earnest identifying thought, and followed with sub- servient docility, the statements which originally embodied concep- tions of truth throbbing with vital practical meaning, become mere dead terms, barren verbal propositions, which manacle the living, life- giving principles of the Divine word in fetters of iron. Men fall into a routine of religious conceptions which have not been verified by a vigorous process of personal investigation, experimental applica- tion, and individual appropriation. It often requires a wave of here- tical opinion to sweep over the Church to awaken men's minds to the Vr//^ r t Iriv^i*'^ cj ir 8 power and richness and health of the Divine word. Men think them- selves orthodox, when they are merely manipulating by a mechanical logic the several propositions of their ci eed. Even a sound creed adopted on trust, and repeated by rote, may be less fruitful of practical good than a defective creed which has been personallyithougiit out, and has come to the birth after many a pang of sore intellectual and soul struggle, as a real personal possession. A sound creed may be a soul- less creed. The crystalized formula must be vitalized by peisonal ab- sorptivon and verification before it can be a living power. So long as a creed is fighting for existence it is a real thing to the minds and hearts of its adherents. But when it has passed beyond this stage the danger beginft. The late John Stuart Mill, in hh treatise on Liberty used language, toAvhich thoughtful minds cannot refuse assent, however much at variance with that author on other points. Speaking of such accepted forms of doctrinal belief he says, " when it has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively — when tVie mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exer- cise its vital powers on the questions wiiich its belief presents to it, theie is a progressive tendency to forget all of the beliet, except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realizing it in consciousness, or testing by personal experience ; uatil it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the himian being. Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world as almost to form the majority, in which the creed remain'^ as it were outside the mind, encrusting and petrifying it against all other influenc s addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for tlie mind and heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacs^nt." Alas, there is too much truth in this, a also in his further sneer that doc- trines thus held are " chiefly " viceable to pelt adversaries with." Probably this language will recall to your minus the oft quoted lines : "There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds." There is truth in this. Earnest souls battling honestly with difficul- ties, (raised not by vanity or a spirit of intellectual sophistry seeking to cover faults of practice, but by experimental inability tonarmonize the doctrines with the facts of consciousness, and the feasibilities of personal conduct,) are in a more hopeful state by far, than those who yield a lazy inoperative acceptance of the truth, which does not affect the life and character. To what a lamentable extent are accepted beliefs of truth — that has a direct and tremendous bearinj on human I I i \ I i il/# 9 feeling and conduct, practically ignored. To deny bluntly ftom this place such doctrines as that of the Deity, the Atonement, Future Judgment, would startle overyear, and create a storm of just indigna- tion ; but is it not the case that to some the siatfement of these mo- mentous doctrines, which to you are familiar platitudes, has ceased to awaken even a ripple of passing purpose to act in harmony with them, or to disturb consciences that have come to regard them as meaningless words, instead of living things ? The spirit of our creed must be incorporated in our very being before it is to us an effective reality. The Pharisee rot only adopted the errors of tradition , but having begun thus to adopt beliefs ready made, without personally testing them, out of deference to the authority of the fathers, he car- ried the process into the residue of sound scriptural belief which he entertained, until he evacuated it of its power over heart and life. In this aspect the Pharisee is not extinct, but sometimes sits in the pew, stands in the pulpit, and occupies the teacher's chair. III. The next development of Pharisaiam grows necessarily out of the last. It magnified the externals of religion till it lost the inner spirit, and multiplied observances and prohibitions tillit actually created occasions of sin. On the directly moral side, the Pharisees worked on the basis of a creed not absorbed in^o the very essence of their souls, and conse- quently ran morality and religion out to *he surface. They attended to the letter, and not to the spirit. In seeking conformity of conduct to their formal beliefs, they overlooked the more vital importance of motive. To such as were not protected by a deep spiritual-minded- ness, the Mosarc system offered some temptations in this direction. "The difference between the Old Covenant and the New was, that the former prescribed, the latter inspired .... the former laid down the rules, the latter brought man's heart into a condition in which such rules became a part of his nature." (Lias 2 Cor. II. 6 ) Herein lies the grand distinction and superiority of the Christian dispensation over the Mosaic • The New Covenant directs our attention more to our states than to our acts. But the Pharisees lost sight of such spirituality as undoubtedly existed in the Mosaic system, and concentrated atten- tion on acts, on doing, on outward conformities, rather than on states, on being, on inner harmony of soul. They thought, the seventh com- mandment v/as kept, when its outward breach was avoided ; but Christ told them that ii, was broken even by inward lust. They never dreamed that the spirit of the sixth commandment included hate in the heart as well as the actual crime of murder. They practically forgot that m " 10 the deeper reading of the whole law required to its right fulfilment a real love to God and man, over and above its outward observance. Thus they fell into an utter distortion of the proportionate heinous- ness of outward luid inward sins. Sins of a flagrant fleshly kind they sternly denounced, but sins of the spirit little troubled them. Murder, adultery, theft, lying, neglect of ceremonial observances of religion, were sins visited with the heaviest penalties of their condemnation ; but ambition, malice, envy, scorn, evil thinking, pride, avarice, cove- tousness, workllimindedness, selfishness, scarcely gave their consciences a moment's uneasiness, unless indeed tbey burst to the surface in some outbreak of a scandalous character. Are we free from this daager ? We very properly cry shame on open breaches of the moral code, and grosser forms of sin ; but do we minimize, and almost overlook sins of the spirit that burrow in our souls like cancers, and blacken them in God's sight sometimes more than sins which are visited with the sharpest condemnation of public opinion, and the severest censures of Church discipline ? God forbid that we should extenuate the evil of the grosser forms of sin ; but God forbid, not less, that we should con- ceal from ourselves the odiousness and danger of sins of heart, spirit, thought, temper and feeling. There are those who never transgress the rules of decorum, and who often severely denounce such as do, who are yet nursing in their hearts the very spirit that cast the wicked angels out of heaven. We may scorn the poor drunkard who soaks himself in liquor till the reason is dethroned ; but may be soaking our own whole being in sordid worldliness, till God himself is dethroned, and our heart grows hard as adamant. Sometimes a clique of sancti- monious religionists may groan in pious phrase over the wickedness of those who practice dancing, card playing, theatre-going, horte racing, Sabbath-breaking and other forms of worldliness, who may themselves be, in the very act of deploring, expending as much spite, and nursing as much self-righteousness in their religiously phrased lamentations as would outweigh in the scales of Divine judgment, the whole catalogue of sins denounced. It is one of the tricks of a per- verted conscience to fix our eye upon some outward form of transgres- sion, and concentrate our attention, and expend our indignation on it, tin we have no eye or condemnai ion for corroding inner vices. Severity against outward evils is the readiest way of diverting our attention from our own heart-sins, while it gives us the luxury of posing as ab- horrent of vice, and at the same time of gratifying our malevolent passion for denunciation, and flattering our own sense of superior virtue. We can " Compound for sins we are inclined to By damning those we have no mind to." • I !. ] () 11 But in religion as in medicine we must remember that surface , /^ diseases, though most repulsive, are not always dangerous. In both ^^ ^*v«qC' cases too, tiie most elficacious remedy will probably be that which enters the blood and works from within ; not an external application alone which may only send in the disease on more vital parts. But while dead to the spirit of God's Avord, and largely ignoring the evil of spiritual sins, tlie Pharisees ¥f«4««d industriously ewM; the MUJL ground of external religion. Working intellectually from the basis of a series of formal beliefs, whic». had never been absorbed into their inner nature, they learned to treat the doctrines of their faith wiih the merely mechanical manipulation of a wretched and barren verbal dialectic. Like the school-men of the 14th century they reasoned, analyzed, and refined witli a quibbling formal logic, by which they piled deduction on deduction and inference on inference, ti 11 they built up a system of moral casuistry of unparallelled, and often ridi- culous minuteness. Scrupulous about the letter of the Scripture in its bearing on external conduct, they adopted a principle of imerpre- tation known as " setting a liedge about the Law ; " fencing it off as it were to prevent even an approach to the violation of it. When any- thing was commanded they tried to go a little beyond what was strictly required, to make sure of doing all. When anything was forbidden they enlarged the prohibition to maks sure of doing nothing that was prohibited. In ihis way they fancied they would always " err on the safe side." This pi inciple at first sight appears wise and commendable ; but it was by it that they so extended the scope of the Law as to make it what the Apostle calls " a yoke " which they were not able to bear. Prohibitions and observances were so multiplied as to actually create endless occasions of sin. Allow me to quote some examples from which. one is disposed to shrink, so foolish do they appear. To take instances regarding the Sabbath, we find that for fear of inferentially profaning the day by encouraging work, they would not eat an egg that had been laid on that day, or perhaps even the following day, be- cause its production involved Sabbath labour ! A man with a wooden leg must not go out on the Sabbath, because that would be carrying a burden ! A person must not wear hob-nailed shoes on the Sabbath, or carry a handkerchief, or go out with a false tooth or a gold plug in the tooth, for that would also be carrying a burden ! If a piece of wadding in the ear fell out, it must not be replaced, for that would be work ! On similar principles it was fcbidden to take an emetic, set a broken bone, or replace a dislocated joint on the holy day ! But pre- caution must be taken against even an accidental broach of the Sab- bath. Accordingly, a tailor must not go out with his needle on the day previous, lest he should forget and carry it during the sacred I ■; ' 12 hours! These are specimens of an elaborate system of minute details of prohibitions and injunctions, covering every department of private, social and public life, which that puerile process of defining, subdivid- ing, and atomizing the Divine Law produced. We may think such trifling to6"ri'iiculou3 for serious notice ; but grave rabbis devoted their most strenuous thought to such frivolous relinements — all to make sure of erring on the safe side ! Now what was the effect of all this ? By adding to the stiigency atnd minute particularity of observance of the Divine Lnw, it really added to the Law, and thereby manvjadured a vast range of neiv possibilitiea of transgression. Human life became so tied down by a multitude of petty regulations as to fetter all freedom of action by the constant fear of inferential trangrossion. A man could scarcely move without trampling on some precept. He was tripped up at every turn, till hope died out, conscience was initated, and self-respect humiliated. The difference between living a right life on these maxims and on those of purified inner motive, regulated by the general principles of the word, was like that of one practising manners from constant mem- ory-reference to a book of etiquette, as compared with acting on mo- tives of inbred politeness. Is this tendency to enlarge the laAV by a structure of remote infer- ences entirely dead in our day.? It is to be feared not. We find strong currents of feeling running in similar directions still. Do we not find many acts raised to the rank of sins, wh!ch Scripture carefully declines so to designate ? Take the case of luxuries. Is there not a powerful tendency to regard ascetic abstinence asintrinsically superior in virtue to moderate indulgence ? Are there not muttered ind' cations of a desire to exclude from Church privileges those who use certain luxu- ries which are distasteful to a certain class of Christians ? May it not be sometimes in the sphere of popular amusement, that we are inclined to show an ultra-protective spirit which narrows, more than God has done, the limits to which we may go without sin ? The plausible maxim of erring on the safe side may become, in unwise hands, a dan- gerous instrument of restriction and intolerance. It provokes reaction too. Excessive strictness defeats itself, as we often see in family gov- ernment. We do not always possess the right to enforce upon others what we may legitimately consider a law for our own consciences. Our Saviour himself plainly teaches the t we must leave room for some diversity of action within a certain region of conduct. The Son of man made no pretence to ascetic severity. — Ke came eating and drinking. John the Baptist practiced the most rigid austerity — he came neither eating nor drinking. Yet no man dare find fault with Christ himself, while he throws his broad shield over John's very dif- , .. 18 ferent practice. There is as much as an intimation that there is a sort of neutral sphere in which every man, up to a certain point is at liber- ty to follow the dictates of his own conscience, but must not make his practice a law to others. The modern Pharisee sometimes stretches the law too far, as did his ancient prototyjie, in pushing i wti tionc e too boldly. ivv|p[afvv«J— Up to the point we have reached ve might attribute the errors of the Pharisees to narrowness of judgment, and deficiency of intellectual and spiritual insight. A blind idolatry of the past, a hide-bound tra- ditionalism, a shallow externalism, and a burdensome system of petty prescriptions and restrictions, are tfCiircely in themselves evils of such moral turpitude as to account for the blighting scorn, and bitter invec- tive which ever blaje forth from Jesus against them. But advance a stage to the results which naturally and actually flowed from these principles, to the sad fruitage of these pernicious roots, and we shall cease to wonder at the terrible thunderbolt flung at the heads of the Pharisees in our text : " Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers ; how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." IV. Two hideous vices were born of the system. Its natural Daughters were self-righteousness and sham-righteousness (if the ugly word may be allowed to describe the ugly thing). 1. First-born is self-righteousness. A religion which had worked itself to the surface of life under the operation of the causes we have been considering, and clothed itself in a web of outward forma, infallibly led those whose circumstances favoured a considerable success in outward conformity, to compare themselves complacently with others less successful. The consequence was an inflated sense of superior righteousness, and a corresponding contempt of other men. Hence our Lord puts into the mouth of the Pharisee in the temple, as descriptive of the spirit of the class the words : " God I thank thee that I am not as other men are." Popular sentiment agrees with Scripture in regarding self-righteous- ness with contempt and abhorrence. The calm self-complacency of the self-righteous man, and his air of lofty superiority are repugnant to all. His supercilious contempt for others is cffensive, while there is often a well-founded suspicion that the virtues he so ostentatiously professes are not always real. Such a man stalks about among his fellow-men wrapped in a mantle of self-sufiiciency, with eve:y feature and every gesture proclaiming, " I am holier than thou." Nothing more eflfectually kills out all generous sympathy with humanity, nothing more surely wraps the soul in narrowness and self-conceit. 14 But the self-righteous man carries his airs into the presence of Qod himself. Religion is honoured by liis acknowledgement of it ; the Church by his adhesion to it. That the Almighty should be other than pleased with sucli a man as he, never enters his mind. He is rich and increased with goods, and hath need of nothing. Hence our Sa- viour indicates the hopelessneps of eflecting any good on him : " They that are whola need not a physician but they that are sick." His soul is smitten with the blight of arrested development. So long as he is satisfied with his own goodness, improvement is simply hopeless. There is deep truth in Browning's words, " Man's good is knowing he is bad." Only when he learns like Paul that all his own righteous- nesses are as " filthy rags," and counts ihem but loss, will he submit himself to the mercy of God, and cast himself humbly on his grace. 2. The worst fruit of Pharisaism, however, was and is what we have termed sham-righteousness or hypocrisy. That was the culmination of a vicious and hollow system, lliat was what called forth the most merciless castigations of Jesus : " Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed ap- pear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." (M. 23, 27.) All the Pharisees were not hypocrites : men are often tetter than their system, and a large crop might be expected in every generation. The impossibility of conforming to all the requirements of their vast and endlessly detailed body o" rules put them under powerful tempta- tion to hide their short-comings, to make " clean the outside of the cup and of the platter," though within they might be "full of extortion and excess ; " while blindness to the spirituality of the law left their consciences at ease in regard to inner sins, and the upgrowth of their ingenious but perverted and puerilo dialectic enabled them to get round any precept the pressure of which might be inconvenient. To escape the stringency of their own rules, they employed all the resources of their subtle and sophistical ingenuity. The prohibition, for example, of carrying a burden out of the house on the Sabbath day, in Jeremiah ,XVII. 22, -often proved a troublesome restriction. ^ Explaining the home asithe place where the members of a household ate tdgether** they taught that if all the families living, say, in one court, united in placing an article of food in a given place the day before, that consti- tuted them all one family, and all their dwellings a common home ; 80 that there would be no transgression of the law in carrying articles from one house to another on the Sabbath. In the same way they extended the limits of the lawful Sabbath day's journey. If a person T 16 contemplated going farther than the legal distance, he had only to place t'vo meals the day before at the very outside of the limit, and then, starting from this point as his home, he was at liberty to mi»ke his journey almost twice his legal distance. By such tricks of logic they got over almost any irksome precept, not only of tlieir own tra- ditions but also of the clear commands of Scripture. What could the result be but utter falsity and hollowness ? Manly integrity was sapped at tVie root. Keason was prostituted to the vile service of tricking conscience. Morality became the football of so- phistry. All true moral perceptions were lost, the spiritual faculty killed. To appear well unto men became the one great article of their practical creed. As our Saviour expresses it : " all their works they do for to be seen of men." " The hypocrite," says old Gurnall, " sets his watch not by the sun but by the town clock." The semblance of sanctity serves him as well as the reality, provided it be not found out. A mere veneering of religion may cover rottenness and pollution, but it will answer the purpose quite as well for him as the genuine article, if that is not truly in his heart. The Pharisee loved to pray standing at th.. corners of the streets that he might be seen of men ; but he could devour widows' houses. He was strict in tithing such trifles as mint and anise and cummin ; but he omitted the weightier matters of the law : judgment, mercy and faith. He is alive to-day. Sleek, and smooth spoken, with religious senti- ments dropping from his lips, and pious talk in fulsome abundance ; he may be a very wolf in sheep's clothing. He may sneak around and stab you in the dark in a way the raerd man of the world would be ashamed of. His mouth may be a repository of spiritual phrases, and his heart a hell of bitterness and selfishness. He may talk religion, and practice deceit and dishonesty. "Wee unto you Scribes and Pha- risees, hypocrites ! " ^m^. ir, Time will not admit of calling special attention to the lessons of our subject ; but we cannot close without pointing out that it was among the religious people of the day that those evils arose. Almost all the religion of the Jews was among the Pharisees — they were the equiva- lent of our '* professing christians." Imagine the ellect when Christ throws among tliem shell after sliell of condemnation. But the point 1 wish to press home is this : That there is real danger of us getting into an unreal and hollow religious profession, and that without deli- berate hypocrisy. The mode of Church life and teaching may develope the external, the ostentatious and noisy elements of our nature, till the inner reality ceases to operate, or is shrivelled up, and men's religion becomes as it were, a department run without much relation to practice. We must guard against that. Our personal religion also may gradually slip into a formalism of outward act, and what might be called outer thinking and feeling, till even real Christian people sometimes lose the deeper, truer, virtues of humanity to a degree that allows them to be rebuked by the manlier, if less pretentious, virtues of men of the world. i **- 1^^=^^^^ ■'^i' ti If'-i.'" ji& '■ J* 'iJ?"W^'1 '^-^t—-. -Ji. N_ V "if't •^' *'<